The House on Dream Street (23 page)

“It’s bad luck. Vietnamese businesspeople never set foot in that place. Drink your tea.”

Since then, I’d been less positive about people’s opinions of Ho Chi Minh. But Phai only said, “Uncle Ho was a great man. He made Vietnam a free country.” Of course, while Mrs. Thu remembered Ho as the controversial leader who had led Vietnam down the path to communism, Phai was seven when the old man died. His Ho Chi Minh was a character in history, a portrait in elementary
school textbooks, a name in a song. George Washington, really.

I felt a cool breeze blow in from the West Lake and across the square. The dust in the floodlights glowed like fireflies, and my balloon jumped on its stick. Phai was so quiet that I finally asked, “Is everything okay with you?”

Phai looked up, startled and embarrassed, as if I’d scolded him for failing in his duty to keep me entertained. He nodded firmly. “Everything’s great,” he said.

We made a slow loop of the square. Then Phai stopped. “Did I ever tell you about my friend in Moscow?” he asked.

I shook my head.

In front of a us, a tiny girl raced by on an intersecting path, making a monkey balloon bob in the air in front of her. Phai said, “We went to school together. She wasn’t my girlfriend. But she was easy to talk to. Two years ago, her father got her a position as a guest worker in Moscow, so she went. We’ve been writing since then. I got a letter from her yesterday.”

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“No. I just . . .” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know. I don’t understand these things. She’s coming home pretty soon.”

I had to guess at the rest of it. “Do you think you’ll marry her?” I asked.

Phai shrugged. His face was sullen. “Probably. Our parents like one another. I think that’s what we’ll do.”

In my mind, I tried to make a shift. “Do you love her?” I asked.

Phai laughed. “I don’t know. What do I know of love? I guess it’s my destiny to marry her, so that’s what we’ll do.”

I paused. “Don’t you think you should love her?” I said. Phai said nothing.

We walked back to the motorbike. The city had grown quiet now, with only a few dateless guys cruising the deserted streets. We drove up Dien Bien Phu Street, which led past the dark, half-timbered embassies of the former Eastern bloc. In the guardhouses, solitary soldiers rested their elbows on the windowsills, their heads slowly turning as we passed.

“How do you say ‘I quit’ in English?” Phai asked.

I told him.

“I quit,” he said, trying out the sounds on his tongue. It sounded like “I kit.”

A balloon-seller pedaled by us, a single blue monkey whipping back and forth against his wooden vendor’s frame. I closed my eyes and saw the image of Uncle Ho, lying dead and fragile under glass. I leaned into Phai’s back and set my hands upon his waist. For the first time, I felt his body beneath the soft, thin fabric of his shirt.

8. A Typhoon and a Full Moon

I
N JULY, THE TYPHOON HIT.
For weeks leading up to it, the air was hot and as sticky as syrup. Even the slightest rain made steam rise off the pavement, as if the entire city were a kettle of simmering soup. Almost worse than the weather was the mood. Although Hanoi was a city plagued by bad climate almost year round, summer brought hopelessness, as if no one could decide if life was worth living.

A few weeks into the summer, Huong’s sister, Nga, had opened a dress shop in the downstairs living room of our house. Nothing changed in the makeup of the living room itself. The couch was still there, and we still spent great chunks of time on it. The TV still flickered in the background, and Tung still played his Metallica at full volume. The only difference was that now dresses also filled the room. There must have been a hundred of them, plaids and polka dots, long-sleeved ones with lace-covered collars, a rusty wool with a matching cowgirl vest, and the same thing in pink. The dresses hung from long wooden poles attached to the living room walls and dangled from the front doors of the house, making it look like the entrance to a harem. Each dress
cost about thirty dollars, in a country where most people earned that much money over the course of a month. But, in a sign of the wealth in Hanoi, Nga was selling a lot of dresses.

Two of Nga’s biggest customers were a pair of Chinese women who’d been introduced to Tung by Mr. Huey and who were now staying in Mr. Huey’s second room, the one on the fourth floor. They were big-boned, sturdy women I could imagine as urban factory workers in China. It was hard to figure out what had brought them to Vietnam. They didn’t act like tourists, but they didn’t have any apparent work to do here either. They never left the house until the middle of the afternoon, and they always came home with shopping bags full of new clothes—blue jeans mostly, but also denim shirts and jackets, frilly dresses, and straw hats with big, bright flowers on them. They were determined to wear every single thing they’d purchased, even the jackets, despite the heat. But they moved stiffly in their outfits, pulling at the seams and checking their zippers, as if they weren’t quite sure how to wear them. Huong and I would sit on the couch and watch them try on Nga’s dresses. We smiled at them, doing our best to be friendly, but we never spoke at all. Neither of us knew a word of Chinese.

I was in the living room, with Huong, when I first heard that the typhoon was approaching. She called it a
bão,
with a tone that swooped up, then down, then up again, as if mimicking the weather. The newspapers and TV were full of predictions, but I had so much trouble comprehending the language that I had to rely on the news as it trickled down, second- and thirdhand. On the afternoon that Typhoon Chuck was supposed to arrive, Huong hauled the big stone planters down from my balcony railing. Downstairs, Nga and her husband pulled all the dresses off the front doors and hung them inside, far from the entrance to the house. Outside, Grandmother Nhi disassembled her tea
stand, and the motorcycle mechanics put away their tools, boarded up their storefronts, and hurried home. Everyone seemed quite worried. But Hanoians were always upset about the weather, and I couldn’t tell whether this storm was really that much worse than any other passing crisis.

I hadn’t seen Phai in two days. In fact, I hadn’t seen much of him at all lately. He no longer fixed motorbikes next door, so he didn’t have reason to spend all day in the living room. He hadn’t been fired, or even laid off, exactly, but over the past few months he’d worked less and less, until the job just didn’t exist anymore.

I felt sure that he’d come by tonight. The two of us never made plans. But he followed an unspoken pattern of stopping by, a pattern I’d come to predict and depend upon. Surely, I thought, he would appear tonight. But we’d never had a
bão
before. At four in the afternoon, I stood out on my balcony, surveying the sky. A thin, gray haze stretched out over the military housing complex across the street.

At six, the sound of howling wind made me look up from the book I’d finally started reading. I turned the latch of the door that led out to the balcony and found I had to force it open. Up and down the street, tree branches waved like arms at calisthenics. A wall of dark gray clouds had rolled across the city and, down below, fat raindrops had already begun to crash against concrete. On a typical Wednesday evening, it would have been rush hour on Dream Street, but tonight the road was empty. I leaned out and let the rain splash against my face. The air smelled like sweat. Even in those first few minutes of the typhoon, the heat refused to break.

I spent the rest of the evening reading and watching the storm. I wasn’t afraid; from where I stood, the trees were swaying back and forth, but none of them had toppled. I was fascinated by the drama of it. As the wind picked up, the house began
to rattle and shake. A water stain appeared on the ceiling and began to expand down my bedroom wall. I couldn’t keep myself from stepping onto the balcony, where the fat drops of rain had turned into broken lines, then ropes, then dense sheets of water. Even in my childhood in Memphis, where the storms rolled across the Mississippi Delta in the summer, I’d never seen such wind as this. The shiny metal Christmas tree ornaments on Huong’s potted plants whipped in the air like Ping Pong balls.

Across the street, a few lights twinkled in the windows, but I couldn’t see much of anything. The storm, the darkness, and the distance kept me from spotting a single person. I couldn’t remember another moment since I’d arrived in Vietnam when I felt such an absence of human life. Even when I lay in bed at night, motorbikes would regularly roll by and break the silence. Now, all of us were trapped inside. What was everybody else doing? Drinking rice wine? Playing cards? Standing at their windows looking out toward me? So many times, I’d felt desperate for privacy. Now all alone, I felt stranded. I contemplated braving the elements and running downstairs to sit out the storm with Tung and Huong and Viet, but I knew they’d yell at me for venturing down the slippery stairs.

The enormous muscled trees hunched like old men protecting themselves from a beating. I looked out toward the Old Quarter, toward the Red River, no doubt swollen now, and the neighborhood where Phai lived.

      The next morning, metal hooks were all that remained of Huong’s Christmas tree ornaments. The sun made gold mirrors out of the puddles on the sidewalk, and small branches lay scattered up and down the road. The bright green awning of the beer bar across the street now hung from the
lower branches of a nearby tree. The city looked sloppy, but also clean and fresh. Actually, from my position on the balcony, the damage didn’t look too bad.

When I walked downstairs, though, Tung told me of the devastation. Somewhere between three hundred and a thousand trees had fallen in the city, some crashing into houses, many others blocking streets and crippling traffic. Hanoi was paralyzed. Tung had tried to take Viet on a ride to survey the damage, but they hadn’t made it past the railroad tracks a block away. The huge trunk of a tree was blocking an entire intersection. According to Tung, these were all trees that the French had planted. Beautiful and generous with shade, they had shallow root systems that made them topple easily in violent storms.

“At least our Asian trees are flexible,” he said.

I sat down next to him on the couch and he poured me some tea. “Were you scared?” he asked, grinning like an older brother daring his little sister to tell the truth.

I shook my head. I hadn’t been brave, I told him, just ignorant.

“People died,” Tung said. “Over on Thi Sach Street a guy died. He was a security guard at that outdoor market. He stayed in a little hut during the night and a French tree fell on him. Crushed the whole hut.”

Footsteps made us both look up. It was Mr. Huey’s translator, Tuan, who didn’t bother to greet us.

“Are they off to Saigon?” Tung asked.

Tuan grunted an assent.

“You’d better leave early. It’ll take you hours to get to the airport.”

The translator surveyed his image in the big mirror Nga used for her customers. He leaned forward and picked something from between his teeth. “We’ll leave at ten,” he said.

“They’ll be back the day after tomorrow?” Tung asked.

Tuan grunted again. He adjusted his belt, fiddled with his collar, and raised his eyebrows, apparently satisfied with what he saw. Then he sat down in an armchair, pulled a cigarette out of his breast pocket, and lit it. Tung pulled out a 555 of his own and lit it.

“He’s getting rich,” I mumbled to Tung in English, which the translator couldn’t understand.

Tung looked up, startled, as if he hadn’t remembered that I was there. When my meaning registered on his face, he shrugged. “I guess so,” he said in Vietnamese.

Someone yelled down from the top of the stairs in Chinese. The translator jumped out of his seat and went up. Tung watched but didn’t move. The translator reappeared, a large suitcase in each hand. Mr. and Mrs. Huey followed him down the stairs, each of them carrying several smaller parcels. The yellow-toothed dog peeked out of a canvas shopping bag.

Mr. Huey stopped, put down his parcels, and grinned at me and Tung. He pulled a package of Dunhills out of his pocket and offered cigarettes to both of us.

I shook my head. Tung doused his 555 in his teacup and took a Dunhill. Tuan returned from putting the bags in the car and translated a brief exchange between Tung and Mr. Huey. “You’re off to Saigon?” Tung asked, his voice full of respect.

Mr. Huey nodded and took a drag on his cigarette. His eyes closed slightly as he sucked, then he looked out the door toward the car, exhaling slowly. He was as relaxed as ever, cheerful and distracted, as if his mind were wrapped around some big deal he planned to make that afternoon.

“Anything you need me to take care of while you’re gone?” Tung asked.

Mr. Huey looked at the ceiling, considered the suggestion for a while, then he shook his head. “Everything’s taken care of,” he said. “We’ll have a lot to do when we get back here.” Then he
picked up his bag, put out his barely smoked Dunhill, and shook Tung’s hand, then mine. “See you soon,” he said.