The House on Dream Street (44 page)

Hanoi became strange and dreamlike then. Even time changed. As if following some subtle shift designated by the heavens, just as the holiday began, Vietnamese returned to their ancient tradition of marking days. Throughout the rest of the year, they follow the solar-based calendar that’s used in the West. At Tet, they switch to the lunar one. If, for example, Tet began at midnight on February 9, then February 10 was the first day of the Lunar New Year. Suddenly, Vietnamese began to follow the moon. No matter what the Western calendar might call the date on which the Lunar New Year’s Eve fell, Vietnamese called it “the thirtieth of Tet,” and, according to the logic of the season, New Year’s Day itself was known as “the first of Tet,” followed by the second, the third, fourth, etc. The rest of the world continued racing through the same old year, while Vietnam stepped off for a week and then, reluctantly, stepped back on.

Because the holiday set the tone for the coming year, Vietnamese gave a great deal of thought to whom they would invite to be the first person to walk through their front door in the first minutes after the new year began. It must be a person whose previous year has been prosperous, or a person with a reputation for bringing luck. As a foreigner, I was considered both prosperous and lucky. Thus, almost everyone I knew wanted me to come visit them on Tet. The competition for my presence was so great that I had to settle my schedule weeks in advance, filling every day like a dance card to accommodate all the people anxious to have me visit.

My first appointment was at Yen’s house, where I’d committed myself to helping cook, then eat, the feast for New Year’s Eve. The family had made their
bánh chưng
well in advance (also like fruitcake,
bánh chưng
has a long shelf life), but there was
much more to do before the new year arrived. I sat on the kitchen floor, wrapping spring rolls, while Yen, her mother, and her younger sister hurried to complete the dozen or so dishes they would prepare as an offering to their ancestors. Only after the ancestors have had their share of the food could the living family members eat. As we completed each dish, Yen or her sister would climb the three flights of stairs to the family altar, then set the dish there. For hours, the two sisters ran back and forth between the kitchen and the altar, while their mother and I kept working in the kitchen.

It was after dusk already, and the firecrackers were exploding constantly on the streets outside. I looked out the window, excited but nervous about the increasing onslaught of noise. I’d grown up watching firecrackers from a cozy distance on the Fourth of July. These explosives were closer, constant, and more dangerous.

Yen’s mother, a successful businesswoman who ran a number of beer halls in Hanoi, could see that I was edgy. “Don’t you have firecrackers in the States?” she asked.

“Yes, but mostly for public displays,” I said. “In many states, people are forbidden to buy or sell them.”

“Forbidden!” She found the idea incredible. “Why?”

“Because they’re so dangerous,” I said.

Yen’s mother was silent for a while, slicing beef and considering what I’d told her. When she looked up at me again, she had a smirk on her face. “So you Americans aren’t allowed to shoot off firecrackers,” she said, “but it’s quite all right for you to carry guns around and shoot each other?”

A huge bang went off in what must have been a neighbor’s yard. It was followed by a string of tiny pops that sounded like machine-gun fire. Yen’s mother looked back down at her cutting board, chuckling, neither expecting a response nor wanting
one. I stopped what I was doing and gazed outside, but the night was dark and I couldn’t see a thing. Even though Yen’s mother seemed satisfied with her knowledge of my country, part of me felt that she should know that her information wasn’t accurate, that it wasn’t “quite all right” for Americans to shoot one another. In the end, though, I kept silent, reaching my fingers into the bowl full of spring roll filling and continuing to wrap. There was no point, really, in correcting her. And, in some ways, she wasn’t all wrong.

By the time we finally sat down for the first feast of Tet, we were too exhausted even to talk, and we ate almost silently. The women in Yen’s family had spent the last weeks cleaning and cooking without respite. For them, the holiday was no vacation. Still, their tired faces showed content, even joy. Afterward, we went out to the front porch, and Yen’s father and sister lit firecrackers.

Midnight on New Year’s Eve, known as
giao thứa,
is the most significant moment of the Vietnamese year, and I wanted to experience it at the very center of the city. At around ten that night, Yen drove me over to my friend Van’s, who lived near Hoan Kiem Lake. After all the exploding firecrackers of the past few weeks, now, only hours before the new year arrived, the streets were eerily quiet. Almost everyone was inside their homes, setting offerings before their altars and praying. On every doorway hung a long strand holding hundreds of bright red firecrackers, ready to be lit at precisely the instant when the new year arrived. At Van’s house, five or six of us sat drinking rice wine. We didn’t look so different from a group of friends hanging out on New Year’s Eve in the States, but it didn’t feel like an American New Year’s Eve at all. The evening seemed hushed and somber, as if something enormous were about to happen. We kept glancing at the clock.

And then, as the clock struck twelve, the firecrackers began to pop, slowly at first, but with increasing frequency. We walked out of Van’s house and made our way up Ba Trieu Street toward Hoan Kiem Lake. For so many weeks, I had braced myself for this moment when the world would explode, and now it was happening.

I couldn’t see anything except the black of the sky, the white flash of exploding firecrackers, and the rusty fog of smoke. But the noise was a demon in the air. For the first time in my life I could imagine the sound of war. And that, perhaps, was one of the main reasons foreigners had such a problem with Tet. Given Vietnam’s history of war, 
giao thứa
 could have given outsiders an uncomfortable suspicion that there were inherently violent tendencies within Vietnamese culture. On the surface, it seemed true. Any culture that would willingly put itself through something as aurally painful and potentially destructive as the simultaneous explosion of millions of firecrackers seemed, at the very least, masochistic. But standing in the middle of Hanoi at the moment of 
giao thứa,
 I realized that something entirely different was going on. All around me people were joyous, not reveling in the danger, but reveling in their happiness. At that moment, I began to understand the truth about Tet. Vietnamese didn’t love firecrackers because of their violence. They loved them because of their noise. Firecrackers were Vietnam’s call to the heavens: “Here we are! Don’t forget us! Let the new year be better!” Clutching my hands to my ears to protect them from the sound, I knew that what Yen had said was true. Tet revealed the essential nature of Vietnam. This place was complicated, yes, and full of pain as well, but beneath the hardship lay a sense of joy, a recognition of change, and, perhaps most significantly, a pervasive hope for the future.

My head ached from all the explosions, but my whole body
felt alive and strangely grateful to have a head that could ache, lungs that could fill with smoky air, ears that could ring, and, most importantly, a mind that could sense the power of what was happening all around me. Holding my fingers in my ears, I rotated in slow circles, bracing myself for each new flash of light. Vietnam changed then. For a few brief moments at least, it floated between reality and dream, between heaven and earth. As an outsider, I might never fully understand the meaning of Tet, but I knew that I was witnessing something spectacular and precious. A whole nation, through the force of firecrackers and collective will, was transforming itself into something utterly different, to herald the future, and welcome it.

      For days after 
giao thứa,
 every street and sidewalk was covered with the paper fragments of exploded firecrackers, which Hanoians considered a blanket of lucky red covering the city and all of Vietnam. I spent the days of Tet in a whirl of feast after feast, visit after visit. Most of my visits were also good-byes, because I planned to leave for the States on the fifth day. I wasn’t the only one going away. My friend Linh was also leaving Vietnam. Son had managed to secure a coveted position at the Vietnamese embassy in France, and the family was about to move to Paris. On the evening I went by their house, they were packing up the last of their belongings. It was an ironic time for them to leave. After living for years in a bare, one-room house, they’d finally saved enough money to complete an extensive renovation, enlarging their space into a three-room home with a tile floor, a comfortable loft, and, most thrilling of all, a sparkling new Western-style bathroom. The place wasn’t big, but, for a family that had quite recently used a tin pail for a toilet, it was like a palace. Their fortunes had improved so much
that Linh was able to quit her job at the Metropole Hotel in order to go be a housewife in Paris. Despite all that, she wasn’t completely happy about the idea of leaving Vietnam. She’d never been overseas before, had never even ridden in an airplane. The flight to Europe would take an entire day, she told me. She was worried that they wouldn’t have enough food to eat on board. That they wouldn’t be able to sleep. And, up in the air, a plane can’t stop. What if one of her little sons had to pee? As she walked me to the door that night to say good-bye, she held my hand tightly. “Write letter to me,” she whispered fiercely. “Over there in Paris, I will be very lonely.”

I gripped her hand, telling her not to worry. I’d been lonely when I first arrived in Vietnam, I said, but, slowly, I’d managed to build a life for myself and make friends here. “You’ll have a good life in Paris,” I said. “You’ll be happy there.”

Linh didn’t look convinced. “I don’t love Paris,” she told me. “You love Vietnam.”

No one ever seemed puzzled by the fact that an American woman would abandon the United States, with all its glitzy cities, modern conveniences, and wealth, in order to come live in a country as poor and troubled as Vietnam. I’d often had to explain my actions to people in America, but the Vietnamese didn’t even ask. They could understand why I loved their country, because, despite their grudges and gripes about things as fundamental and disparate as the weather, the government, and the economy, they loved it, too.

      I left Vietnam on the fifth of Tet. After five days, which all of Hanoi spent eating, drinking, and racing all over town, the holiday spirit was finally beginning to diminish. Huong didn’t make as much of an effort anymore to keep her
Tet dish full of sunflower seeds and candied ginger. Tung, who had visited aunts and uncles, old school friends, and former teachers, now began to draw the line, telling himself that it just wasn’t that important to go visit one more distant cousin and one more former neighbor. He settled down on the couch and began to
chúc Tết
 by phone instead. Out on Dream Street, some of the shops were open again, conducting business as usual. For the past few days, it had been impossible to find any food in the city, other than what people were serving in their homes. Now, a couple of the stalls on Cam Chi Street were, once again, ladling out steaming bowls of noodle soup. With the waning of the holiday, the wedding season was officially beginning again, and the fifth of Tet must have been deemed, by those who read the calendars, an auspicious day for nuptials, because busloads of wedding revelers kept zooming past our house. Sometimes, I could spot the bride and groom, riding by in a rented car covered in garlands of silk flowers. Some couples wore the traditional Vietnamese
áo dài.
Others wore garb so Western that they could have posed for the figures on the top of an American wedding cake. Many couples did both, spending the first half of the day in traditional Vietnamese costume and the second half in black tux and silky white dress.

Tung rode in the car with me to the airport. We talked for a while about his plan to open the Kangaroo Pub with Max, a dream for him that had never materialized, but in which he still believed. Tung’s dreams were as grand as ever, but, these days, he seemed more content with what he had, less desperate to make every new dream come true. Sitting in the car with him, I wondered if it was age or experience that had mellowed him, but I didn’t have a chance to ask. Tung was so worn out from Tet that when I turned to look at him again, just after we’d crossed the bridge out of the city, his eyes were closed and his breathing was
already heavy in sleep. I turned again and looked out the window. I didn’t mind the silence at all.