The House on Dream Street (13 page)

The technical quality of the next picture was so vastly improved that the family seemed to have advanced a century in only three years. Huong explained that Tung had left for Germany a year after their wedding, and just a month or so after Viet was born. When the baby was almost two, Huong took him to Germany for a visit.

Neither Tung nor Huong had ever said anything to me about that visit, but here was proof of Huong in Germany, a family photo with a bunch of Germans at a large table covered with Vietnamese food. Everyone was holding up their beer glasses in one hand and their chopsticks in the other, as if the mixing of the two symbolized the union of two friendly cultures. Tung seemed ready to jump out of his seat with enthusiasm. Huong looked tired.

“Did you like Germany?” I asked.

Huong shrugged. “It was okay,” she said, with complete indifference. “The rice is terrible there. Nobody speaks Vietnamese.” She was already moving on, searching through the pile again. Finally, she pulled out a recent shot, a clear image of the family in a setting I recognized. They were standing in front of their just-completed house in Hanoi. Huong wore a bright blue
áo dài,
the Vietnamese national dress. Tung had on a nice pair of blue jeans, one of his button-down shirts, and sunglasses.

“Tung’s not really Vietnamese anymore. He’s a Western man now,” Huong said with a sigh. “I’m too sick of him.”

I wanted to reassure Huong, but my mind was blank. She was right. Her husband’s world had changed, and it was hard to see how she fit in.

An American travel writer once told me that the longer she stayed in one place, the harder it became to write about it. “After a week, I can write something great,” she said. “After a month, I start to get confused. If I stay for a year, I’m totally lost.” Travelers who spend a short time someplace get a sense of it as static, a motionless image they can study like a photograph and feel they know. But the longer I stayed in Vietnam, the more complicated it became. I could see the society changing before my eyes, as fast as the hypermotion of an early movie. After its government launched market-oriented economic reforms in 1986, Vietnam tried to drag itself out of the Stone Age and onto the Information Superhighway all in the course of a few breathless years. Every day of my life there, I witnessed contrasts between the old and the new. On the spindly legged table of her tea stall, Grandmother Nhi now sold fancy imported cigarettes, but to light one you had to stick a piece of shaved wood into the dim flame of a kerosene lamp and use that as a match. Huong still bought live chickens at the market, but now she carried them home strung upside down from the handlebars of her shiny Honda Dream and wrung their necks in her own modern kitchen. I was used to such contrasts and no longer felt a tourist’s need to photograph them. But as someone trying to live in this place, I was beginning to sense that a more serious result of all this change was the intense difficulty people were having in coping with it.

The most obvious sign of that difficulty was evident in my friends’ marriages. In Hanoi, at least, separations were a big part of the problem. Even my students, most of whom had graduated from foreign universities, were anxious to go away again. The economic benefits of going abroad were so enormous that almost no one could hope to earn as much by staying home. Vietnam was in desperate need of educated professionals, but few acknowledged the emotional price to be paid for them.

Family separation had evolved into an accepted tradition in Vietnam. The nation’s folktales are full of soldiers going off to battle, leaving their heartbroken families far behind. During Vietnam’s wars in this century it wasn’t unusual for soldiers to be away from home for the duration of the conflict, even if that meant twenty years. With Vietnam at peace, the tradition of family separation had not disappeared, just evolved. But as Tra had once explained, families have a much harder time surviving long separations when the cause is not national defense but personal ambition. And in the gap between those very different motivations lay a hint of what was happening in Vietnam today: This nation, whose very survival had always depended on an all-powerful sense of community, was evolving into one in which the individual took precedence.

Instead of my cheering up Huong, she ended up consoling me. Seeing the glum expression on my face, she started laughing. “Don’t worry,” she said. “This is normal.”

I stood up. “You should talk to Tung,” I said.

Huong shook her head, then closed her eyes. “I’m not ready yet,” she said.

When I got back downstairs, Tung was still sitting in front of the broken telephone. Both bottles of beer were now empty. “What did she say?” he asked.

I shrugged.

He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it. “I’m so sick of this,” he said.

      When I got home from teaching that afternoon, Phai was sitting by himself in the living room with the broken telephone spread out on the coffee table in front of him. The big double doors, usually opened wide to the street, were
halfway shut. The overhead fluorescent bulbs were turned off, and the only light came from the slice of dim sunlight that managed to pass through the dense clouds and thick canopy of leaves hanging over the street outside.

I sat down on one of the little plastic-upholstered stools. “Tung and Huong are having a fight,” I said.

Phai laughed, as if we were sitting through a typhoon and I mentioned that it was raining.

I smiled. “
Phức tạp,
” I said. The word meant “complicated,” but it sounded like “fucked-up,” which would have worked just as well.

Phai nodded, looking out the door at the rush-hour traffic. His smooth, dark face was full of concern. The afternoon drizzle was starting to turn into heavier rain, and gray Shower Attack Sports raincoats flashed by like ghosts on motorbikes.

“Do you understand what the problem is?” I asked.

Phai looked at me and smiled. “I don’t know. I’ve never been married. I don’t know anything about women.” Then he turned his eyes away and picked up the telephone. “I should fix this thing,” he said.

I still felt slightly confused by Phai. There was a distance between us that neither seemed capable of bridging. It had nothing to do with mistrust. Unlike all the married men who saw me as a prospect for an affair, Phai seemed willing to regard me as more than The American Woman. He had an empathy that I recognized long before the two of us were even able to talk. During those early months in Hanoi, when I felt as though people regarded my efforts to speak Vietnamese as the ridiculous utterings of a mental incompetent, Phai always watched me like a sports fan rooting for his favorite player. Still, we were complete mysteries to each other.

Phai had what my grandmother would have called “commonsense smarts.” He had never been to college, but could install an
air conditioner without even glancing at the instructions. In Vietnam, which suffered from a chronic lack of spare parts, exacerbated at that time by the U.S. trade embargo, people made do by fashioning workable replacement parts for everything from radiators and refrigerators to typewriters and photocopy machines. Most Vietnamese knew how to coax aged and delicate appliances into working one more month or year, but, even by local standards, Phai had talent. Tung was clever enough to recognize Phai’s skills and turn him into the fix-it man for everything that broke in our house. I had watched him open a busted stereo, scatter the parts across the floor, tweak a few wires, then put it back together so that Tung could blast Metallica through the house as clearly as ever. I often came home to find Phai perched on a ladder, readjusting the electrical wiring, or hidden between the toilet and the wall, unclogging a drain. To me, this was magic.

Phai was using a rubber band and Scotch tape to fix the broken phone. He pried the cover open with his fingertips and thumbs.

“Where did you learn to fix things?” I asked.

He glanced up and grinned at me. “You don’t have to go to school for this.”

The internal circuit board looked like something I’d seen on a commercial for AT&T, an intricate puzzle of tiny wires and connectors meant to convey to TV audiences the technological sophistication of the phone company. Phai dug his fingers into it, opened a gap, and fixed the rubber band around it. Then, holding a torn section of the board in place, he ripped off a piece of tape with his teeth and reconnected it. He snapped the cover back on the phone, fiddled with the wires in the wall, then picked up the receiver and listened. After a moment, he handed it to me so that I could hear the dial tone myself.

“You must have learned about machines somewhere,” I insisted.

“I learned some in the army,” he finally admitted, pulling a cigarette out of the box in his shirt pocket and lighting it. Phai was my age, which meant that his mandatory military service had taken place long after the last shots of the war against the United States were fired (but not long after the brief 1979 border war with China). His memory of the American War was probably hazy, but, like all my other Hanoi friends, he still avoided talking with me about it. Sometimes, someone would make a joke about the war, but other than that, when I asked for specifics, I generally met with the same response, a vague smile and an emphatic, question-stopping, “That was the past. I like to think about the future.” Once, during an English class, I asked my adult students to describe the scariest moment of their lives. One talked about almost drowning while swimming in a river as a kid. Another remembered a traffic accident in Moscow. All of my students would have been considered members of the “Vietnam Generation” had they lived in the States. But if they had any terrifying memories of war, I didn’t hear about them. Talking about the war with an American was bad form, like reminding a guest in your home that she owed you money. Still, the longer I spent in Hanoi, the more I felt the need to find out about it.

“What did you do in the army?” I asked, testing to see how much more he’d offer.

“I was up on the border with China,” he said. “I didn’t want to shoot a gun, so I studied how to repair cars and motorbikes. I hated the military service, but at least I learned a trade.”

I heard the rumble of a motorbike outside the door and turned to see Tung pull up on his Dream. He walked into the house, leaving muddy tracks across the slick linoleum floor, then
threw himself down on the couch next to Phai. None of us said a word. In a culture that had so little regard for privacy, there was a great respect for silence.

My impulse to come to Vietnam had sprung from my conviction of the two nations’ similarities, not their differences. I was learning that I’d been right. Phai learned to fix motorbikes so that he wouldn’t have to shoot a gun. Had I been faced with military service, I would have done something like that. Tung didn’t have the patience to sit still on a couch for ten minutes, much less prowl through the jungle on an all-night patrol. But it was one thing to try to imagine Tung and Phai in army gear. It was quite another to hear directly from them how they had experienced the war. Sooner or later, I would have to ask.

I was already able to understand one thing very clearly, though. It was not career military men or the sinister VC I remembered from movies, but individuals like Tung and Phai who would have done most of the fighting. Despite all the rhetoric, all the willingness to die for a cause, war wasn’t natural to any of them.

A memory slipped through my mind then, from Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel
China Men
describing the experience of soldiers in Vietnam: “[When] they were ordered to patrol the jungle they made a lot of noise, clanged equipment, talked loud. The enemy did the same, everybody warning one another off. Once in a while, to keep some hawk officer happy, they fired rounds into the trees.”

I didn’t know if Kingston’s description was authentic or not, but I’d remembered it all these years because it seemed truer to human nature than anything else I’d read about the conflict in Vietnam. I looked at Tung and Phai and thought of my friends back home. I could picture any of them, lonely and petrified, banging their jackknives against their mess kits.

It seemed like we sat there, silently, for hours, but it was probably only five or ten minutes. Tung finally leaned over and ran his finger across the top of the phone. “Did you fix it yet?” he asked Phai.

Phai picked up the phone and held it over his shoulder like a football. “It works,” he smirked. “Now you can throw it all you want.” I watched Tung, wondering how he’d react to teasing.

Tung looked at Phai and managed a little grin. “I’m so sick of this,” he said miserably.

      Tra, her sister Hoa, and her sister-in-law Xuan were discussing how many pairs of black pumps Tra would need in Michigan. Tra couldn’t seem to convince them that, given her student lifestyle, she might not need any pumps at all. Like me, she spent a lot of time trying to convince people that, though Americans have a lot more money than Vietnamese, we aren’t necessarily stylish.