The House on Dream Street (43 page)

This time, I was determined to make the meal myself. Rather than looking uncertainly around the kitchen, I started my preparations purposefully, chopping garlic, then sautéing it with the anchovies in olive oil, explaining every step to Huong as if I were Julia Child.

“That’s weird,” Huong told me, eyeing the pan full of garlic and salted fish. A few minutes later, when I dumped an entire jar of olives into the concoction on the stove, she gasped, then shook her head. “Well,” she told me, “we can always go out for noodle soup.”

Huong lurked in the doorway the whole time I was in the kitchen, watching me cook. I only had to glance around the
room and she would jump to find me exactly the right knife. As soon as my fingers touched the chili sauce, she hurriedly opened it and helped me measure out a spoonful. She might have been doubtful of my ability to cook, but she was also determined to make sure I didn’t flop.

By the time dinner was ready, Huong was heavily invested in the meal’s success. While Tung set the table and opened his cache of Johnnie Walker for us to drink, she stood in front of the kitchen shelves, trying to figure out how to make Vietnamese dishware work for an Italian dinner. Although both cultures eat noodles, it was actually quite an awkward fit. Vietnamese rice-based noodles are light, and slurped, with the help of chopsticks, out of deep bowls. Italian pasta, on the other hand, is heavy, and eaten in small quantities out of shallow bowls. If we gave each person enough pasta to fit in a Vietnamese noodle bowl, we’d either end up throwing away a lot of uneaten pasta, or we’d all get sick. In the end, we abandoned the noodle bowl idea and decided to eat out of tiny rice bowls.

Tung, who’d eaten Italian before, was almost finished with his first bowl before Huong even started. She ladled a small spoonful of sauce over her pasta, explaining, “I don’t want to put too much on it. If I don’t like this, I’m going to take the noodles into the kitchen and stir fry the whole thing.” Then, she took a bite. I sat without moving, watching her chew, then swallow. She paused for a long time, like a judge contemplating the texture of pie at the state fair. Then she looked at me and shrugged. “Not bad,” she said.

Tung was already having thirds. Viet was ladling sauce into his bowl and drinking it straight. Ly held a piece of garlic bread in her hand, tearing off tiny pieces and nibbling on them, as if she wanted to eat it slow and savor it. But it was Huong who pleased
me most. “Not bad” was the only verbal compliment she offered, but she ate the sauce like soup, with a spoon. I was more pleased than I cared to admit.

      By early February, I had lived in Hanoi for over a year altogether. I’d experienced every season, from the coldest days of winter to the most sweltering summer heat. I’d witnessed all the holidays, from International Women’s Day and Teacher’s Day to the Mid-Autumn Festival and the birthday of Ho Chi Minh. I’d experienced every holiday—that is, except for Tet. Most Americans hear the word “Tet” and immediately combine it with “Offensive.” But for Vietnamese, the word conjured entirely different ideas. Tet, Vietnam’s Lunar New Year, was the most important time on the Vietnamese calendar. For Vietnamese, it was like Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and everybody’s birthday combined.

I decided to stay in Hanoi through Tet and then return to the States. Certainly, Todd had a good deal to do with the comparative ease with which I decided to go home. But, more than that, after living for more than a year in Vietnam, and over a span of two, I finally had confidence in the durability of my relationship with this country, and with the strength of my friendships here. When Huong talked about me coming back to visit her again when we were old, I no longer worried that I would never see her again. I fully expected to grow old with her, even if the gaps between my visits lasted years. Huong was like a family member who lived far away, whom I wouldn’t see very often, but with whom I managed to feel just as close, and happy, when we did.

Now that Tet was fast approaching, everyone I knew, and even people I didn’t know—shopkeepers, friends of friends,
the guy who fixed my bike—asked the question that seemed foremost in all their minds: “
Ăn Tết Việt Nam?
” Translated literally, it meant, “Are you going to eat Vietnamese Tet?” but, more roughly, they were anxious to find out if I was going to celebrate Tet here. For Vietnamese, Tet was so fundamental that they seemed to take it as a sign of my commitment to their country.

It did take commitment, really, to spend a Tet in Vietnam. It might have been the
vui
-est holiday of them all, to Vietnamese, but many foreigners considered it a chore. After all, we didn’t have the spiritual and traditional connections to it that would make all the more grueling aspects of the holiday worthwhile. For one thing, when people talked of “eating Tet in Viet Nam,” they meant it. According to an old Vietnamese adage, “You can go hungry even on the anniversary of your father’s death, but you must be full for the three days of Tet.” Just as revelers at Mardi Gras consider it their duty to drink, in a country as familiar with hunger as Vietnam, tradition demanded that people stuff themselves at Tet. The eating was intimately connected with the other central activity of Tet, going from house to house to “
chúc Tết
”—wish one another a happy New Year. More and more people were getting lazy and deciding to
chúc Tết
 by phone these days, but most people still spent the holiday visiting—and eating. A host would feel insulted if the guest didn’t eat something, and though the eating could be as inconsequential as a couple of pieces of candy sampled from the Tet candy dish, just as often it involved sitting down to a feast. Every household I visited had virtually the same menu: five different varieties of fresh fruit, spring rolls, pork sausage, pork-stuffed mushrooms in broth, and
bánh chưng,
a lard- and egg-filled steamed rice cake. Dense and tasteless,
bánh chưng
was the fruitcake of Tet. Vietnamese liked to have it around, but they
wouldn’t necessarily eat it. They ate everything else, though. American Thanksgiving was like a midnight snack compared to Tet. Rather than one enormous Thursday afternoon feast, Vietnamese would eat this meal twice, sometimes three times a day for at least three days. Vietnamese believed that the way you spent the days of Tet would set the tone of the entire year. Eating a lot at Tet was a way to help insure that you’d have plenty to eat for the next twelve months as well.

Many foreigners who lived in Hanoi celebrated Tet by leaving the country. Why not avoid the
chúc
Tết
duties, and the heavy eating, by spending the Vietnamese New Year lounging on a beach in Thailand? The weather was getting colder just as the Vietnamese holiday season erupted in full force, and I could certainly understand the attractions of the beach. But I’d been hearing about Tet for two years. I wasn’t going to miss it.

“You can never understand Vietnam,” Yen told me, “unless you’ve experienced Tet.” She began to point out things I never would have noticed, things that, for someone who’d grown up in Hanoi, were unmistakable signs of Tet’s approach. The stores selling children’s clothes, for example, were crowded with parents buying new outfits for their sons and daughters. And sunflower seeds had become, by the end of January, nearly as omnipresent as rice. Vietnamese munched seeds all year, but now they began to consume as if the
crack-crack-crack
of teeth on seeds marked some kind of drumroll for the season. Seeds did, I saw now, demand conviviality. No one sat alone in a room munching seeds. No one ate them for dinner. Seeds were sitting-around-with-friends snacks,
chúc Tết
 snacks. In my earliest attempts at Vietnamese, I’d learned a verb for this sort of activity:
ăn nhậu lai rai,
which meant to eat and drink in a leisurely manner, keeping the mouth and fingers happy, while the mind is busy socializing. I thought I’d known what
ăn nhậu lai rai
meant,
but it wasn’t until I watched Tung and three of his friends sit in our living room one afternoon and consume an entire kilo of sunflower seeds that I finally began to understand the true meaning of the term.

Other signs of the approaching New Year began to appear as well. According to tradition, in the days before Tet, people bring delicacies to others they want to impress. To keep up with the demand for these items, temporary specialty shops opened all over town, their bright red banners wishing everyone a happy Tet and proclaiming the delectability of their particular products. Yen and I went shopping at one of the biggest markets, where shopkeepers stood in front of dozens of glass jars full of sugar-coated dried fruits, the holiday treats known as
mút.
A saleswoman weighed out half a kilo of apricot
mút
for Yen to give to her aunt, a mixture of cherry and ginger
mút
for her mother, and tomato
mút
she’d give to her favorite professor from the university. All around us, shoppers were stocking up on jars of imported pickles, apricot wine, Russian vodka, dried sausages, and tins of golden Danish sugar cookies. In a country where most diets were limited to whatever local farms and factories produced, a jar of French mustard meant real luxury and could serve as the perfect holiday gift. Foods that foreigners bought in Hanoi all year were now being swept up by the locals.

Vendors began to appear on the city streets selling miniature orange trees and
hoa đào,
the small blossoming peach trees that were as much a requisite part of Tet as Christmas trees at Christmas. The vendors roamed the city with trees slung to the frames of their bikes, and prospective buyers checked the trees carefully, looking for just the right mix of branch, bud, and flower. One afternoon, I took Viet to the Tet flower market, in the center of the city’s Old Quarter. With Viet balanced on the back of my bike, I rode right into the center of the market, stopping in what seemed
like a forest of trees. The tree-sellers were bundled up against the winter cold, and as the wind picked up, I buttoned all the buttons on Viet’s coat. The lacy pink veil of peach blossoms couldn’t keep out the chill, but it promised the coming of spring.

Viet, who normally had a hard time interrupting his play long enough to eat or go to the bathroom, was motionless now. “It’s beautiful,” he whispered. Then he put his face into a mass of blossoms and let the soft petals touch his skin.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what Yen had told me about the days of Tet setting the stage for the entire year. If your Tet was happy, she’d told me, you’d have a happy year. If it was sad, you’d have a sad one. Even Tung and Huong took this concept very seriously, though they were not at all religious. They had a little ancestral altar, but they often seemed to forget that it was there. As Tet approached, though, they both sprang into action. Huong cut Viet’s hair and bought new outfits for both him and the baby. Tung had the Dream washed and buffed until it glistened as much as anything could glisten on those sunless winter days. Ly stood on a ladder and pulled year-old spiderwebs off the ceiling with the handle of a broom. One afternoon, a few days before New Year’s, Tung brought home a peach tree and moved the TV out of the way so that the plant would occupy the most prominent position in our house.

Hanoi’s wealthy weren’t the only ones preparing. The street children who lived on Cam Chi Street, where I ate noodle soup, were getting ready as well. All year, they slept in a half-hidden corner of the alley; at first glance, their bodies, curled around one another, looked like piles of discarded rags. Over the past few months, I had gotten to know a few of them. One afternoon, I invited an adolescent girl and a boy of about ten to eat with me. They were shy, and, at first, they couldn’t even look at me. Only after the food arrived, and we all had something to
focus on, did they begin to relax. I asked them about their lives. Both had left home in the countryside because their families were too poor to take care of them. They lived in Hanoi and returned home once a year, at Tet, bringing with them whatever money they’d been able to save over the past twelve months. It seemed ironic that homeless children sleeping on the streets of the city would end up being breadwinners for their families back home, but that’s how the economy was shaping up in Vietnam. They could earn more than farmers out in the countryside. The girl had managed to save ten thousand dong, about ten dollars. The boy, who was younger, cuter, and therefore more successful at begging, had earned fifteen. They would have had more, they told me, but they’d both been robbed. They explained all this to me as if they were telling me what grades they got in school, and not describing the circumstances of urban homelessness. We were just three people having lunch together who happened to be discussing poverty. After lunch, I gave them some money, but, later, after I’d gone home, I decided to give them more. By the time I went back to the food stall alley, however, all of the street children were gone. They’d already returned to the countryside.

By then, the firecrackers were beginning to explode. Children treated them as toys and shot them like missiles into the rush-hour traffic. Foreigners were easy targets, a fact that added a whole new challenge to my rides through the city. The Vietnamese authorities had begun to criticize firecrackers as a social problem, and thus, in the fluid way that official opinion came to dominate the pages of the press, newspapers ran prominent stories about fireworks-related deaths. In one incident I heard about, a bus exploded because a reveler had set off a firecracker inside it. By the next year, in fact, the government, citing danger and expense, would ban firecrackers entirely, which meant that
my first Tet was the last explosive one in Vietnam. For now, though, Hanoians were still setting them off with abandon.