The House on Dream Street (39 page)

The dinner invitation followed a moment later. I told him I was busy. What about Saturday? I shook my head, then leaned over and took a sip of my coffee, wondering how I could extricate myself from this room. In another situation, perhaps in the States, I might have felt more flattered and less embarrassed. But in Vietnam I had a hard time taking such attention personally. They weren’t interested in me, but in some “Western woman” they expected me to be.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” Mr. Choi asked.

I considered the question for a moment. “Yes,” I said, still unsure if I was lying or not.

As I got up to leave, I tried to return the gifts, but he refused to take them. “For you. Please, enjoy the Rémy Martin with your boyfriend,” he told me. He waved his hand impatiently, as if he had a closet full of corporate giveaways and more important things to do than worry about his inventory. With the slightest change of expression, Mr. Choi had already become a bureaucrat again. I didn’t argue. I really wanted that watch.

      The baby still didn’t have a name when, four days after his birth, he left the hospital. Following Vietnamese tradition, Huong and Tung took him to her parents’ house, where the whole family would spend the next few months. The house on Dream Street seemed very quiet. Ly spent every
day with Huong and the new baby, then she rode back every night to keep an eye on the house. Tung showed up for a few minutes every three or four days, just to check on things. Other than that, there was so little activity that it felt like Paula, Whitney, and I were living in a hotel that had shut down for the winter.

I spent a lot of those weeks sitting on my bed surrounded by piles of information on AIDS, sexually transmitted disease, and sexual practices in the developing world. Before the birth of the baby, Tung had been a fabulous source of information. I’d grilled him on everything from prostitution to drug use to extramarital affairs, and what he didn’t know—or claimed not to know—firsthand, he was more than willing to offer in the experiences of his friends. From Tung, I’d learned that in the
cà phê ôm
—or “hugging cafés”—on the West Lake, customers could pay waitresses to snuggle on their laps. Tung was also the one who first told me that the imported used clothing sold near the Kim Lien Hotel was known as “
aó quần si-đa
”—AIDS clothes—because Vietnamese worried that one could get AIDS from wearing those clothes. Most Vietnamese regarded AIDS as a scourge on foreigners, particularly loose-living Westerners, so it made sense that all the worn denim and frayed wool blazers must be infectious. After all, why else would someone give away perfectly good clothing?

As much as I rolled my eyes over the things I heard from Tung, I found much more upsetting what I read in the books and pamphlets I’d borrowed from Scott Stein. One glossy booklet, a study by CARE International in Vietnam titled “The Risk of AIDS in Vietnam,” examined sexual practices and attitudes among urban men and “sex workers” (their less judgmental term for prostitutes). Ninety-seven percent of the people
interviewed in the study knew about AIDS, and most knew something about its transmittal as well. That statistic seemed to prove that the Vietnamese government, which had plastered the country with frightening “do it and die”–style AIDS posters, had actually had some success in educating people about the threat. But aside from generally understanding that AIDS could be transmitted sexually, Vietnamese had a fuzzy knowledge of everything else related to the epidemic. Many believed, for example, that HIV carriers looked sick and could therefore easily be avoided as sex partners. Some claimed that AIDS hadn’t arrived in Vietnam and that they couldn’t get the virus unless they had sex with a foreigner. It was, of course, possible to combat such ignorance with education. But there was something more disturbing that the study had uncovered. A significant number of Vietnamese believed that destiny, not their own behavior, would determine whether or not they got AIDS. As one sex worker, who wouldn’t argue when her clients refused to wear condoms, put it, “I have to accept my fate.”

Vietnamese women were willing to use condoms, but they wouldn’t use them unless their partners agreed. Because of that, Scott and I decided to focus the documentary on convincing men to protect themselves and their families. We’d have to expose the myths surrounding AIDS, but that wasn’t enough. We decided to present a set of options: Celibacy was the safest way to protect yourself from AIDS. If you couldn’t be celibate, we’d say, you should be monogamous. If you couldn’t be monogamous, well, at least wear a condom. We took the practical approach.

I knew, from my own experience, that these were racy topics for Vietnam. The government had put considerable effort
into family planning programs, but, from what I’d seen, they hadn’t put much energy at all into simply teaching the birds and the bees. One unmarried friend had asked if she could get pregnant from kissing. And I remembered all the time I’d spent with Phai, explaining the connection between sexual intercourse and the birth of babies. As an American, I still found such ignorance astonishing, but people simply did not discuss sex in Vietnam.

By the end of October, the script was ready. All we needed was to find someone to translate my English draft into Vietnamese. I suggested to Scott that he hire Yen. These days, she was much happier than she’d been after the government had kicked Nick out of Vietnam. Nick had spent most of the autumn trying to secure a visa to come back for a visit. His chances had seemed slim. But the Vietnamese government, always unpredictable, had suddenly decided to grant it. Nick would arrive in Vietnam a few days before Todd. Yen was elated.

Still, the trauma of the previous summer had taken a toll on her. Before her troubles with the police began, she’d enjoyed a lucrative and highly respected position with an American consulting firm. Yen’s political problems, however, had alarmed her boss, a Yale grad named Edward who took pride in his good relations with the Hanoi government. Rather than defending Yen’s civil rights, Edward responded to the news of her troubles by firing her. Now she spent most of her time lying in bed at her parents’ house, reading novels. She seemed like a perfect candidate for translating our script. And she had excellent English skills (she’d translated
Peter Pan
into Vietnamese as her senior thesis).

My only qualm about Yen translating the script had to do with its content. Yen was as sophisticated about the world as
anyone I knew here, but she was still Vietnamese, and so uncomfortable talking about anything related to sex that she couldn’t even say the word “menstruation” without lowering her eyes and starting to blush. I didn’t know how she’d cope with the explicit dialogue in the script, not to mention Scott Stein himself. When I tried to warn her about him, though, she shrugged it off. “I’m going to be translating for you, not him,” she said.

I found myself seated once more at the big conference table, facing Mr. Sex. This time, Yen was sitting beside me.

Scott began the meeting by dropping a handful of Rely souvenirs—condoms, key chains, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap—onto the table right in front of Yen. Then he pulled up a chair and sat down, facing her. He had a friendly look on his face, but his gaze was focused on Yen as if he were a carnivore examining his prey. She began to shift in her seat.

“So, Yen,” Scott began, “tell me something about yourself.”

As Yen spoke, Scott reached his hand over to the pile of condoms among the freebies on the table. He tore one open. At first, Yen watched him, but as he slowly began to stretch the condom between his fingers, her face grew tense and she dropped her gaze. She didn’t stop talking, however. Barely missing a beat, she said that she was in the midst of searching for a Vietnamese publisher for her
Peter Pan
translation.

Scott’s eyes widened at the mention of the children’s classic, then he asked, “Have you seen our commercials?” He didn’t look up. He was stretching the condom like a balloon between his fingers.

“Yes,” Yen said quietly. She was rubbing the bridge of her nose with one hand, a gesture that served to shield her eyes.

Scott must have wanted a more emphatic answer. “You have seen them?” he asked again.

“I have seen them,” Yen answered, still refusing to look at him.

Scott put the opening of the condom up to his mouth and began to blow. I didn’t move. Yen, hearing the sound of air expanding into latex, shrank into her seat. The condom expanded until it approached the size of a basketball, and then Scott tied off the end. “I want to make sure that you’re comfortable with all the subjects you’ll have to translate,” he said. “I can’t have anyone embarrassed around here.” With that, he lifted the condom balloon into the air, aimed, and bounced it like a free throw off Yen’s head.

As soon as it hit her, Yen looked up. Her face was white, but she stared at Scott without flinching. “Are you looking for a translator or a foil for your comedy act, Mr. Stein?” she asked.

Scott leaned closer to Yen. “I’m looking for a translator,” he told her.

“Then I’ll do it,” she said. And then she added, “But you had better not tell anyone that I work for you.”

      Hanoi in autumn turned out to be lovely, golden, worth the wait. The cafés beside the West Lake were crowded day and night. People strolled, took meandering bike rides, rented paddleboats, fished. The air was cool and dry and breezy. The city seemed perfect.

The documentary was the last bit of work I had to finish before Todd arrived in Vietnam. On top of that, I’d been rushing to write three columns in advance for my
Vietnam Investment Review
assignment so that I could take a vacation. For the first time since I’d lived in Vietnam, I was working the kind of schedule I might have worked in the States. It was a good thing
Huong was at her mother’s house, because I wouldn’t have had time anymore to sit around in the living room, watching traffic. I hardly even had time to go by and visit her. I missed the freedom I’d once had to sit around and absorb everything around me, and I knew that I no longer paid attention to the world as diligently as I had in the past. In a sense, I took Hanoi for granted now, but feeling comfortable made me love the city as much as ever, perhaps more.

I rarely saw Phai these days. I was hardly home, and he didn’t stop by the house much either. The tension of those first few weeks had eased, and sometimes when we saw each other we were even able to talk a little bit. On the afternoon I got my bag of gifts from Mr. Choi at Bright Star, Phai and I had examined it all together, like pirates going through their loot. Another day, we managed to have a serious conversation about his prospects for a wife, although the only thing he had to say on the subject was that he didn’t have any. Huong had explained Phai’s predicament to me already. Phai wanted a woman who was sophisticated, educated, and pretty, but no woman like that would be attracted to a guy like him. One of the most interesting cultural differences I’d discovered between Westerners and Vietnamese centered on our varying concepts of beauty. Huong and I never tired of discussing who was good-looking and who wasn’t, and we disagreed a lot. Although, to me, Phai’s dark skin made him beautiful, Vietnamese valued pale complexions and, according to Huong, women here would not consider him attractive. Worse, he was poor and unskilled in anything that could provide a decent wage. The girls he liked weren’t interested. And the ones who might like him, country girls like Ly or Sa, he wouldn’t even look at.

I kept meaning to discuss Todd with Phai, but put it off. Of course, he eventually found out anyway. One afternoon, he came by the house and asked if I wanted to go for a walk. It was a crisp, sunny day, and, with anyone else, I would have agreed immediately. But, with Phai, the prospect of an open-ended outing made me uncomfortable. Too many awkward topics could come up.

“I’m sorry. I’m just so busy,” I told him.

We were standing in the living room. Phai looked away, and, for a moment, stood gazing out the door. His expression wasn’t angry, just thoughtful, and I waited to hear what he would say. After a while, he turned around. “Your boyfriend’s coming for a visit?” he asked.