The House on Dream Street (10 page)

On top of all that, Huong seemed to be growing increasingly convinced that I was good-natured, but incompetent. I wasn’t any good at washing my clothes by hand, and when I hung them to dry on the balcony, I didn’t pin them properly and they fell off in heaps on the dusty floor. I didn’t know how to peel an apple without slicing my hand. I forgot Vietnamese words she had already taught me two or three times. Once, in frustration, I told her she should come over to San Francisco and try operating a digital answering machine to see how I felt in Hanoi.

To celebrate the impending arrival of the new tenants, I decided I’d cook an American dinner for Tung, Huong, and their families. Surely, hamburgers and French fries would be exotic enough to impress Huong and demonstrate that, in my country at least, I knew what I was doing. She was skeptical about the endeavor, but offered to help.

We went to buy supplies early in the morning on the day of the meal. The Hang Da Market was a three-story concrete building, the cavernous bottom floor of which was dominated by food vendors. I’d been here before, and the sight of dozens of food-sellers squatting over their baskets of bananas, mountains of rice, and buckets of live fish didn’t put me off. I’d seen the piles of intestines sitting out on the tile-covered butcher blocks. I’d seen the live chickens and the roasted dogs. I was used to the smells of rotting produce and raw meat, and I knew to walk carefully so as not to slip and fall on the wet and often slimy floor. But I’d never bought anything more complicated than a few tomatoes. The prospect of collecting the ingredients for a dinner for a dozen people suddenly overwhelmed me.

Huong stood behind me. “It must be different from your markets at home,” she said.

I nodded.

When I still didn’t move, she gently nudged. “What do you want first?” she asked.

To my right, the vegetable vendors sat in little neighborly clusters, chatting with one another while they bent over their morning bowls of
phở.
“Tomatoes, lettuce, and potatoes,” I decided, and we started there.

We spent about an hour in the market, though Huong could probably have gone through my whole list by herself in fifteen minutes. She was more puzzled than annoyed, though. It was hard for her to understand how someone about to cook a meal could be indecisive about what to buy and how much of it to buy. I was glad to have her with me, though, and not just for the extra arms (and motorbike) to haul the groceries home. Huong knew the appropriate price of every single item in the market and wouldn’t let any of the vendors get anything more out of me. The only things I knew better than she did were the prices for ketchup and mustard, which we bought from imported goods dealers at stalls outside.

When we got home, Huong locked the bike and I started pulling bags off the handlebars and out of the front basket. “Duyen!” I heard a voice call from behind me. When I turned around, I saw Phai squatting on the sidewalk in front of his mechanic shop in his worn blue shirt and black trousers splattered with mud. He had a cigarette between his fingers and a big grin on his face. “
Đi đâu vê?
” he asked. Where have you been? It was a standard Vietnamese greeting.

Even though I knew that Phai didn’t expect a literal answer, I answered by holding up the groceries for him to see. “I’m cooking dinner tonight,” I told him.

Phai’s eyebrows went up.

“I know how to cook,” I insisted. He didn’t look convinced. “I do,” I said. “You should come.”

The expression on Phai’s face didn’t change, but he gave a slight nod, which I took as acceptance.

Late that afternoon, I went down to the kitchen to cook. Huong, who had volunteered to be my sous chef, was already squatting on the floor peeling potatoes. “What should we do with these?” she asked.

Hamburgers and French fries had seemed the perfect meal to make, before I started making it. Neither dish was complicated, and the two combined were so quintessentially American that even Huong had heard of them. The problem was, I didn’t know exactly how to make either one. Although I loved to cook, hamburgers and French fries were not on the repertoire of things I made at home. I looked at the pile of freshly peeled potatoes and said, “We’ve got to do this,” gesturing with my hands to cut the potatoes with a knife.

Without talking much, we sliced potatoes and tomatoes, washed lettuce, and began to make the burgers. Ground beef was not an item on sale at the market, but I’d managed to explain what I needed to one butcher, who, though puzzled over my request, was willing to take a huge slab of perfectly lean filet—the kind of cut that would have cost fourteen dollars a pound in the States—and chop it by hand with a murderous-looking cleaver. Now I dug my hands into a bowl to mix the meat with eggs and chopped onion and garlic.

We moved on to the raw potatoes. “Now we use that,” I said, pointing to a bottle of oil on the shelf.

Huong looked at the oil, then back at the potatoes. “Are you sure?” she asked.

I hesitated. I was only making up this recipe as I went along,
but I was sure that Huong would know less than I did about making fries. “You’re supposed to use that,” I asserted, pointing again to the oil.

“I know what dish you’re talking about,” Huong said. “Don’t you call them French potatoes? They’d be better in the oven.”

Of course, after years of French colonialism, the Vietnamese had been influenced enough by French cuisine to have discovered
pommes frites.
But what self-respecting American thinks of French fries as French? I considered arguing with Huong, but then I gave in. I really didn’t know how to make French fries. In this case, she might be right.

Vietnamese recipes seldom called for baking, and Huong used her oven for storage. We pulled out a wok, two saucepans, a baking pan, an empty water bottle, and an orange plastic frog that Viet had thought he’d lost. Then we spread the potatoes out on the pan, sprinkled them with salt and oil, and turned on the oven.

By seven o’clock that night, everything was ready. Huong and I had pulled together several small tables to make one large dining table in the living room. Vietnamese usually eat with chopsticks out of small, deep bowls, and so Huong didn’t have enough plates and forks for all the people coming to dinner. We improvised by putting platters of French fries at strategic points along the table and deciding that people would eat their hamburgers out of bowls.

We finished just as the guests began to arrive. Huong’s parents got there first. Her sister, Nga, and Nga’s husband Tan came in a few minutes later, followed by Tung’s parents, who rode bicycles over from their house a few blocks away. Tung’s younger brother appeared on a motorbike and took a seat next to his mother. Viet, who refused to sit down, lurked near a bowl of French fries, which, not surprisingly, had turned out crisp and
perfect. Tung pulled his bottle of Johnnie Walker from a cabinet and began pouring it into glasses. The only person who hadn’t shown up yet was Phai.

Huong, Nga, and I shuttled platters of burgers and fries in from the kitchen. Huong’s mother, a round-faced woman with a loud voice, picked up the bottle of Heinz ketchup, opened it, and smelled it. She set it down, picked up the bottle of mustard, smelled that, and set it down. As I was beginning to learn, Vietnamese rely on their sense of smell much more than Americans do. If someone describes a food, they’ll talk about its smell, either complimenting its pleasant fragrance or complaining about its stink. And when Vietnamese want to demonstrate their affection, they don’t kiss. Instead, they hold each other close and inhale deeply.

Now Huong’s mother was wrinkling her nose at the smell of the ketchup.

“It’s delicious,” I told her. “Do you know how to eat it?”

Huong’s mother never attempted to communicate with me directly. She looked at her daughter Nga and bellowed, “What is it?”

Nga set a platter of burgers down in front of the two grandfathers, then looked up at me. “What is it, Duyen?” she asked.

Before I could answer, Huong’s father pointed to the ketchup and said, in French, as if to translate, “
Qu’est-ce que c’est?
”

Everyone looked at me and waited. I leaned over the table and methodically pointed at the plates of burgers, the “buns” we’d fashioned out of long baguettes, and the bowls of fries, using gesture and a few words of Vietnamese to demonstrate the varied uses of mustard and ketchup. Huong’s mother eyed me skeptically. Then Tung’s mother picked up the ketchup and, using her chopstick to get it moving, gamely poured some into her bowl. She had a character that Vietnamese would call
vui,
which to describe an experience means “fun” and to describe a personality means “cheerful” or “good-natured.” Unlike Huong’s mother, who wouldn’t talk to me at all, Tung’s mother acted as if I could understand Vietnamese as well as a native Hanoian. She looked up at me and said something that sounded like, “Blah blah blah Duyen blah blah.” Everyone laughed.

She picked up a French fry with her chopstick, dipped it in the ketchup, then took a bite. She chewed, swallowed, and pondered the experience like a gourmet contemplating the taste of a new wine. After a while, she looked up at me and announced, “
Ngon!
”—Delicious!—and passed the bottle of ketchup to her husband. Now everyone wanted to take a taste.

The next time I returned from the kitchen, Phai was standing in the doorway looking in. His hair was damp and combed back off his face. He had on a gold-colored long-sleeved shirt and a pair of white trousers that were as smooth as a sheet of paper. He looked so clean and fresh that, without even thinking about what I was doing, I found myself pushing my dirty hair off my forehead and straightening my shirt. “Hi,” I said, forgetting that I was speaking in English.

“Hi,” he smiled.

“Phai, sit down! Eat!” said Tung, who was already biting into his second burger. Phai took a seat next to Tung.

Huong, Nga, and I sat down at three empty spots near the kitchen. “Duyen!” Tung yelled from the far end of the table. “Drink Johnnie?”

I didn’t like whiskey, but tonight I took a glass.

We Americans eat our meals very quickly. Even Thanksgiving dinner, which might take eight hours to prepare, can be devoured in twenty minutes. Vietnamese, on the other hand, like to savor their food when they have a chance. On festive occasions, I’d seen men take a bite, stop and talk, take another bite,
smoke a cigarette, take another bite, then have another glass of whiskey. A meal like that could last for hours. Tonight, people were laughing and joking as if we were celebrating a holiday, but, for some reason, they rushed through my hamburger and French fries dinner with the speed of a meal at McDonald’s. Maybe there was something about the food itself that didn’t allow for pauses. Within about half an hour, everything on the table had disappeared, except the mustard, which no one liked.

“Ask her how to make that meat,” said Huong’s mother, nudging Nga.

“Duyen, blah blah blah,” said Tung’s mother, nodding enthusiastically.

“
Très bon!
” laughed Huong’s father.

Tung’s father was going through his teeth with a toothpick.

Tung yelled down at me from the other end of the table. “This dinner is
vui,
” he said. It was the best compliment I got all night.

I looked at Huong. “What did you think?” I asked. Hers was the only opinion about which I really cared.

Huong had eaten one hamburger and a small bowl of French fries. On top of that, she’d consumed several tomato slices dipped in ketchup. “The meat is good,” she said, agreeing with her mother. “But it’s not good on bread. It would be more delicious over rice.” Then she got up and began clearing dishes. Nga and I stood up to help her. I wasn’t thrilled with Huong’s response, but I told myself that I was making progress.

The party ended pretty quickly after that. While Nga and I cleared, Phai, Tung, and Nga’s husband sat at the far end of the table, smoking cigarettes and sipping Johnnie. Each time I emerged to retrieve another armful of dishes, someone else had gone home. First, Huong’s parents left, then Tung’s, then Tung’s brother, then Phai disappeared as well.

Not a single person had thanked me for the meal. I had long ago noticed, of course, that Vietnamese don’t say “please” and “thank you” nearly as often as Americans do. As I would later learn, it wasn’t for lack of social skills. Rather, with as much logic as an American would use to explain how “thank you” eases the flow of social interaction, a Vietnamese would argue that Americans’ use of such terms is excessive, overly formal, and even cold. The mark of a true friendship, a Vietnamese would say, comes from the ability to expect everything from each other, and to give and receive without comment.

I didn’t know the Vietnamese side to this argument yet, and even if I had, I would have still been disappointed. You only realize how heavily you depend upon the customs of your own culture when you live somewhere that doesn’t follow them. I was raised to say “please” for something as slight as the salt and pepper shakers being passed at the table. My parents had taught me that even “Gesundheit!” deserved warm thanks. As I slowly filled my arms with another set of dishes from the table and walked into the kitchen, I felt unappreciated and ignored. “People don’t say good-bye very often in Vietnam, do they,” I commented to Huong.

Huong looked up at me from the basin of dishes over which she was squatting. She had refused to let me help her wash, and it was only after some arguing that she’d agreed to let me clear the table. “I don’t understand,” she said.

I let it drop, telling myself that Tung’s assessment of “
vui
” should have been compliment enough.

      Tuesday was the night I taught English to the children at Tra’s house. My class had five students, who ranged in age from seven to ten. Tra’s son Minh, whom I called Mickey in
class, was the oldest. He competed for dominance in the group with Harry’s daughter, Lily, who was bright and very pretty but didn’t like to listen. Next was Tra’s niece, Halle, who was good-natured and studious, and a cousin, Georgey, who became the class clown. The youngest student was Toby, a sweet-faced child who wouldn’t open his mouth at all, and whom I was surprised to find was the grandson of General Vo Nguyen Giap, the military mastermind behind Vietnam’s victories over the French and the United States. After those classes, I had a hard time looking at the general’s photos without seeing Toby’s face.