The House on Dream Street (27 page)

Huong had immediately thought of me. After convincing Grandmother Nhi’s son to let her investigate, she’d rushed upstairs.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

I shrugged my shoulders, a recalcitrant teenager confronted by Mom.

“Why don’t you trust me?” she wanted to know.

I stared at the floor, shocked at my own inability to discuss the matter like a grown-up.

“We could get into a lot of trouble because of this,” Huong said. “Tung and I have too many problems already.”

I nodded.

“You can trust me,” Huong said. “I take care of you already.”

I looked up at her, confused. “What do you mean?” I asked.

Huong paused for a moment. Once every few weeks, she explained, secret police would come by the house to question her about my activities in Vietnam. Who are her friends? Where does she go? What does she do? Huong always professed ignorance. She was only my landlord, she’d claim, how could she know such details about my private life? Without ever actually lying, she managed to keep from them the one fact that would have made them push her harder. She never told them that she and I were friends.

The news didn’t surprise me, particularly in light of something I’d learned from my student John only a week or two before. Late one evening, when John was driving me home on the back of his motorbike, we got into a conversation about Harry and how he’d once taken me out to Ha Long Bay. “I still don’t understand how he managed to take a foreigner outside of Hanoi without government permission,” I said.

The motorbike puttered to a stop in front of my house, and John paused before heading home. Two dogs were poking through a pile of trash my neighbors had put outside for the street sweepers to pick up. “Harry’s very powerful,” John said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “As a scientist?”

John laughed uncomfortably, then looked down at the ignition on his motorbike and toyed with the keys. “You can have many careers in Vietnam,” he said. “Look at me.” Although John worked every day as a physicist, he made his money on the weekends, as a guide for French and Italian tourists. With Harry it was the same thing, John explained. He was a scientist. And he was also a high-ranking member of the secret police.

It took a moment for the idea to register that Harry—small, lascivious Harry—was also a cop. “How can he be both?” I’d asked.

John explained that many institutes in Vietnam had employees who were also members of the secret police. It was a perfect way to keep tabs on what was going on in the country.

I must have looked upset. John had laughed. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Harry is your friend. It’s no problem.”

I’d nodded, not knowing what else to say. Harry’s interest in me had suddenly seemed more complicated. He wasn’t just a student looking for a date.

Huong wasn’t critical of her government, but she was critical of me. “How can I help you if I don’t even know myself what you’re doing?” she asked me now. “You act like you want to make the police suspicious—having Phai climb across the neighbors’ roofs. Tung and I can help you.”

Huong’s words were harsh, but her eyes were smiling. After all these weeks of secrecy, I felt enormously relieved to discover that Tung and Huong not only wouldn’t condemn my relationship with Phai, but that they would actually encourage it. It turned out that they’d been wondering when the two of us would finally get together.

“I thought maybe you would look down on me for sleeping with him without being married,” I said.

Huong shook her head. “You’re not like Vietnamese women. You’re an American. You always sleep with your boyfriends.”

I started to object, but stopped myself.

“You’re lucky,” Huong continued. “Maybe if I’d slept with Tung, I never would have married him.” She laughed loudly then, thoroughly enjoying it.

Huong and I came up with a more practical—and physically safer—plan than the one Phai and I had figured out. Phai could spend the night, but he couldn’t leave the house before nine in the morning, an hour that was late enough to guarantee that none of the neighbors would notice.

Huong stood up and walked to the door. Just before she closed it behind her, she looked at me again, her face more serious now. “Duyen,” she said, “Tung and I care about Phai. He doesn’t know anything about these things. You’ll hurt him if you don’t really love him.”

      I was asleep, and Phai’s words nudged me like gentle fingers. “
Yêu quá,
” he said. Two words that, translated, meant “so much love.” Pronouns weren’t necessary in Vietnamese. All that mattered was the noun itself, and it came out of his mouth as easily as a sigh. But my mind was clouded with sleep and, at first, the words didn’t register. I lay on my stomach and when I opened my eyes, I could only see the lower half of his body sitting on the bed beside me. As usual, he’d woken well ahead of me. A towel covered his waist, and drops of water glistened on his bare legs. He pulled down the sheet and draped a hot wet towel across my back. I closed my eyes again and fell back to sleep.

It wasn’t until later that morning that I remembered what Phai had said. He’d said it quietly, not knowing if I was asleep or not, as if he only wanted to try the words on his tongue. Perhaps he wanted to give me an out. That might have explained my own
behavior, had I been the one to whisper words of love to someone sleeping, but Phai’s mind didn’t work like mine. Whether he was fixing a broken faucet for Tung or spending his last few thousand dong to buy an ice cream for Viet, Phai’s generosity flowed freely. Love would be a gift from him, like a warm towel draped across my back. He’d whispered it because he felt it. And, for that moment, at least, he needed nothing back.

From my previous romantic relationships, I’d come to believe that love was a complicated experience that filled you with passion one day, aversion the next, and, on the third day, tortured you with some mind-numbing mixture of the two—so many emotions piled on top of one another that love itself ended up a tiny pearl buried beneath a heap of trash. With Phai, it never seemed to include the trash. He loved so completely, and without hesitation.

Still, I wanted to avoid the subject. If I could have controlled our relationship, I might have decided that we’d only say such things while the other person was absent or sleeping. Words seemed to complicate things. Loving Phai was easy, but our future together wasn’t.

      I wasn’t the only American to fall in love with a Vietnamese. During the time that I lived in Hanoi, I came to know a number of Americans, most of them my age, most of them scholars or staff members of international aid organizations. Our small circle of expatriates relied on one another for everything from emotional support to loans of money to carrying letters and packages for one another when we returned to the States. Other groups of foreigners were trying to create tiny Western enclaves for themselves in Hanoi, and the city did have its cocktail parties at the Australian embassy and a pizza
parlor or two. But for more than financial reasons, my friends were not among this set. Jack spent his free time translating an ancient Chinese text into Vietnamese. Olivia learned to play an obscure type of bamboo flute. Norma raced off to every village festival that took place within a hundred miles of the city. We didn’t focus our intellectual or personal passions on one another, but on Vietnam. Not surprisingly, few of us became involved with each other romantically and almost all of us fell for Vietnamese.

Most of the men in that circle have since married Vietnamese women. Only a couple of the women have married Vietnamese men. Somehow, the cultural gap between our nations has been easier to span for one gender combination than the other, and the traditional interest of Western men in Asian women doesn’t fully account for it. My male American friends did not travel the countryside in search of fresh-faced farm girls to cook, clean, and raise babies for them in Kansas. Jack married Nga, who became such an asset to Save the Children in Vietnam that the organization sent her on a year-long study course in Australia. Steve married Lan, who raced so quickly up the corporate ladder at Cathay Pacific in Hanoi that, when the couple decided to move to the United States, the airline offered to transfer her to its prestigious Los Angeles office. David married Thuy, who, while completing a fully funded graduate program at Harvard, had to rush back to Vietnam to translate for groups of visiting VIPs who refused to hire anyone else.

The American women I knew didn’t end up with partners like these, probably because of two factors: our nationality and our gender. Two specific attributes—being American and being male—were the qualities most likely to enhance one’s power in one of these cross-cultural relationships. If a member of a couple was both American and male, there wasn’t much of a problem.
Jack, Steve, and David could marry phenomenally successful Vietnamese women and not feel threatened by the success of their mates. All three of them could both believe in equality for women and, at the same time, appreciate having a wife who felt she had a duty to cook dinner. Such relationships didn’t disrupt the established dynamics of power.

When American women took up with Vietnamese men, however, power got split down the middle, and not always with positive results. Though Vietnamese men may have appreciated our independence, most of them were raised to expect dinner on the table when they came home at night. If I cooked, I’d expect the guy to do the dishes. In more subtle ways as well, such as my desire to have male friends or his need for a wife willing to be subservient to his mother, my nationality would invariably clash with his gender. We American women gravitated toward Vietnamese partners less likely to make oppressive demands on us: eccentric artists, easygoing workers, curious but unambitious intellectuals who sat around all day drinking rice wine and talking about books.

It was hard to imagine, though, bringing a guy like that back to the States. Nga, Lan, or Thuy could make it in any country in the world, but Phai couldn’t. As long as we remained in his own country, where he functioned well, power remained fairly balanced between us. Once we got to the States, however, the scales would tip dangerously in my direction. After a blissful honeymoon spent standing atop skyscrapers, riding escalators, and sampling Big Macs, we’d settle into normal life. Phai would look for a job fixing motorbikes and, because he didn’t speak English, no one would hire him. Unable to work, he’d stay home alone, squatting in front of the television, trying to make out the meaning of every episode of
Days of Our Lives.
At some point, my
mother would fly out to meet her new son-in-law, and her brows would bunch with worry because she couldn’t even speak to him.

No, I couldn’t imagine that kind of future with Phai.

      Phai lived with his parents and younger sister and brother in a neighborhood at the edge of the Red River. He had described for me the large room where the family slept, his father’s garden, and the shed where his mother was raising a pig. But these descriptions weren’t enough for me. I kept asking him so many questions that, finally, one afternoon, he invited me for a visit.

On our way out the door of my house, I heard the sound of running water in the kitchen. For reasons I could never understand, Huong regularly left water running in the sink. I regularly turned it off. Now, however, when I walked into the kitchen, I nearly tripped over Huong herself. She was squatting on the floor, ardently scrubbing a black cloud of mildew that hovered like a thunderstorm above the tiles. Her posture suggested that she was involved in some form of meditation.