The House on Dream Street (5 page)

The expression on the lawyer’s face hardened. “Excuse me,” he said, “we haven’t called it Saigon since we reunited the country in 1975. We Vietnamese call it Ho Chi Minh City now.”

I felt my stomach tense. On my first visit to Vietnam, I’d been determined to use the name Ho Chi Minh City, proving that I, for one, was an American who recognized the legitimacy of the Hanoi government. But the local people insisted that I refer to their city by its original, prerevolutionary name, Saigon. I might have attributed this behavior to linguistic dissent were it not for the fact that, even in Hanoi, I seldom heard anyone use the name Ho Chi Minh City. Even Tra, whose father had fought in the revolution alongside Ho Chi Minh, always called the place Saigon. After much thought, I had finally decided it was both more prudent and more convenient to use the term Saigon.

The lawyer was staring at me like the cherubic baby doll in a monster movie, suddenly possessed with the dazzling pinwheel eyes of the devil. Clearly, the “everybody else calls it Saigon” argument would not do here. I was an American. “Ho Chi Minh City,” I mumbled. With a sense of surrender, I gazed down at my orange. “Sorry,” I added.

Suddenly I felt overcome with exhaustion. I had come to Hanoi to discover some other Vietnam, a Vietnam that wasn’t exploding bombs and burning villages and screaming babies. I had come with a belief that by learning about the country at peace, even learning such silly things as a new way to peel an orange, I could develop an understanding of this place that was broader and deeper than what my country had learned during so many years of war. But now I saw that Americans weren’t the
only ones who could reduce an entire nation to their own country’s experience with it. Here was a Vietnamese who believed he could judge my political opinions by my choice of a proper noun.

Tung seemed aware that the conversation had taken a turn for the worse. He suddenly stood up and said, “We’ll go downstairs now.”

Tung didn’t follow the other two down the stairs immediately. Instead, he stood for a moment on the landing outside my door. Behind his head, the lines of the rooftops zigzagged across the dark horizon. I looked in his eyes and I saw something I’d never seen before, concern. “
Ngủ đi.
” Go to sleep, he finally said, adding with a gentle smile, “
lo nhiều quá.
” You worry too much.

After Tung went downstairs, I stood on the landing for a long time, the loneliness seeping into me like dampness through the porous walls of this house. I had felt alone almost every minute since I’d gotten here, but it was always simple homesickness mixed with the uncertainty of finding my bearings in a foreign place. What bothered me now was not the pain of physical distance so much as the absolute sense of mental isolation. My relationship with Hanoi had to be more complicated than my relationship with Saigon. After all, the United States had bombed this city. Maybe no one would ever completely trust me here. Maybe I wouldn’t trust anyone myself. In the space of ten minutes, Hanoi had switched back to “Hanoi,” the totalitarian, eternally frowning center of a Communist dictatorship. The war wasn’t some show that I’d seen on TV as a kid, and I wasn’t even sure that it was over yet.

I stood outside for a long time. One by one, the lights went out in the nearby windows. In the distance, I could see a lone pine tree towering like a great leader against the sky. I leaned on the railing of the stairway and took a deep breath of enemy air.

      I tried to remind myself that I was making progress. I’d even started to do something I never would have expected from myself: I was using a bicycle to get around Hanoi. For another American, riding a bike in Vietnam might not have been such a big deal. But I was always the kind of rider who rode on the sidewalk, then stopped and walked whenever I had to cross a street. I wasn’t very brave. I wouldn’t have been crushed to learn I’d never ride a bike again. But in Hanoi, I didn’t have a choice. My other options were worse. Cyclo drivers not only demanded exorbitant prices of foreigners, but they also had the confounding habit of insisting, once we reached our destination, that I pay them even more. An American lawyer who lived in Vietnam later explained this phenomenon to me in terms of cultural differences in contract theory. While Westerners consider contracts the final phase of business negotiations, Vietnamese view them as a starting point, a basis for further discussion. Thus, when I agreed to pay a cyclo driver five thousand dong, I expected to pay five thousand dong. The driver, however, would, after completing the trip, take into consideration the difficulty of the route, his fatigue, and the estimated size of my wallet, then give me an updated price. The extended process of negotiation may have made sense to him, but after a while I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t rely on walking, either. Central Hanoi didn’t cover a lot of territory, but on foot I would have had to spend two or three hours a day making my way across it.

The obvious solution was a bicycle, but I was nervous. A few days after I first moved into my house, I had spent a morning on my balcony. Observed from above, rush hour alone was enough to give me a terror of riding a bike. Set against a symphony of noise, with motorcycle horns supplying melody and mufflerless engines carrying an insistent beat, my street was a stage for an anarchic dance of buses, trucks, cars, bicycles, cyclos, and
motorbikes, each vying for its precious meter on that narrow space of road. I had watched a boy on a bike glide in a casual diagonal across the street, moving out of the path of a honking bus a split second before it flattened him. A tiny orange Honda Chaly motorbike, carrying a sandwich of three teenage boys, swerved around a slow-moving cyclo, drifted into the opposite lane of traffic, then, after nearly colliding with an oncoming truck, carelessly slid back to its own side of the road. It looked like the death-defying circus act of a trapeze family that, with each progressive trick, moved closer to disaster. I knew that, eventually, someone would miss, and a fractional miscalculation of speed or distance would leave some sad soul sprawled and bloody in the middle of the street. General Westmoreland’s much-criticized comment about Vietnam that “the Oriental doesn’t value life the way we do in the West” had begun to sound less like a racist slur and more like a clear-eyed assessment of fact.

I had tried to explain my fears to Tra, but she wouldn’t listen. In one of my earliest encounters with bossiness, a quality I would find endemic in Vietnam, Tra insisted that I had to ride a bike. One morning, standing in the courtyard of her house, she pushed one in my direction. “If you want to live in Hanoi, you have to ride it,” she’d said. When I refused to take it from her, she walked it out to the street herself. Then, pointing at the passing traffic—a grandfather wheeling a small child to school, two teenage girls riding side by side, holding hands—she asked, “Does that look dangerous to you?” It
did
look dangerous, but I had to admit that she was right. I sighed, defeated, then put my hands on the handlebars, my legs on the pedals, and shoved off.

My first collision occurred only a few blocks from the house. Few Hanoi intersections have traffic lights, or even stop signs, so vehicles cross without stopping, just slowing down or speeding up to propel themselves through without hitting one another.
Not knowing that the fundamental rule is “Keep going,” I wavered at the sight of a cyclo crossing in front of me. Had I simply slowed down, I could have put my bike into holding position, treaded water while the cyclo passed, and continued on my way. As it was, I swerved to avoid the cyclo and was rammed by a motorbike coming up from behind me.

The crash threw me off the pedals, but I caught my balance. I turned to look at the motorbike driver, a young man in a business suit. Before I could say a word to apologize, he sneered at me, jerked his front wheel out of the spokes of my bike, and sped off. Now I was stuck alone in the intersection, and when I looked up I saw a large army truck barreling toward me. At that moment, another bicycle was moving slowly past in the same direction I was going. I jumped back on my bike and, maintaining the exact speed of the other cyclist, managed both to let that rider run interference between myself and the truck and to rely on her experience in making the split-second decisions required to cross the street.

My second collision came about a half mile farther down the road, also at an intersection. When a motorbike seemed about to cut across the path in front of me, I tried the treading-water maneuver to let it pass. Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet perfected the technique of slowing the bike and pedaling in place, and so I lost my balance. This time, I swerved into the rear end of a large Caucasian pedestrian, who extricated his legs from the front wheel while yelling what sounded like obscenities in German. My pleas of “I’m sorry!” did not move him and, as his anger showed no sign of abating, I opted for the less intimate dangers of the street and plunged back into traffic.

By the time I got back to Tra’s house, my entire body was shaking and I was desperate to tell her about my brushes with death. But, apparently unconcerned about my fate, she’d already
gone out for the day. I took the bike and slowly began to walk it toward my house.

Maneuvering a bicycle between Tra’s house and my own wasn’t a simple task, given the peculiar geography of Hanoi. Over the centuries, Hanoi’s commercial streets had developed a tradition of specialization. In the city’s Old Quarter, for example, the merchants on Silk Street sold silk and the ones on Silver Street ran jewelry stores. Not every establishment on Cha Ca Street sold the famous fried fish specialty
chả cá,
but if you wanted to eat that dish, you only had to name the street and any Hanoian would know your destination. Though the Old Quarter streets were the ones famous for carrying the names of what was sold there, the entire city followed a similar organizing principal. Shopping in Hanoi was like navigating oneself through a citywide department store. You’d go to one street to buy paint, another for toys, and another one if you were in the market for a Western-style toilet.

Although my street, Tran Phu, was named in honor of one of Vietnam’s famous revolutionary martyrs (who was, incidentally, a relative of Tra’s), I called it Dream Street because of all the Honda Dream motorbikes cluttering its sidewalks. Of course, there were other kinds of bikes parked there as well: lots of Honda 50 and 70ccs, Chalys, and Russian Minsks. But Dreams were the coveted vehicle of the day, the bike to buy if you had money. Unlike the clunky-looking older-model Hondas, the Dream was sleek and elegant. One long smooth line glided back from the handlebars to the rear edge of the black leather seat. It was the Hanoi equivalent of a BMW or a Lexus. On Tran Phu, you could usually spot a lot of Dreams, because Tran Phu specialized in washing and repairing motorbikes. On my side of the block alone, there were nine places to wash motorbikes and three to repair them.

Wheeling a bicycle the ninety-three steps from Tra’s house to my front door was, given the layout of Dream Street, no easy prospect. French-colonial-era city planners probably conceived of the wide, shady sidewalk that ran along my street as a pedestrian thoroughfare, but, even on the quietest of days, walking along it required dodging whipping water hoses and stepping around wandering vendors hawking boiled sweet potatoes. At first glance, the scene appeared chaotic. Like every other open space in the city, however, this expanse of sidewalk was actually a highly organized commercial district. At the edge closest to the road, lottery-ticket sellers displayed their brightly colored tickets to passing traffic. Just behind them, motorbike mechanics squatted in front of flat tires and broken-down engines, their tools spread in wide arcs on the sidewalk surrounding them. Rarely did mechanics work alone. Instead, they squatted in groups of two or three, cigarettes dangling from their lips, pointing and poking, discussing transmissions and carburetors like a surgical team intent on probing the cause of a particularly mysterious ailment. The remainder of the street’s commercial life was dominated by the motorbike washing establishments, teams of four or five people who competed with one another for business by employing someone, usually a big, bellowing woman, to stand out in the street trying to wave down passing motorists.

On Dream Street, it didn’t matter if I was going into my house, stepping outside, or bending over to tie my sneakers; I was the only foreigner on the block, and people always watched me with the scrutiny of scientific observation. Usually, I pretended to ignore them, which wasn’t that hard, considering that I had to devote most of my concentration simply to keeping from tripping over a pile of tires or a mechanic squatting in front of a broken Dream. Today, maneuvering my way along the sidewalk
with a bicycle was even trickier than normal, but I was so relieved to be back on my feet and still alive that when people stared at me, I stared right back. Their expressions were as unfriendly as ever.

After a moment, I saw Tung up ahead, squatting on the front steps of the house. The sight of a familiar face filled me with relief. I imagined describing to him my debacle on the bike, even if I had to use more pantomime than Vietnamese. I didn’t even care if he found my ineptitude laughable. As I walked toward him, the stares of all these strangers seemed less oppressive. I wasn’t entirely on my own here, I thought. Up ahead was a person who would, at the very least, smile at me. As I got closer, Tung spotted me and waved, but when he lifted his arm, I saw that someone else was sitting beside him on the steps. It was the young guy who’d been drinking whiskey with Tung the night I’d eaten downstairs—not Nga’s husband, but the other one, the one who had glanced at me between drags on his cigarette, then disappeared before dinner. Now he was looking at me with the same blank stare that I got from everyone else on the block. I lost all my will. When I reached the house, I gave Tung a quick hello, locked the bike, and hurried upstairs.