The House on Dream Street (15 page)

“And Mr. Dodson? Can I say Mr. Dodson he does not suits me?”

We nodded again.

Linh began to walk around the room, performing a little dance for us. “This color suits me. This dress suits me. Carolyn and Dana suits me. Mr. Dodson does not suits me,” she announced.

Linh ended her parade back at the mirror and did a little fashion-model flick of her head. “I hate Mr. Dodson,” she pouted, staring at herself. “He does not suits me.”

      After Linh went home, Carolyn and I went out to get something to eat. The sky had turned purple, and at the electric appliance stalls by the railroad tracks, the lights of the globe-shaped karaoke lamps were twinkling like colored stars. Inside the open door of one house, a woman was urging a little
boy to read a lesson from his school primer. A few doors down, a tiny old woman chewed on a toothpick and gazed at us from the deep recesses of an armchair. In front of us, a bread-seller walked along the street balancing a basket full of baguettes on her head. “
Bánh mì nông, ời! Bánh mì nông, ời!
”—Hey! Hot bread! Hot bread! It was one of the last things I heard before I fell asleep at night and one of the first things I heard as I woke every morning. The fragrance of the warm loaves drifted over us.

Despite the long day that Carolyn had had—flying in from Bangkok and getting into the city from the airport—I could not even offer to cook her dinner. I had the materials to do so, but not the capability. Huong had given me an electric hot plate and a refrigerator. Most Vietnamese would have considered these appliances luxuries, but for an American who learned to cook on a four-burner Magic Chef, the hot-plate experience felt like camping. I had to figure out a whole new method of preparing food. Most Vietnamese cooked on the kitchen floor. Squatting down over wooden cutting boards, they would chop their vegetables and clean their fish, then prepare everything on little charcoal cookers about the size of a single burner. Even Huong, who had a full-size stove, did most of her preparations squatting in her kitchen, as I had found, to the detriment of my leg muscles, when we made our hamburger dinner. She could sit like that for hours, while I couldn’t last more than a few minutes in that position. Within a few weeks of receiving my new cooker, I was limiting my hot plate use to boiling drinking water and heating up packets of instant noodles. Considering that I could get a very satisfying meal for less than fifty cents, I mostly ate out.

We ended up on the tiny, claustrophobic alley called Cam Chi Street. Lined with bare-bones rice and noodle shops, Cam Chi had the chaotic feel of a Cubist painting. Handmade signs hung off balance, occasionally banging the heads of people moving
down the narrow, block-long road. Awnings jutted out from the buildings, their swooping fabric cutting patches out of the rice-colored sky. Inside gaping doorways, wooden tables sat at odd angles on green-and-yellow checkerboard linoleum floors, and stacks of wooden stools leaned like rickety pillars against mottled hospital-green walls. Over everything floated steam and smoke, the steam lifting off the enormous vats of boiling broth and the smoke rising from the glowing coals of charcoal cookers.

Cam Chi’s stalls were much like food stalls anywhere in Vietnam. One central table covered with food served as each establishment’s low-tech advertisement for what it served—whether it was
phở,
rice porridge, rice pancakes, sticky rice, fried noodles, stewed chicken, or fried eel. At the biggest stalls, this table sat in the open space between the street and the dining room, usually the living room of the proprietor’s own house, which was turned into a restaurant during the twelve to eighteen hours that the shop was open for business every day. The bigger food stalls could have as many as three or four people working in them at the busiest time: one or two to take orders and cook the food, another to prep the ingredients and bring the customers their meals, one to clear and wash the dishes, and another to park and watch the customers’ motorbikes and bicycles. The smaller stalls on Cam Chi set up tables on the sidewalk itself. Some didn’t even have private tables. Customers merely sat down on simple wooden benches lining three sides of the proprietor’s table. The proprietor, sitting on the fourth side of the table, was a one-person restaurant staff, able to take customers’ orders, dish up their food, handle money, and still have time left over to do the dishes.

This was the street where Tra had taught me to order “noodle soup without the pilot,” and Carolyn and I had barely made it around the corner when a young man from my favorite noodle
shop saw me and yelled, “
Phở không ngưồ’i lái!
” He had such a grin of expectation on his face that I couldn’t disappoint him. I ordered the usual.

We chose a table in the corner and sat down. Three well-dressed young men sitting nearby shifted their bodies around and spent the rest of their meal watching us.

Carolyn finally had a chance to tell me why she’d arrived so late in Vietnam. Before coming to Vietnam, she’d stopped to visit her “Tibetan parents,” an elderly couple she’d met years before in Nepal. After she had spent ten days with them in their remote mountain village, they’d convinced her to stay another week. “Sorry I didn’t call you,” she said. “The nearest international phone was a day’s hike, then a twelve-hour bus ride away.”

Our soup arrived. “
Phở không ngưồ’i lái,
” said the grinning waiter, with a wink in my direction. Carolyn looked at me, waiting for me to translate, but I didn’t have the energy to explain. Instead, I concentrated on making sure we followed the appropriate rituals for eating noodle soup. I dug my hand into the canister of chopsticks on the table searching for equal-sized chopsticks for each of us. “It’s better to have a mismatched husband and wife than a mismatched pair of chopsticks,” I explained to Carolyn, repeating an axiom I’d picked up from Tra. I wiped off all four chopsticks with paper napkins. On a plate in the middle of our table was a mound of fresh herbs, crisp white bean sprouts, sliced chilis, and quartered lemons. I squeezed the juice of a couple of pieces of lemon into my broth, plucked the leaves off a stalk of basil, and dropped them in. I took my chopsticks and my wide, flat-bottomed spoon, and stirred the hot soup. The steam settled like a warm dew on my face.

I told Carolyn about Tung and Huong, about Tra, and about the slow progress of my Vietnamese. After nearly two months in Hanoi, I was finally beginning to feel settled, I told her. When it
came to negotiating my way through the basic chores of daily life, I had become quite competent. I could even carry on rudimentary conversations with people who didn’t speak any English. But in some ways, the chasm between myself and these Vietnamese was still as deep as ever. I was only communicating in outline form, really. I could mention a topic—say, “age,” “homeland,” “plans for the future”—but I could never actually discuss it.

Finally, someone was here to whom I could actually express myself. “I’m so happy you’re here,” I told her.

Carolyn smiled, but she seemed dazed, not simply by the experience of moving in the course of two days from the high Himalayas to the noodle stalls of Vietnam, but by the simple fact of being in Hanoi at all. She’d spent two years focused on finding a way back to Vietnam. Now, she seemed overwhelmed by the realization that she’d finally made it.

Carolyn leaned back against the chipped and faded green wall. “I love the way it smells here,” she said, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply. She seemed to be trying to drag all of Vietnam into her lungs, and I felt as though I were watching someone tripping. I breathed a sample of the air myself. It wasn’t exotic, more like the muddled ingredients of a stew: burning coal, simmering broth, and the smoke of our neighbors’ cigarettes. I had become so accustomed to these smells, to the cries of the street vendors, to the rich taste of cheap soup, that I no longer really noticed such things. Vietnam had already swallowed me whole, and I sat inside it now like a bug in the belly of a dragon.

Carolyn still lived somewhere beyond the thick skin of this place. I wanted reminders of America, reminders that beyond Vietnam a place existed were I could feel at home. I broke in awkwardly. “Carolyn, what’s going on in San Francisco?” I asked. “What’s happening in the election campaigns? How’s Deborah?
Who was nominated for the Academy Awards? Has anybody famous died lately?” I didn’t want to miss something important.

We ordered tea, and Carolyn tried for ten or fifteen minutes to satisfy my curiosity. She told me about the presidential election primary season, about her plans for next summer’s garden, about the new Vietnamese restaurant near my house. I took in the words as if they were drops of water falling onto my parched tongue. And then, in midsentence, she stopped. She said nothing for a long time, rubbing her eyes with her fingertips. “I’m sorry,” she finally said, looking up at me, obviously exhausted. “I can’t do this. I’m only in Asia for five weeks. My time here is so precious. I can’t think about America now.”

Both of us were silent, embarrassed. I stretched my fingers around my cup of tea and blew into it until my face grew hot from the steam and frustration. For a long time, I focused my attention on the little disk of liquid in my cup, and on the image of myself reflected there. That other world was an ocean away. One friend had crossed that ocean, but this didn’t mean I’d gone home.

      When I came back to the house one afternoon a few days after Carolyn arrived, a brown paper bag was sitting on the living room coffee table. It was a large bag, rumpled and bulky, the kind one would use to carry home a load of groceries in the States. The top of it curled softly to one side, as if it had been rolled tightly closed, then opened, then closed again.

On the couch sat Tung with his brother-in-law, Nga’s husband Tan. Mr. Huey’s translator, Tuan, sat in the armchair. Phai, smoking a cigarette, perched on a stool near the door. All four of them glanced up at me, then their eyes shifted back to the bag, then back to me.

“What is it?” I asked.

Phai answered. “The money for Mr. Huey’s phone bill,” he said, explaining that Mr. Huey and Tung, under whose name the phone was registered, would be taking the money to the central telephone office this afternoon. “Take a look,” he urged.

I walked over and unrolled the top of the bag. It was stuffed with rubber-band wrapped bundles of 5,000-dong bills, each of which probably contained one hundred individual notes. Five-thousand dong notes, which were worth about 50 cents, were at that time the largest denomination available in Vietnam. They were dark blue and usually crisp, compared to the faded brown 1,000s and the pale red 500s and 200s, which became so worn in circulation that they were as soft and rumpled as Kleenex. In this country, you were lucky to have a little blue in your pocket. Five thousand dong could buy ten loaves of bread, a major bike repair, a pair of shorts and a shirt for a child, several days’ worth of rice.

“How much is it altogether?” I asked.

The men looked at the bag, then looked away. It was as if a nude woman were lying on the table and they were trying not to stare at her. “It’s worth about five thousand U.S. dollars,” Tung told me. Though it had stabilized in recent years, Vietnam’s currency had had such a history of fluctuation that, when it came to big sums, businesspeople like Tung often thought in terms of dollars.

“That’s about ten thousand five-thousand dong notes,” said Phai, who thought in terms of dong.

Even though Vietnam was one of the most expensive places to make international calls in the world, it was hard to believe that one person could rack up $5,000 worth of calls in a month. The figure was astonishing, particularly in a country where the average person only earned about $130 a year. We couldn’t talk
about $5,000 in terms of Vietnam, and so we ended up discussing what $5,000 could buy in the States. A third of a car, I told them. No, not a house. Almost a year of rent, depending on where you lived. College tuition at a state school. A fourth of a year at Harvard. Three round-trip tickets between San Francisco and Hanoi. Five thousand dollars was a lot of money, even to Americans, but if that was all you earned in a year, you’d be eligible for food stamps.