The House on Dream Street (9 page)

The only real pleasure Professor Mai seemed to get out of teaching me came when we were able to delve, however simply, into sociolinguistics. One morning, our conversation drifted onto the subject of how military terms, which came into common usage during the war, had over the years taken on peculiarly nonmilitary meanings. The word
bắn,
which meant “to shoot,” had become, in increasingly corrupt Vietnam, a slang word meaning “bribe.” If a wealthy businessperson “shot” an official in order to avoid some troublesome regulation, you’d know the official came out a little richer because of it. Similarly, the word
tấn công,
which literally means “attack,” was now often used to describe episodes on the romantic battlefront as well. When a boy flirted with a girl, for example, hip Vietnamese would say, “He attacked her.”

Hearing about the evolution of words like
bắn
and
tấn công
reminded me of how, on one of the first days I’d been in Hanoi, Tra had taken me to eat at a little food stall near my house. When I said I wanted vegetarian noodle soup, she’d told me to order
phở không ngưồ’i lái.
I blurted out the phrase, and the food stall
proprietor looked at me with surprise, but I got the food I wanted. After that, whenever they saw me walking toward their food stall, the people who worked there yelled, “
Phở không ngưồ’i lái!
” and burst out laughing. It had taken me weeks to get Tra to explain to me that
phở không ngưồ’i lái
didn’t actually mean “vegetarian noodle soup.” During the war against the United States, she’d finally explained, Vietnamese had marveled at the unmanned airplanes Americans used for reconnaissance missions over North Vietnam.
Máy bay không ngưồ’i lái,
they called the aircraft: airplanes without the pilot. Soon, the notion of a thing without its essential ingredient creeped into the Vietnamese vernacular. Poor people who couldn’t afford meat in their noodle soup joked about eating “noodles without the pilot.” An American ordering
phở không ngưồ’i lái
seemed doubly funny. First, I was a citizen of the country that had developed that unmanned aircraft. Second, what was a rich American doing ordering poor people’s food anyway?

“Is that what you mean about the language changing?” I asked Professor Mai.

He was still chuckling over the story, but he looked at me sympathetically. “Yes,” he said. “That’s it, exactly.”

After class, I would ride home, hang out with Huong in the living room, then go eat lunch. Most afternoons, I taught English at the National Center for Scientific Research, a job I had found through Tra’s sister.

One afternoon, as I was on my way downstairs to go teach, I ran into Huong. Her face was flushed with excitement. “Good news!” she said. “We’ve rented the empty rooms.” Tung had spent much of the past month on the telephone, calling anyone he knew with contacts at foreign companies or international aid organizations, trying to spread the word that he had rooms for rent to foreigners. The sight of Tung talking on the telephone
had become as familiar an image as Huong sitting on the couch or Viet leaping down the stairs. Now, Tung had managed to rent both of his empty rooms in the same day. Huong and I stood on the landing and went through one of our typical exchanges of information.

“Who?” I asked.

“Chinese from Thailand,” she said.

“They’re from Thailand?”

“But they’re Chinese. It’s two wife husband.”

It was the “two wife husband”—
hai vợ chồng
—that confused me. I’d never heard a word for “couple” before, but I could deduce that
vợ chồng
—the words for “wife” and “husband” in Vietnamese—could easily mean “couple.” What I didn’t understand was if “two” (
hai
) signified two couples or one couple, particularly since this party was renting two rooms.

“Is it a wife and husband?” I asked.

“Yeah. Two wife husband.”

“Is that two people or four people?” I persisted.

“It’s two people. Two wife husband.” She wasn’t impatient, but it was obvious she couldn’t see how to say it more simply.

I was finally beginning to understand when the doorbell rang, signaling the arrival of my ride to the institute.

My student, Harry, was waiting for me on the sidewalk. In keeping with Tra’s tradition of giving her American students Vietnamese names, I had come up with American names for all of mine. Harry was a sweet-faced man in his early forties. I was happy to see him. The center was located several miles from central Hanoi, and if I were to ride my bike there I’d spend more time getting to class than I would spend teaching it. But getting lifts to class, so far, had been a problem. At first, a member of the Department of Physics, Jerry, had driven me to class in the institute car, but it was clear to me within a few minutes of our
first meeting that I wouldn’t enjoy these rides. The institute car was a clunky, mud-yellow Russian model, the first car I had ridden in since arriving in Hanoi. After weeks of getting around town on bikes and the backs of friends’ motorbikes, being chauffeured through the muddy streets of Hanoi in a car made me feel like I was riding a water buffalo through a chicken coop.

The real problem, however, wasn’t the car as much as the driver. Jerry was tall and heavyset, a body type so unusual in Vietnam that, in comparison to everyone else, he looked like a pudgy giant. A few minutes after we had pulled away from my house on my very first day of class, he had turned toward me. “I see that you are looking so very beautiful today,” he said, looking out at me through his thick glasses. The space between the front of our car and the rear end of a truck narrowed precipitously.

“Thanks,” I finally said as he jerked the steering wheel and whipped around the truck. “Where did you learn English?”

“Oh, you see, I did this. I taught myself. Only two years. I did that. Study at my house is what I did. Alone. No benefit of teacher . . .” He didn’t stop speaking for several minutes, but I had already lost the thread of what he was saying. Jerry’s efforts at home study had expanded his self-assurance, but his accent was nearly incomprehensible. He spoke English as if he were speaking Vietnamese, staccato-like, forcing out each syllable like a separate word. It reminded me of a child playing with clods of dirt, throwing them ceaselessly and without aim.

He turned to me again. “And you. I ask. Do you have a husband?”

“No,” I said. “Your institute is very far away, isn’t it?”

“No husband! I ask. Do you like to dance? I ask. Do you like to disco?”

“Not really,” I answered. I didn’t know Jerry’s marital status, but since most of the men I’d met who were over thirty were married, I took a chance. “Tell me about your wife,” I said.

“My wife? Yes. Then I will tell you about my wife. You ask.” If the shift in conversation made him pause, it was imperceptible to me. I spent the rest of the ride gazing out the window and vaguely tracking the course of a monologue that centered on his wife’s business ventures, a new car shipped from Pakistan, and their efforts to build a guesthouse in Hanoi. By the time we reached the center, I had come to know Jerry more intimately than I desired.

After a few weeks of commuting with Jerry, I contemplated quitting the job simply because I couldn’t bear the car rides anymore. Then I found out that another student, Harry, lived near my house. Harry was friends with Tra’s sister, and his eight-year-old daughter was one of the children I taught at Tra’s house every Tuesday night. I’d had a spate of invitations from married men, asking me to do everything with them from eating at expensive restaurants to dancing at the disco to riding out into the countryside on the backs of their Hondas. I was suddenly more popular than I’d ever been in the States, but none of the attention felt flattering. Rather, it seemed that these men were interested in me because I was a single American woman and therefore available for sex, and probably discreet. Fending off these invitations had become a part-time job for me and a big joke between Tung and Huong, who kept teasing me about not liking Vietnamese men. When Harry offered the ride, I thought that this problem, at least, was solved. I could see by the delight Harry took in his daughter that he was a happy family man.

The center was located at the western edge of the city, on a campus that, given a new paint job and a bit of landscaping,
might have passed for modern. Inside, however, I was instantly reminded that this was a poor country with few resources available for aesthetic improvements. My classroom was dank, with wooden tables, dirty windows, and a ceiling fan that, once the warm weather started, would prove itself incapable of redistributing the hot and heavy air. Other institute buildings were hardly more high-tech than the one in which I taught. I never once saw a computer, and the most up-to-date offices I visited looked more like dusty wire- and cable-filled hardware stores than laboratories for scientific research.

Despite their dismal facilities, my students were smart. Most were physicists, but the class also included medical doctors, biologists, chemical engineers, and nuclear scientists. I felt intimidated, having fulfilled my college science requirements by taking courses with titles like “Poetry and Nature.” I became even more intimidated when I learned that, on average, each of my students had spent seven years studying abroad, earning doctorates from the ivory towers of the Eastern bloc. These people were fluent in such languages as Czech, Hungarian, and Romanian, and most spoke Russian as well. Now, however, they faced two professional dilemmas. First, the local scientific facilities gave them no chance of keeping up with international research; second, the breakup of the Eastern bloc had made fluency in Czech or Romanian as worthless as the currency of a toppled regime. Even Russian would be of no help at a conference in Tokyo, Geneva, or New York. For that, they needed English. Whenever I walked into the classroom, twenty students greeted me like a visiting specialist called in to help solve a particularly puzzling question in quantum physics.

Harry got me to class much quicker than Jerry’s lumbering car ever had and, fifteen minutes after saying good-bye to Huong,
I found myself standing once again in front of the enthusiastic scientists. Today, we were working on chapter 8 of the book
Meanings into Words,
a Cambridge text that was so popular in English-avid Hanoi that it would have easily made the best-seller list. For the first half of class, we discussed a reading passage entitled “Dishwashers,” the first sentence of which began, “Over the last fifty years housework has been made considerably easier by the invention of an increasing number of labor saving devices and appliances.” For my students, who had voracious appetites for both new vocabulary and information on life in the West, this material was enthralling. It didn’t take long before we were holding a passionate discussion on such housecleaning topics as vacuuming options and plumbing problems. After the reading, teams of students came up to the front of the room for a role-playing session in which a customer goes into the neighborhood Sears to check out the latest models.

My students were so satisfied with the dishwasher lesson that, after a brief break, I pulled out a humor column I’d photocopied from the
San Francisco Examiner
about the often odd behavior of tourists. I had never considered the possibility, however, that humor might not translate. For twenty minutes, we moved sentence by sentence through the first paragraph as I tried to explain each joke and the students politely responded with chuckles. By the time we began the second paragraph, however, they had given up listening entirely, and instead sat with their heads buried in their photocopies, hopelessly trying to decipher phrases like “cable car turnaround” and “Bermuda shorts.” Even more surprising was how bothered they were by their incomprehension. Jerry, saying he had some office business to attend to, got up and left. Tra’s sister bit her fingernails frantically. When I asked Harry a question, he shrugged with despair.

After class, Harry and I walked silently toward his motorbike. Today’s class was not the first time that I’d steered my students in the wrong direction.

Harry could see that I was concerned. “It was a good class,” he said. “You taught it very well.”

I was touched by his effort to cheer me up. “Thanks so much,” I said. “You’re really sweet.”

We walked on for a moment without saying anything and when we reached the motorbike, Harry stopped and looked at me. “I have an idea,” he said. “We should go relax now, because you are tired. We can go to my little country house, next to the West Lake. It’s very quiet there, and empty. We can take a nap. It’s very pleasant.”

Was there some sign on my body that said, “Married Men: I’m available”? After a long moment, I said, “No thanks, Harry. I just need to get home.”

When, several months later, I began teaching English at the Vietnam Atomic Energy Commission, which was an easy bike ride from my house, Harry became my only student from the center to follow me to the new locale. Because his enthusiasm never waned, I assumed that he was pleased with his progress in English. It was many months before I learned he had another reason that kept him coming to my class.

      Now that I could finally communicate a bit with Tung and Huong, they were able to tell me what they thought of me, and it wasn’t always good. Tung decided that the glasses I wore were so unflattering that they made me look like an old grandmother—hardly a desirable quality for an unmarried woman approaching thirty. Huong thought I should do something more with my hair. It just hung there. Why wouldn’t I let her take
me to the beauty shop down the street and supervise my getting a perm? Both of them considered my wardrobe atrocious. Faded jeans and baggy sweaters were not the fashion statement they expected an American woman to make. Didn’t I own a belt?