The House on Dream Street (29 page)

It was my job to be translator, but, unlike Linh’s husband Son, I wasn’t a foreign ministry diplomat trained to be objective. I turned to the Frenchman and did my best to make Huong’s offer of breakfast and laundry sound inviting. “It’s a good price,” I told him, not mentioning the fact that I only paid $220 a month myself. “And Huong’s an excellent cook.”

“Ffffft,” said the Frenchman, half closing his eyes and letting his fingers flutter through the air dismissively. He was about my age, with close-cropped dark brown hair and an air of stubbornness that made me curious to see which of them would give in first. “As if I cannot buy my own breakfast on the street every morning for two thousand dong,” he said, looking at me and rolling his eyes.

In the few minutes since Huong had dragged me down the stairs to act as her translator, the Frenchman and I had conversed just enough for me to establish that his name was Hugo, he came from Bordeaux, and that, on several occasions, he’d visited the States. Now, after that brief conversation and, more importantly, because of the implicit solidarity of Westerners, Hugo was treating me as his ally. He regarded Huong and Nga skeptically, and he spoke to me as if the two of us were in this thing together.

Huong had seen enough old French movies to know what “Ffffft” meant. She tried another tactic. “Tell him I’m an excellent cook,” she urged.

I mumbled, “I did already,” then I turned to Hugo. “It’s a good deal for you,” I told him. “I don’t get breakfast, and I have to do my own laundry.”

Hugo shrugged and looked around the room uncertainly. I could easily remember the morning Tra and I first trudged up the stairs to that multicolored, overfurnished room I now
called home. I’d once wondered if that uneven staircase would lead me to break my neck, and now I raced up and down it ten times a day without a thought. I’d once looked at Tung with the same suspicion with which Hugo now gazed at Huong. In a country where the average citizen made less in a year than he was being asked to pay in one month’s rent, the Frenchman probably thought that she was trying to grab every dollar he had. In addition, Hugo, like me, came from a country that had a rocky history with Vietnam. Maybe he was wondering if the high rent demonstrated how much the Vietnamese still hated the French.

Hugo sat back and looked around the room. A recent shipment from Hong Kong made it appear even more like a dress shop and less like a living room than ever. “These two sisters own the place?” he asked.

I shook my head. “It’s just Huong and her husband, who’s away on a business trip to Saigon.” I said. “He lived in Germany for a long time.” Hugo’s eyes opened wide, and I could see that the European connection impressed him.

“So, is he very Westernized?” Hugo asked.

I nodded. “Very,” I told him. I went on to describe Tung as a Vietnamese in blue jeans and loafers, a fan of Metallica, drinker of Heineken. I could see Hugo begin to relax. Tung became comprehensible, which was a very attractive quality to foreigners just starting out in a city as incomprehensible as Hanoi. At the mention of Metallica, Hugo began to laugh, but the memory of Tung standing in front of his stereo, tapping his feet and cranking up the heavy metal, just made me sad. I wasn’t just trying to paint a portrait of Tung. I was trying to conjure him.

Huong had told me that on the previous Tuesday afternoon, two policemen had arrived at our house. They weren’t the regular
guys who came by periodically and sat in our living room drinking tea with Tung and questioning him about the foreigners who rented his rooms. Within a few minutes of their arrival, they had already disposed of the requisite small talk and had begun to interrogate Tung about the Chinese women who’d been staying on the fourth floor. Tung said that he didn’t know much about the women, only that they’d been friends of Mr. Huey and that they’d rented his room for a month before leaving Vietnam several days earlier. What Tung didn’t know, and what Huong had only been able to figure out piece by piece in the days that followed, was that the Chinese women had been traveling under fake passports. When they tried to leave the country, their passports had been confiscated and the women had been arrested. Because the women had been living at Tung’s house, the police turned to Tung.

After a half hour or so, the policemen stood up and invited Tung to join them at their office for further questioning. In the four days since then, Huong had neither seen nor heard from her husband. All she knew was that the police could hold him as long as they liked.

Huong’s face had grown thinner over the course of the last few weeks, and it seemed to be set in a permanent expression of worry. But her magnificent self-containment, that quality that made her seem lazy and indifferent to everything around her, had now evolved into an impulse toward self-preservation. Everything about her suggested competence and determination, and it gave a hint of the kind of internal strength people like Huong must have mustered in order to endure all those years of war. As the Vietnamese themselves liked to point out, they weren’t victims, but survivors.

“Duyen,” she nudged me, “will he take the room?”

I’d done everything I could to market the room as fabulous. I looked at Hugo. “What do you think?” I asked.

Hugo sighed and shrugged, as if defeated. But after a moment he looked over at Huong and smirked. “I like croissants from the French café down the road. And my coffee must be very, very hot,” he said.

Huong must have understood that the news was good. She was already smiling as she waited for my translation.

      Phai only asked me once where Tung had gone, and when I told him the Saigon story, he didn’t question it. Phai’s own life was in such a state of flux that he was in no position to notice inconsistencies in anyone else’s. He’d found a new job on the other side of town, but he left it after only a few weeks because business had been just as bad as it was at his old job. All over the city were signs that Vietnam’s economy had taken off. Modern luxury hotels were filling rooms that cost two hundred dollars a night. Importers did a brisk business in Rémy Martin, Heinz ketchup, and Snickers. A sports boutique around the corner from my house sold tennis racquets and exercise machines, products that could only attract consumers with significant disposable income. International business magazines forecast that Vietnam was fast becoming the next Asian dragon. And still, on a busy day as a mechanic, Phai could only hope to earn 10,000 dong, or roughly a dollar. That was barely enough for a bowl of beef noodle soup, much less a meal in one of the city’s new restaurants. As the economy boomed, Vietnam’s proletariat could only watch in wonder, poor cousins invited to a debutante ball, but not allowed to dance.

Phai wanted to dance. Unlike the farmers out in the fields, who only saw urban luxuries on their communes’ TVs, Phai stood so close to all this glitter that he could feel the warmth of its glow. Since he’d become friends with Tung and, of course, with me, the wealth of the world had come to seem like a possibility to him. Even if fixing motorbikes had earned him a decent wage, which it didn’t, he was sick of dirty hands, torn clothes, and low prestige.

As Phai struggled to change, he and I struggled with the differences between us. The economic gap between the two of us was so enormous that money issues were both extremely awkward and very simple. We had ridiculous races to see who’d be quicker to pay for a two-dollar dinner, although that expense, which set him back a week, wouldn’t amount to the loose change I could find wadded up in a pocket. Still, I usually ended up letting him pay. To assert that I was rich and he was poor, especially in our neighborhood noodle shop, would only humiliate him. And so I let Phai make a show of reaching into the pocket of his pale yellow shirt and pulling out his small stash of bills.

When we were alone, we were more honest and practical. Phai never asked me for anything, but when I offered to help him embark on a new career, he accepted gratefully. That I had money and Phai didn’t seemed like an obvious fact of life between us, intrinsically related to my being born in America and his being born in Vietnam. Late at night, we would sit talking in my room, visualizing all the possibilities for his future. If my financial capabilities seemed miraculous to him, they seemed no less so to me. With a simple investment of a few hundred dollars, I could help him change his life.

In his free time, Phai had been making bronze ornaments and Buddhas at the family kiln across the street from his house. Though he seemed to enjoy it, he considered the craft a sideline,
nothing that could sustain him. For the long term, he thought he should learn English and computer skills. Although he’d learned some English words, he didn’t know any grammar. As for computers, Phai had never used one, but his mechanical skills seemed to promise that he’d pick it up quite quickly. I had a different idea in mind. I imagined him opening a bike rental business to cater to the increasing numbers of foreign tourists visiting Hanoi. To both of us, it seemed reasonable that he embark on all three ventures at the same time. The English would help him communicate with tourists. Computer skills would give him entry into the world of the office or help in the bike-rental business. Using the $400 he got from me, Phai enrolled in an evening computer class, found space to rent near the tourist hotels, and bought six Chinese bikes.

He also found a way to improve his English. Along with the change of wardrobe, the shy motorbike mechanic had metamorphosed into an extrovert. Once, as we rode Tung’s motorbike through the center of Hanoi, we saw a Western tourist pedaling a bike. Phai slowed down alongside him. “Can I help you?” he shouted, over the rush of the traffic. “Where you going?” His English was garbled, and I wondered if the foreigner could understand.

The scruffy, bearded man looked at us. “Hanoi Hilton,” he said, using the nickname the Americans had employed to describe the famous Hoa Lo Prison, where POWs had been held captive during the war.

As we puttered along beside the Westerner, Phai launched into an enthusiastic, if not terribly effective, set of directions, complete with hand signals, that gave the foreigner enough information eventually to know when to turn right. We slowed to watch him pedal off down the street.

“Do you think he’ll find it?” I asked, uncertainly.

“Maybe!” said Phai happily.

I was Phai’s first foreign friend. Hugo was his second. On the evening that I told Phai that a Frenchman had moved into the second-floor room, he raced downstairs to say hello. He returned an hour later, his eyes gleaming and his face bright red from drinking beer. I was lying on the bed with a book in my hands, and he lay down beside me and closed his eyes. “Hugo’s so
vui,
” he said, and then he fell asleep. I had no idea how the two of them had managed to carry on a conversation, but before Hugo had been in the house for two nights, he and Phai had come up with a plan. Twice a week, Phai would teach Hugo Vietnamese and Hugo, the Frenchman, would teach Phai English.

Hugo’s
vui
-ness became obvious to everyone else before me. I might have been the only one able to carry on an extensive conversation with him, but they appreciated him sooner. Huong liked to peek out at him from the kitchen and watch the ritualistic way he drank his morning coffee. Sa thought Hugo was such a funny guy that all he had to do was smile and she would dissolve into giggles.

One night, Huong invited Hugo, me, and Phai to have dinner with her, her mother, Sa, and Viet. After we’d cleared away the dishes. Huong passed around a big bowl of lychee fruit.

We talked for a while about Hugo’s native Bordeaux, which, he explained, was famous for wines. Then the conversation drifted from a discussion of France to one of Vietnam. The Frenchman had only recently arrived here, and Huong and Phai were curious to hear what he thought of their country.

“Ffffft!” Hugo answered immediately. “The country is quite nice. But this government of yours, this Communist government. They talk about helping workers, but they don’t care
about anything except their own power.” He paused and smiled in my direction, waiting for me to translate.

“Are you sure you want me to say that?” I asked. I’d never said anything so critical of the Vietnamese government.

Hugo looked at me and nodded as if his words were a dare. “Yes, I’m sure,” he said.

“What?” Huong asked. Her mother had gone upstairs to lie down. Sa was in the kitchen doing dishes, intermittently peeking out to watch us talk. Among themselves, foreigners criticized the Vietnamese government all the time. I’d come to have plenty of complaints of my own, after finding out that my “friend” Harry was a member of the secret police, after learning that my neighbors were keeping tabs on me, and, worst of all, after Tung was jailed without trial or even the benefit of a lawyer. I had a lot of thoughts about Vietnam’s government, but I would not have expressed them to my Vietnamese friends.

Huong and Phai were obviously curious to hear what Hugo had to say. I thought for a moment. “Well, he doesn’t like Communists,” I finally told them.

Phai and Huong looked at each other, their eyes wide with surprise. They began to chuckle, then their chuckles got louder until laughter filled the room, making Sa look out of the kitchen to see what was going on. It wasn’t an easy laughter, like the reaction to a silly joke. Instead, it sounded shocked, like the inadvertent hilarity when a child utters a string of dirty words. “He doesn’t like the Communists,” Huong said, between breaths. Her eyes were glowing.