The House on Dream Street (7 page)

“Miss!” said the tea stall proprietor. I turned around, took the small bowl from her hands, and looked inside it. This was not a hard-boiled egg. It was a half-formed, embryonic chicken. I might have been looking down at the results of an abortion.

It would be more dramatic to say that my first major crisis in Vietnam occurred when I was accosted by a gang of drunken war veterans, or when I was suddenly overcome by a life-threatening disease, but it didn’t happen that way. This small and nonthreatening confrontation with a tiny, semi-developed bird felt like disaster in my mind, and my newfound sense of oneness with Hanoi suddenly shattered. I held the small pottery bowl in my hands, paralyzed.

The proprietor saw the look of horror on my face. “It’s delicious,” she said. “Try it.” I stared into the bowl. It was now clear to me why the yolk of a hard-boiled egg is the same color as a live chick.

The young mother picked up her son and crossed the lane. She sat down next to me to watch. “Try it. It’s delicious,” she said, as if at any moment she might put a spoonful in her mouth and cool it down for me to eat.

I shook my head. “I’ve never eaten it before,” I said.

“Try it,” both women coaxed.

“I don’t know how to eat it!” I wailed.

The mother looked at the proprietor. “She doesn’t know how to eat it,” she said. The proprietor nodded.

I knew that if I didn’t get back on my bike, I’d start to cry. I offered the bowl to the little boy. His eyes lit up and he reached to take it. His mother laughed. “It’s so delicious,” she said.

I walked my bike up to the main road and started pedaling toward home. Although the day was still clear, the city streets were a blur to me, as if I were gazing at them through a car window in the pouring rain. Back at my house, I lay down on the bed and stayed there for hours. If something as insignificant as an unborn chicken bothered me, how would I react to something really bad? The very thing that had drawn me to this place, its foreignness, seemed repulsive to me now. How bad had it gotten for the American teacher before she left?

The sky was dark when I finally left the house again, to walk over to Tra’s for dinner. She laughed when she heard about the chicken egg. “That wasn’t a chicken,” she said. “That was a duck. It’s the best thing you can eat. So many vitamins. Vietnamese women eat that dish when they’re pregnant. You should try it. It’s so delicious.”

“I don’t know how to eat it,” I told her. I felt a lump in my throat.

Tra nodded. Now she understood. “That’s happened to me in the States, too,” she said, putting her hand on mine. “People
try to get me to eat something disgusting. It’s awful. I tell them I don’t know how to eat it, but they still don’t understand.”

I tried to imagine which American dish the gristle-loving Tra would find impossible to eat. And how could anything be worse than an embryonic baby duck?

“Mashed potatoes,” Tra said. “All that butter and cream—disgusting! How can people eat that?”

      Once, after I’d been in Vietnam for almost a year, I went to see a play by a local playwright, the setting of which was in a Hanoi neighborhood not unlike my own. If I were to write a play about my own life in Hanoi, it would take place on a set like that one. Almost all the action would occur in the downstairs living room of Tung and Huong’s house and on the sidewalk right in front of it. Every morning, Tung would pull open the folding front doors, exposing the entire width of the living room. It was hard to know where the inside stopped and the outside world began. The street had a ceiling of dark green leaves and the living room had a ceiling of plastic tiles. The sidewalk had a layer of dust. The linoleum floor of our house also had a layer of dust. Outside, the ladies who ran tea stalls whacked the ground smooth with their feather-soft straw brooms. Inside, Huong swept the dust into pieces of newspaper and dumped it out in the gutter of the road for the street sweepers to gather on their nightly rounds. The food vendors and wandering beggars passed through both domains, walking hunched, palms open, eyes fastened now on the ladies selling tea, now on the customers drinking it, now on Huong sitting inside on her couch. The only difference between inside and outside was that outside was constant motion. Inside, we rarely moved. We
formed the Greek chorus to the drama in front of us. Every day I spent in Hanoi my knowledge and understanding of Vietnam expanded, while every day the central focus of it constricted, until it seemed like the whole universe centered on this little living room and the sidewalk in front of it.

The living room of the house was always crowded, and I had to develop tricks to remember who the players were. The sweet-faced older man who rode the rickety bicycle was Tung’s father. Huong’s father wore a black beret and spoke to me in French. Tung’s mother was bony and cheerful. Huong’s mother was round and sullen. Two of Huong’s brothers looked like twins, but the one with the Vietnamese flag tattooed to his forearm was the older one, who had driven a supply truck during the war, and the one who wore the flashy shirts was younger and would have barely reached puberty by the time the war ended. Huong had three sisters-in-law, and, because of the limited number of Vietnamese given names, two of them were also called Huong. Thus, I had the advantage of greeting all of them with, “Hello, Huong,” and being fairly certain I was right.

Then there was Huong and Tung’s five-year-old boy, Viet, the wild child. Sometimes I’d sit down on the couch and he’d jump onto my lap, throw his arms around my neck, and let out blissful coos. At other times, he’d lure me with the promise of a kiss and punch me in the mouth. One night I brought home a flower-covered chocolate cake for Viet. He took one look at it, breathed deeply, then plunged his whole face into the middle. Viet could hold nearly a whole bowl of rice in his mouth and eat it while singing a song and standing balanced on the seat of his father’s Honda Dream.

The family drifted in and out of conversation as easily as one drifts in and out of sleep. At first, I kept wondering why they didn’t get bored. We Americans are always searching for distractions,
even at those moments that demand we do nothing but stare at whatever’s right there in front of us. We read while sitting on the toilet, thumb through magazines in supermarket checkout lines, and listen to the radio while driving to work. Even “relaxing” involves some action verb: eating, watching TV, going for a walk. Now I found myself in a place where people could sit for hours observing the relentless monotony of traffic. Only Tung had trouble. He could only last for a few minutes before he’d start to fidget, jump out of his chair, light a cigarette, comb his hair, walk into the kitchen, walk back out, make a phone call, then sit down again, finally ready for another stint at it. Everyone else could last forever, silently staring out the front door.

In the beginning, when I spent a lot of time downstairs, I wondered what I was missing. I’d only walked by the Army Museum, and I wasn’t even sure where the History and Fine Arts museums were yet. Maybe something major was happening in this city while I sat on a plastic-covered sofa watching traffic. Maybe revolution was fermenting in Hanoi and I didn’t even know it. But ever so slowly I became completely absorbed by the life of this house, and my American compunction to “use my time wisely” disintegrated. Whole hours passed unaccounted for, marked only by the steady rise and fall of noise. Time started to pass in a different way, not so much in the turn of the clock as in the change in the light, the growling of my stomach, Viet’s ecstatic return from school, or the smell of Huong’s cooking.

If someone had told me, even a month before, that I would spend so many hours hanging out on a couch with a native Hanoian, I still might have doubted it. It was hard to believe that I could feel so relaxed around a woman like Huong, who wasn’t Westernized and who had never had a chance, as Tra had, to make peace with America. About the time I was polishing my
POW/MIA bracelet back home in Memphis, Huong was hiding out in the countryside, avoiding the bombs the United States was dropping on her city. But here we were, twenty years later, sitting on the couch together, not only not discussing the past, but—on my part and I believe hers as well—not even thinking about it.

Something was finally shifting between myself and Huong. I couldn’t mark any exact moment that had caused the change, but each time we passed each other on the stairs, each time she came into my room to water my plants, our smiles became more relaxed, our exchanges easier. I don’t know that my Vietnamese tones had gotten any better, but she had gotten much better at understanding them. The more time I spent with her, the more I realized how smart she was, and the more incomprehensible became my initial reaction to her as a timid young wife cowering behind her husband’s back. That image seemed laughable now, as I watched her directing Tung through his daily chores like a factory boss. She spoke to her older brothers with a voice of authority, and they listened to her. I don’t think I was the only one intimidated by her.

Huong had not only never shown an interest in why I came to Vietnam, she never asked me anything at all about my past. Her world was compact, as tightly woven as the finest straw basket, leaving no space to contemplate my existence in America. She acted as though the span of my life began at that moment I’d first stepped through her front door. I think this assumption accounted for how, although I was actually a year older than she was, she treated me like her innocent younger sister. As our conversation became easier, she took to giving me advice on everything from my love life to how I washed my towels. On quiet mornings, she rested her hand comfortably on my knee, just as she rested it on her sister Nga’s knee, and taught me new words,
all the while keeping her eyes out for passing vendors hawking something she might like to cook for lunch.

One day, Huong was trying to explain to me all the Vietnamese words for rice. She found it incomprehensible that I could use the same term for the plant growing in the fields, the uncooked grain sold in the market, and the food we ate for dinner. To prove to me that these were in fact three very different things, she opened the cabinet under the glass coffee table and pulled out the Vietnamese-English dictionary. I leaned back on the sofa and prepared to wait. I had already found out, during any number of dictionary-aided conversations with Huong, that, like many Vietnamese, she didn’t know the system of alphabetical order. Every time she wanted to find a word, she did a random search for the first letter, then slowly scanned the rows until she finally found the word for which she was looking. It could take her fifteen minutes to find a single word, and by that time I’d nearly forgotten what we were talking about. But Huong hadn’t. She was patient. The two of us experienced time in completely different ways. Sometimes I tried to imagine what kind of person she’d be if she were an American. I could see Tung wrangling his little deals in New York or Dallas as easily as here in Hanoi. But Huong’s pace, the steady and absolutely certain way she moved through her days, was an exact mirror of her surroundings. She was rooted to this place in the same way that a tree is rooted to the soil. I sensed that if she were ever torn away from this house, this street, this city, she might not survive.

I was waiting for Huong to find the third of her rice words when, suddenly, from out of the normal roar of traffic, we heard the sounds of screaming. Both of us jumped up and ran outside. A crowd of thirty or more people was forming at the edge of the street. Passing motorbikes, bicycles, and even a couple of cars had stopped to look at whatever was going on in the middle of
the road. This is it, I told myself. Our neighborhood’s collective karma had been used up. Now, instead of another near miss, we’d had the real thing. “Viet! Viet!” Huong shouted. My stomach turned, but then I saw him trying to nose his little body into the middle of the crowd. Huong dragged him out by his shirt. The three of us stood at the edge of the mass of people trying to figure out if anyone had gotten hurt.

In the middle of the crowd, an angry cyclo driver was arguing with a tall, muscular teenager who, judging by his rubber boots, was one of our street’s motorbike washers. The teenager pointed at a woman standing next to them. She had on a smart pea green business suit and high heels. She was leaning over her Dream, investigating a broken headlight. The teenager’s voice rose, and he began to stomp his foot for emphasis.

I felt as though I were watching a foreign film without the subtitles. “What’s going on?” I finally asked Huong.

“The cyclo driver hit that woman’s motorbike, and the teenager’s mad because the cyclo driver won’t say he’s sorry.” Though I couldn’t get all her Vietnamese, Huong’s hand motions and facial expression told the story perfectly well.

The shouting escalated. The cyclo driver jumped off his seat, then the teenager moved toward him. Drawing his fist back in the air, the teenager looked like a cartoon character going through the stylized motions of a fight. He was fast and his fist went flying.

Before the blow hit its mark, two other men grabbed the teenager and pulled him back. One of the men let go of him, then walked over to the cyclo driver. He was smaller and less intimidating than either the burly teenager or the tough-looking driver, but, with a few words, he managed to appease them both. I realized that this peacemaker was someone I recognized.