The House on Dream Street (32 page)

She smiled, surprised that she could understand what I said. “We’re emigrating to London,” she answered. “I’ve got a son there.”

It took a while for me to tell her how old I was, that I wasn’t married yet, and that I’d been living in Hanoi, studying Vietnamese and teaching English. While I answered her questions, she listened carefully, nodding as I spoke. Then, when I’d finished, a look of worry crossed her face. “Miss, can you tell me something?” she asked. “Do you think we’ll like London?”

I thought of the London I knew, the rows and rows of flats, crowded subways, pubs, closed doors. I hadn’t been there for years, but I was sure of one thing about the place. This old woman wouldn’t spend her days there in the manner of so many Hanoi retirees, sitting on her doorstep and chatting with her neighbors. At her age, she’d probably never learn English. And, even surrounded by family, she’d be lonely. I thought of the millions of Vietnamese living in diaspora, growing old far from home. It seemed a tragedy to spend one’s life in exile, but it was perhaps a greater tragedy, still, to die there.

She was looking at me expectantly, waiting for an answer. “London’s a beautiful city,” I finally said. “Your family is there, so I think you’ll be happy.”

The agent announced that my row was boarding, so I said good-bye to the old woman and got in line. Outside the window,
I could just make out the smooth tail of the jet and, beyond that, the desolate tarmac of an airport that didn’t see more than a dozen planes a day. Just past the tarmac, the rice fields began, stretching toward Ba Vi Mountain.

I was already in my seat when I saw the old grandmother standing at the head of the aisle, scanning the rows of seats in front of her, her eyes squinting in confusion. A flight attendant approached her from behind and pointed down the aisle toward some point beyond where I was sitting. The old woman nodded and hurried forward. Just as she was about to walk by my seat, she noticed me. She grabbed my hand, gave it a quick squeeze, and then disappeared down the aisle.

11. Shifting Positions

I
DIDN’T LAST A YEAR AWAY
from Vietnam. In fact, I’d only been in the States for two months when I began to think about going back again. I felt like someone who’d spent a huge amount of energy learning how to plant a garden, then abandoned the project just after I’d gotten the soil ready for planting. I’d never settled down there and now, back in the States, I couldn’t settle back into my old life, either. Though I’d returned to my house in San Francisco and started working as a journalist again, I was distracted. My friends kept asking me about my “trip,” but my time in Vietnam hadn’t felt like a trip, even though I’d never allowed it to be real life, either. I had a sense that I was floating through my life, baffled over where to land. On the night before my birthday, I went to my sister’s house, looking for some company, then proceeded to break down in tears before she even had a chance to open the door. Even if I was thirty, over the hill, and destined to be pestered about it, I wanted to be in Hanoi again. I’d left Hanoi in early September of 1992. By July of 1993, I was back.

No one met me at the airport. Last time, I’d taken a public
bus that dropped me off at the city center, and then a cyclo to Tra’s house, proving to myself that I could handle it. Today, I could have hitchhiked into the city on the back of a motorbike if I’d set my mind to it. But why bother? For a couple of dollars, a tourist minivan would take me to my front door.

I climbed into the front seat of the minivan, beside the driver. A couple of German tourists hauled their backpacks into the rear seats and we drove away. It was mid-July and the air was a thick soup. At least that hadn’t changed. I’d been afraid that something would happen to Hanoi that would make it either incomprehensible or unappealing to me now. Maybe I’d find a skyscraper in the spot where my favorite noodle shop used to be. Maybe too many cars would clog the roads and I’d find myself terrified, all over again, to ride a bike. Maybe, now that Vietnam had become the tourist destination of choice among wealthy Europeans, my white face would attract hordes of vendors and children hoping to sell me postcards. Maybe I simply wouldn’t like it here anymore. Outside the dirty windows of the van, though, Vietnam looked pretty much the same. The just-planted rice fields lay baking in the midsummer sun. Young men drove by too fast on their Hondas. Ramshackle roadside restaurants advertised their menus with hand-painted signs. Vietnam looked familiar, like a friend who hadn’t changed much.

I’d wanted to use this ride into the city to acclimate myself to being back. I needed time to focus on the sight of children playing flip-flop toss in their dusty front yards, on the men hauling baskets of live chicks on the backs of their bikes, on the musical cadences of Vietnamese, which was now blaring out of the tinny minivan radio. When I’d spoken to Huong on the phone from the States, I told her I didn’t know when my plane would arrive. “Sometime in the afternoon,” I’d said vaguely.

Arriving back in Vietnam was overwhelming enough, but I
felt very nervous about seeing Phai. When, a few weeks after I first returned to the States, I opened my mailbox and found a letter from him, I had stood for a long time, trembling, marveling over the fact that I was holding in my hand something he had so recently touched. It had seemed magical then, a rare jewel my letter carrier had not even known she was delivering. Phai and I wrote to each other regularly after that. We even had a few teary conversations on the phone.

Week by week, though, I became increasingly convinced that our relationship was impossible. One night, not long after I’d returned from Vietnam, I went to a party full of journalists. As I wandered through the rooms, sipping wine, eating peanuts, and trying to remember how to schmooze, I imagined what it would have been like if Phai had been at this party with me. While I chatted with a friend about the difficulty of sending stories by modem from Asia, I pictured him sitting alone on the couch across the room, making an effort to smile every time I glanced in his direction. Later, he would follow me into the kitchen and stand at my elbow while I listened to a litany of complaints about a magazine editor who didn’t return phone calls. Phai wouldn’t have understood a word of it. Even if the conversation had been in Vietnamese, he would not have understood much more. He was not an intellectual, or even a professional in the “white collar” sense of the word. The San Francisco journalists would regard him as one more curious souvenir I’d brought back from Asia. Phai would sit on the couch, studying the gestures, the way people laughed, as if partygoing in America were a test and he was destined to fail it. The thought of him in that context made me feel sorry for him in a way I didn’t want to feel. That night, driving home, I felt something like relief—relief that he had not been at that party with me, relief that he was still in Vietnam.

Writing letters to Phai, and reading his letters, came to mean a tiresome afternoon with the dictionary. My Vietnamese grew labored, and I couldn’t remember how to spell. And it wasn’t just that my language skills had deteriorated. The simplest details of life didn’t translate. Normal activities like “I drove out to Berkeley to see the house my friends just bought” or “My dad’s flying in for the weekend” or “We ordered out for pizza” required paragraphs of explanation that I was too lazy to provide. Just as our conversations in Hanoi had become dull from the gaps in our ability to express ourselves, so, too, my letters grew generic and vague. “I’m seeing my friends and family often,” I would write. “It’s very
vui
here.” At the same time, my feelings for Phai were growing generic and vague as well. To write “I miss you” or “I love you” required conjuring a feeling that would only last the time it took to write it down. These feelings could be vivid and intense, but I caught them like beautiful, slippery fish. Within moments, they wriggled free and disappeared.

As the months passed, I still held Phai’s letters for long moments before opening them, but it was no longer to savor the fact that his fingers had touched them. Now, I needed time to make him real again, to connect the writing on the page to the photograph on my desk and then, with more difficulty, to the actual person back in Hanoi. Sometimes, I couldn’t even conjure his face, and I had to let the return address invoke an image of that house by the Red River, of that courtyard where a young man would someday partition off a private room for himself and a wife. With an uncomfortable sense of having escaped, I opened Phai’s letters and conscientiously read descriptions of the struggling bicycle-rental business, the nasty weather, his love for me. I was always aware of the care he had taken to write, using a clear script and simple vocabulary to make sure I could understand every word. But after a while, I stopped bothering to keep a dictionary
next to me. I grew impatient to finish. If I didn’t know a word or two, I’d guess.

Meanwhile, my friends had never understood what had drawn me to Phai to begin with. Then, as those feelings began to wane, to admit the change seemed to mean admitting that he had never meant much from the start. Even my closest friends saw him as little more than the sum of the adjectives I’d used to describe him: gentle, poor, loving, beautiful, uneducated, agile, dark, thin, a genius with a roll of duct tape or a wrench.

All of this change in my feelings for Phai caused me to reevaluate my life in Hanoi. During the time when I had fallen in love with him, I sometimes wondered if my happiness there had more to do with him or the city. Those long afternoons in the living room with Huong seemed mostly focused around the possibility of catching a glimpse of Phai. I’d come to think that maybe I was faking it, acting like I really cared about bike rides across the city or conversations with Huong when I was actually just structuring my life around opportunities to see him. But now, it was the thought of those bike rides, those placid afternoons with Huong—and not the prospect of seeing Phai—that made me desperate to return. The thing I missed most about Vietnam was not the man I’d loved there, but the life I’d lived.

Some things, of course, had changed. The Vietnamese authorities had finally released Tung from jail about six weeks after I went back to the States, three months after they arrested him. I’d spoken to him on the phone a couple of times from San Francisco, but hadn’t been able to get much out of him. I knew that the family was still grappling with Mr. Huey’s $5,000 phone bill, but Tung didn’t want to discuss such things. He was more interested in telling me that Hugo had moved to Thailand and that they’d found a new tenant, an Australian named Max who loved to drink beer. Huong was a bit more forthcoming about the effects
of Tung’s incarceration, but she was uncharacteristically positive, assuring me that her husband was exactly the same, only thinner. It sounded, surprisingly, like things had returned to normal, and I felt relieved, not just for their family, but also for myself. I didn’t just want my old room; I wanted my old life back. When I heard that Max the Australian had gone home to Sydney, I was pleased. My old life did not include another native English speaker living in the house.

The minivan crossed the Thang Long Bridge, and within a few minutes Hanoi surrounded us. Until now, we’d sped at a fairly brisk pace through rice fields and small suburban centers, but once we entered the more congested web of city streets, we stopped moving altogether. Trapped in a line of cars and trucks, we became as immobile as the shops and houses along the road. Bikes and motorbikes squeezed past us without stopping. We were stuck.

The cool air coming through the vents smelled dank and metallic, but when I tried to roll down a window, the driver motioned for me to stop. I glanced at his wristwatch. I’d been in Vietnam for two and a half hours, one of which I’d spent standing in a line with my passport and one of which I’d spent sitting in this minivan, failing to get home. On the street, a woman stepped out of her house, squatted in front of a meat vendor, picked through the slabs of flesh, bargained energetically, and carried her purchase back inside, all before we managed to move another inch down the road.

I leaned back against the seat of the van and listened to the guttural conversation of the Germans in the backseat. Though I couldn’t understand what they were saying, I caught the familiar sounds of “Green Bamboo,” “Especen,” and “Darling Café,” Hanoi’s most well known hubs for low-budget travelers. For a moment, I felt envious. How easy it would be to rent a room in
one of those places, hang a camera around my neck, and wander through the city anonymously. There would be nothing awkward in that.

The minivan began to move again, then stop, then start. After another fifteen minutes, we turned down Dream Street and approached my house, which was no longer the tallest on the block. Now, I couldn’t even see the strange nautical trellis that had seemed so noteworthy a year and a half before.

The muscles in my stomach tightened. Out in front of my house, wearing a pale yellow shirt and crisp white pants, was Phai, pacing back and forth.

      Our hug lasted a quarter of a second before I pulled away and let my hand drop from his clenched fingers. He looked exactly the same. His hair was short on the sides and long on top, a cut that had been stylish even before he had the clothes to match. His body was lithe, his skin smooth and coppery, his smile warm, his eyes wide, his expression unprotected.