The House on Dream Street (40 page)

My first impulse was to say no. I’d been denying that Todd was a boyfriend to myself for so long that I could certainly deny it to Phai a little longer. But he deserved frankness. “Who told you?” I asked.

Huong, predictably, had taken matters into her own hands, telling Phai everything she knew, and then some. She’d even said that Todd and I had been planning this visit for months.

“That’s not true,” I said. I hadn’t been entirely truthful with Phai, but I hadn’t lied to him, either.

There must have been something desperate in my voice, because Phai smiled at me with such warmth that I felt ashamed at my efforts to protect myself at his expense. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s good. That’s what you want. He’ll make you happy.” He didn’t look upset. He looked relieved.

Phai’s worry, I saw now, was not so much that I’d met someone new in the States, but that I would meet someone new in Vietnam. I’d always told him, truthfully, that I felt the cultural differences between us were too great for us to be happy together forever. Now I saw how deeply Phai wanted to believe that.

“Do you think you’ll marry him?” Phai asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Though Phai didn’t look upset, I must have, because he said to me, very gently, “This is good. You’ll be happy with him,” as if it were me, not him, who needed consolation. I only felt worse. No matter how much I ever gave him, Phai always wanted to give me more.

He left a few minutes later. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to avoid thinking about what a jerk I’d been. I might have ruminated over it all evening, had something not come up that took my mind off my own problems. About six o’clock, Ly came by the house to pick up a bag of clothes for Tung and Huong. The baby, she told me, was running a high fever and showed signs of lung infection. He was back in the hospital.

13. Firecrackers on Dream Street

T
HE MATERNITY HOSPITAL WHERE
H
UONG
had delivered her baby had been rudimentary and rather run-down, but it came to seem positively high-tech in comparison to the pediatric hospital where I visited the baby the next morning. Tung brought me with him on his motorbike, which we parked in a lot at one side of an empty courtyard covered in weeds and rubble. Simply negotiating the cracked and broken sidewalk that led into the building felt like crossing a rocky river. The building was small and unadorned, the kind of ugly, no-nonsense structure that went up quickly and cheaply in the Socialist bloc. Inside, the floors were covered with dust, the windows cracked or missing panes. In the empty hallways, the sounds of coughing, machinery, and crying babies swept along the corridors, bouncing back and forth against the hard, bare walls.

We didn’t see anybody until we’d walked down one corridor, through a set of doors, around a corner, up another hall, and then into a large room filled with ten wooden mat-covered beds, none of which was wider than a narrow cot. Two or three people sat on each bed. Another couple of people squatted on the spaces on
the floor between the beds. Every other available space was taken up by suitcases, water bottles, dirty dishes, blankets, pillows, newspapers, and plastic bags full of dry rice, oranges, and loaves of bread. The place reminded me of a cramped, crowded compartment on a Vietnamese passenger train, where whole families and piles of belongings shared the narrow confines of a single berth. Babies were everywhere, sleeping, crying, coughing, nursing, or lying on tiny specks of blanket, staring up at the spiderwebs that stretched like lace across the ceiling. No one spoke loudly, but the simple presence of so many people made the room throb with noise.

Huong was sitting up on a bed near the far end of the room, her back against the wall, the baby, wrapped in a white blanket, sleeping in her arms. Ly sat cross-legged at the bottom of the bed, paging through the morning paper. When Tung and I appeared, Ly scooted over on the bed, making room for me to sit down. I sat closest to Huong and looked down at the baby. His skin was a rosy pink, but his breaths were thick and wheezy, like the slurpy sound of the last drops of liquid drawn up through a straw.

“How is he?” I asked.

Huong shrugged. They’d had a hard night, she said. The baby’s lungs were congested, and he was so exhausted from the simple effort of breathing that he didn’t even have energy to cry. He’d stayed awake the entire night, lying in Huong’s arms, desperately wheezing. Because he was breathing out of his mouth, he couldn’t nurse, and they’d brought him to the hospital because they were afraid he’d become dehydrated. The doctors had immediately put him on antibiotics, a series of injections that had made him scream in panic. When he finally slept, the sound of other babies screaming inevitably woke him up again.

Huong’s face was pale and her eyes looked old and tired. “Are you okay?” I asked.

She reached over, picked up a cup of water that was sitting next to her on the bed, and took a sip. “This is normal,” she said. “The same thing happened with Viet. Only with Viet it was even worse.” She spoke matter-of-factly, as if sojourns in the hospital were part of every woman’s childbearing experience.

Tung was squatting on the floor, unpacking a metal canister filled with hot noodle soup. Huong gingerly handed Ly the sleeping baby, then picked up the soup and some chopsticks and began to eat. Tung pulled some oranges and hard-boiled eggs out of a plastic bag and set them on the bed. “We’re supposed to see the doctor again in a few minutes,” he said.

Huong nodded. The two of them went through the simple tasks in front of them with serious concentration, as if they weren’t willing to think beyond whatever required attention at that particular moment. Huong silently ate her breakfast. Ly held the baby on her lap, swaying back and forth. I looked around the room. A few men wore jeans like Tung’s. A few women had on gold bracelets and sported stylish haircuts, but almost everyone else wore the simple garments of the countryside: faded cotton pants, shirts with patches on them, plastic sandals. To our right, a woman was dozing, her body curled into a ball at the top of the bed. Beside her, a little boy was singing to an infant who lay motionless on the bed, staring at the wall. At the other end of the bed, three runny-nosed little girls played peekaboo with an old pink shirt. To our left, a young girl was holding a medicine dropper full of red liquid over the mouth of a sallow-skinned baby. A teenage boy sat next to her, talking her through the procedure, holding the baby’s legs to keep them from thrashing.

In comparison to these two infants, Huong’s son, with his pink skin and plump body, looked fairly healthy. Still, every few minutes loud coughs wracked his tiny body, forcing his parents to stop what they were doing and stare at him in silent agony. After one such moment, Huong turned to me. “Last night a baby died in here,” she said. The family had come from a village very far away in the countryside and by the time they got to the hospital, the baby was already nearly dead. The family stayed at the hospital for two days, just waiting for the infant to die.

“What was the problem?” I asked.

Huong shrugged. “A cough,” she said, reaching over to take her own infant away from Ly. Feeling his body pass from one pair of hands to another, the baby’s eyelids opened slightly, then fluttered closed again. His open mouth rounded into a perfect circle and he drifted back to sleep. His breath softened into the purring of a cat. Huong stared down at him, her fingers gently smoothing his dark hair down across his forehead. I tried to imagine how I would feel holding my sick child in my arms, helpless to do anything to cure him or even to relieve his pain. Had Huong and Tung lived in a more affluent country, they would have had access to advanced medical technology. The baby from the countryside might have survived, had it lived in the States. Here was something worse than losing a child, I realized: losing a child and knowing that it didn’t have to happen. But maybe those parents didn’t know that health care could be more effective somewhere else.

The teenage boy on the bed next to ours asked Huong something, then motioned in my direction. I was so used to being pointed at and discussed that I didn’t even pay attention until Huong began to laugh. I looked at her.

“He thinks you want to adopt a baby,” she said.

It was hard to tell if he was asking out of curiosity, or if he was interested in finding a home for his child. I looked at him and shook my head. Of course, I had no intention of doing such a thing, but I looked much more closely at the baby on the bed beside us. It was a scrawny little thing, only a few days old, but I had seen it kicking and screaming with an energy that belied its health and age. Calm now, it let out a sigh, then turned its head and, from beneath a shag of jet black hair, looked in my direction. My stomach clinched. I could imagine signing some papers and, in the not-too-distant future, having that baby lying on my bed back on Dream Street, then sleeping in my lap on an airplane headed to the States. Years from now, I’d tell my daughter—or son?—about that first moment when our eyes had met in that crowded hospital in Hanoi. The child would be big by then, an American Vietnamese, still scrawny and tough. A survivor. A kid in Adidas sneakers and Gap jeans, an Asian Jew who only knew what I could teach about Vietnam. Destiny, I would tell my child, had drawn us together.

The teenage father was still looking at me, as if he expected more. I knew what to say but I couldn’t say it. Finally, Huong said it for me. “She’s my friend,” she said. “She’s not even married yet.”

Huong and the baby stayed in the hospital for three days before going home. A week later, they were back in the hospital for another two days, with another lung infection. Whenever I wanted to visit, I had to ask Ly where they were that day—at Huong’s parent’s house, or back in the hospital. The baby never seemed desperately ill, but he never seemed healthy, either. Finally, it was age that saved him. As he grew, his lungs got stronger. When he was a week away from his two month birthday, he left the hospital for the last time. And so, Tung and Huong were finally ready to make the decision they’d been
putting off all these weeks. They’d give their son a name. Although they’d claimed they’d postponed the choice because they couldn’t agree on what to call him, I suspected another reason as well.

Names are important in Vietnam. Introducing themselves to foreigners, English-speaking Vietnamese will often translate the meaning of their names. “I’m Orchid (Lan),” one might say. Or “Shining Jade (Ngoc Minh)” or “Spring Rice (Lua Xuan).” Some names sounded like poetry. I knew three brothers named “Mountain (Son),” “River (Giang),” and “Ocean (Hai).” I had a friend named “Moon Lute (Nguyet Cam)” in honor of a traditional Vietnamese stringed instrument. Another couple had named their three boys, all born during the years of the American War, Linh (after Abe Lincoln), Red (for the Communists), and Binh (which means “peaceful”). Binh must have been a popular name during the years of war, because I knew a lot of Binhs who were born at that time. When I told people that “Dana” doesn’t mean anything in English, they were often baffled. If it doesn’t have a meaning, they would ask, then why bother?

In Vietnam, names also carry a powerful force. Tradition claims that evil spirits like to steal babies, particularly the attractive ones. In the countryside, where old customs linger longer, new parents would go to lengths to make their children seem unappealing. They would never compliment their newborns. Instead, they’d call them “ugly,” or “rat,” or even “shit,” in order to trick the spirits into staying away. Ironically, even such hideous names would come to sound like the sweetest of endearments when they were uttered by adoring parents. Urban Vietnamese, like Tung and Huong, liked to scoff at superstitions, but even they would cringe when I forgot the custom and cooed over how beautiful the baby was. “
Trọm vía,
” they’d hiss, reminding me to say that phrase before the compliment. As one friend later translated
it,
trọm vía,
meant “to sneakily talk behind a spirit”—in other words, to keep evil away. Although Tung and Huong claimed that it was indecision that made them wait so long to name the baby, it seemed to me that superstition and ancient tradition had more to do with it than they cared to admit. The supposedly irrational concern over “evil spirits” actually spoke to very real, and widespread, dangers that newborns in Vietnam had faced forever: poor hygiene, inadequate nutrition, and lack of medical care. Because infant mortality was such a risk, tradition dictated that only close family members would visit a new baby before its one-month birthday, the time at which its chance of survival was thought to be more secure and the moment at which it could be brought into society and openly named. In that context, Tung and Huong’s so-called indecision made more sense. Rationally, they probably knew that their child’s health would not be affected by whether or not they named it. But, in the same way that I avoid walking under ladders, they refused to take any chances.

Once the baby finally came home from the hospital for the last time, his parents settled on a name quite easily. They’d call him “Đức.” It was a common name among Vietnamese, meaning “virtue” or “righteousness,” but it also had a special meaning for Tung. “
Đức
” was the Vietnamese word for “Germany.” Now Tung and Huong had a Viet and a Duc. A Vietnam and a Germany.

      Hanoi had changed quite a bit since my first visit back in 1990. These days, there were so many Dreams on the streets that it seemed like only the poor people rode bicycles. Old buildings had been torn down, and new office buildings and hotels were rising in their places. In a city where it had once been difficult to find anything to eat other than rice and noodle
soup, you could now dine, if you had the money, on pizza and pasta. French wines were sold in the Hang Da Market. Tung could buy his own Levi’s right near our house.