The House on Dream Street (6 page)

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T
HOSE FIRST FEW WEEKS IN
H
ANOI
were blank days. I couldn’t get used to the weather. Absent of snow or frost, the only thing that told me it was winter was the chill that would enter my body with the force of a blizzard. This place was hardly the sweaty tropics I’d seen in
Platoon.
I was freezing. Every morning, I’d force myself out of bed, look out the window at the concrete wall of sky, and contemplate another faceless day. San Francisco mornings often had that same chalky grayness to them, but by noon the fog would lift, revealing a brilliant sun. In Hanoi, I had to remind myself that the sun existed. Whenever I had a chance, I’d take a long ride through the city. I’d wrap myself in a T-shirt, sweatshirt, sweater, and huge scarf and then pull my bike out the front door and into the street. Then I’d summon my courage and launch myself one more time into the flood of traffic. After a while, I could ride without staring straight in front of me, teeth clenched, knuckles turning white with their grip on the handlebars. If I sneezed while I pedaled, I no longer expected to disappear beneath the wheels of oncoming traffic.

I spent a lot of time thinking over a conversation I’d had with an American teacher who’d been living in Hanoi for the past two years. Jack had come to Hanoi as one of the first three teachers—two men and a woman—sent to Vietnam by the New York–based organization Volunteers Around the World. After two years here, he spoke excellent Vietnamese and could use the latest slang to flirt with the women and banter with the men. He walked down the crowded Hanoi streets like an American politician—shaking hands, cooing over babies, and pulling crabby grandmothers off their little wooden stools to make them dance with him. If I had any lingering doubts that an American could be accepted here, Jack dispelled them. And he wasn’t the only American to have done well for himself in Hanoi. The other man from Volunteers Around the World had slid into Hanoi life as easily as Jack had. The woman, however, had problems. “Here was this young, pretty American woman walking down the street,” Jack had told me. “People couldn’t take their eyes off her. They’d tease her, try to touch her, follow her. I don’t think they were physically threatening, but they wouldn’t leave her alone, either.”

Jack was carrying me home from dinner on his little Honda 250cc. With the wind slamming against my face, I clutched the leather seat with both hands, trying to hang on and listen to his story at the same time. “Laura had a hard time from the beginning,” Jack yelled back through the sputtering of the engine. “She couldn’t stand all the attention every time she walked outside. She didn’t feel safe. She didn’t make friends. She wouldn’t do anything but go to school to teach her classes. Then she even stopped doing that. After a while, she refused to leave her room. She just sat there, all alone, and we had to bring her food or she wouldn’t eat. Then one day, she just packed her bags and left.” Jack laughed a little, not because the story was funny, but because
he found it so perplexing. I laughed, too, as if I couldn’t believe anyone could be scared away like that. The truth, though, was that I understood completely. All those eyes could make you crazy.

And so I pushed myself to leave the house, to ride that bike, to become a part of the world here. I discovered lakes I’d never seen before, and instead of pedaling nervously past them, I made myself pull up to park benches, get off, and allow the curious passersby to crowd around me and look. I rode past schoolyards full of uniformed children yelling chants and doing jumping jacks, and when they waved at me through the gaps in the fence, I waved right back. I hated the men who slowed their motorbikes down beside me to stare. I hated the women who tried to grab me in the market, as if by doing so they could force me to buy. But most of all, I hated the specter of the American teacher, so traumatized by all this unwanted attention that she had had to escape.

Sometimes, I was so worn down by the city that I hid in my room for entire days. But, despite those low points, I became convinced that I would stay here. All I had to do was leave the house in order to remind myself of how deeply I wanted to be here, no matter how much the city could overwhelm me. Hanoi was still so new to me that every day brought fresh discoveries. I had arrived not long after the Lunar New Year celebrations of Tet, which also marked the beginning of Hanoi’s busiest wedding season. Despite the fact that I often felt distant from everything taking place around me, I was able to sense the feeling of joy that seemed to permeate the city during those cold winter days. Hanoians, conscious of astrology and the predictions of the fortune tellers, considered certain dates most fortuitous for weddings. Riding my bike through the city, I’d pass dozens of wedding buses. They were covered with flowers and large red paper cutouts of the ancient Chinese character for “double happiness.”
(Though Vietnamese now write their language in a romanized script, ancient Chinese characters continue to play a role in the religious and spiritual life of the nation.) The wedding buses were always full of people, and when they looked out the window and saw me, the foreign woman, pedaling along on her bike, they would sometimes smile and wave. I was still on the outside of Vietnam, but on days like those I could begin to believe that the walls weren’t so high, that I would someday scramble over them.

One morning, the clouds receded for a few hours and revealed a sky so blue it seemed artificial. I took a bike ride down Duong Giai Phong, Liberation Street, named in commemoration of Liberation Day—April 30, 1975—the date of the “Liberation of Saigon,” as most Vietnamese called it, or the “Fall of Saigon,” as most Americans called it. Liberation Street led toward the southern edge of Hanoi and, eventually, became Route 1, which continued south all the way to Ho Chi Minh City. From Liberation Street, I turned west, crossed the tracks of the southbound railway, and entered a neighborhood of enormous Soviet-style housing blocks, three- and four-story monoliths mildewing and crumbling before their time. Judging by the architecture, I guessed that this neighborhood represented some Socialist attempt to “modernize” the ancient city. It seemed ugly and depressing in comparison to the cramped but lively neighborhoods in the unreconstructed sections of the town.

If I had known my history, I might have looked at the map and figured out that I was riding through the Kham Thien neighborhood, which suffered some of the worst effects of the 1972 “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi. In an effort to force concessions out of the Vietnamese, Richard Nixon sent American B-52s on bombing runs over a sixty-mile stretch of a highly populated area in North Vietnam. The campaign, known officially as Operation
Linebacker II, destroyed not only much of Kham Thien, but also a large part of the nearby Bach Mai Hospital. More than thirteen hundred people died in Hanoi and another three hundred in the nearby city of Haiphong.

If I had been ten years older, these facts might have been familiar to me. I would have remembered the bombing of Hanoi and the name Bach Mai Hospital, which became a rallying point among anti-war activists, might have still sent shivers down my spine. But I was only ten years old during the Christmas bombing, and I didn’t remember it at all. I had understood almost nothing about what was happening in Vietnam, except that people were dying there. I was terrified by death, and so I began to pay attention to Vietnam. I reacted to the war by drawing rainbows of peace signs on my denim-covered notebook, hoping that these flimsy Magic Marker symbols could somehow lessen the violence I saw on TV. For me, that jungly ever-exploding backdrop to dinner was the televised version of death itself.

I was lucky. No one I cared about went to the war. The closest I ever came to knowing someone lost in Vietnam was the POW/MIA bracelet I wore around my wrist that bore the name of a missing soldier and the date he disappeared. Among the elementary school set, the bracelets began as fashion statements, but, for many of us, they became our most powerful connection to what was taking place in Southeast Asia. Like me, my MIA, Captain Raymond Stacks, had grown up in Memphis. This hometown connection, combined with what I considered an astonishing similarity in our last names, gave me a strange sense of knowing the man already. I came to think of him as my unlucky missing uncle and became convinced that I might somehow bring him home myself through the sheer power of focusing with utter concentration on the metal band hanging on my wrist. The only effect of these efforts was that I squeezed my bracelet too hard
and eventually broke it. My captain never made it home. Years after the war ended, I happened to see a newspaper article about his parents and how they had lived with their loss. I felt guilty, not simply because I had failed in my mission to rescue their son, but because I had forgotten him altogether.

During those first few weeks in Hanoi, the thing that surprised me most about Vietnam was how little I saw around me that still related to the war. Sure, I had seen the old airplanes in the courtyard of the Army Museum near my house, but in other contexts the influence of the war seemed negligible. Nearly twenty years after the conflict ended, I was living in Hanoi, the one-time enemy capital, and, had anyone asked me, I would have described the defining characteristics of this city as motorbikes, commerce, lakes, and trees. I knew that the war had left scars on this city, but I didn’t recognize them yet. And I mistook the reconstruction of a devastated neighborhood for an inept attempt at urban renewal.

After a while, I pulled my bike over to the side of the road and stopped to consult my map. I was determined to take a new route home. On the map, I found a small road that seemed like it would get me back to the center of town. I pedaled back and forth looking for it, then discovered a gap between two buildings, a concrete-paved lane hardly wider than a footpath from which a line of bicycles and motorbikes poured in and out with as much nonchalance as I would have had driving up the on ramp to a freeway.

I sat motionless for a moment. I didn’t even like to admit to myself the kinds of things that scared me here, but this little lane was one of them. Until now, I’d stuck to the big roads, where I could maintain distance between myself and everyone else. If I rode my bike down this tiny lane, I would lose that tiny amount of privacy. At the same time, though, to ride home the way I’d
come would amount to a failure of nerve. Would Jack have given a moment’s pause to a little lane like this one? For a few seconds, I strained my eyes to see where it was leading. Then I killed some time fussing with my map. Finally, as if the route itself were a dare, I took it.

A few feet past the entrance, it was already too late to turn back. The road was paved like a sidewalk, its great slabs of cracked and broken concrete betraying a history of heavy use and official neglect. Every thirty yards or so, the path made a ninety degree turn, veering left at some points, right at others, as if each bend were a concession to a building that predated the road. There was just enough room for a lane of two-wheeled traffic to flow in each direction. Nobody looked at me. They couldn’t. Like me, all the motorbikers and bicyclists were too busy maneuvering their vehicles to pay attention to anything else. Smashing into another rider meant facing the embarrassment and aggravation of putting a halt to all the traffic in both directions.

Despite the exertion required just to keep my bike upright, I realized that I had discovered something. One simple turn onto that narrow road had brought me into another Hanoi. Away from the crowded anonymity of the rest of the city, I had entered the intimate realm of the urban village. Instead of the sidewalk, bushes, trees, and closed front doors that sectionalized other parts of Hanoi, here nothing divided those of us passing through from the people who called this address home. A woman leaned out a window and dumped her dishwater onto the pavement, barely missing the shoulder of the bicyclist in front of me. Two teenage girls stood in the doorway of a house, painting their fingernails. Three little boys treated the road like a playground, hurling their sandals into the traffic, then making hysterical attempts to grab them from between the wheels of passing vehicles.
An older man pulled his motorbike out of the gate of his house and, during the ensuing pause, I glanced through an open window and spotted an ancient woman standing before a ceremonial altar, eyes closed, waving sticks of incense in a slow circle in the air. I had come upon a different side of the crowded, crumbly, mildew-speckled city, and for that brief instant, at least, I felt part of it.

Just as I was beginning to wonder if I were riding in a circle, I saw in the distance a main road. I pedaled a few more yards and then, spotting a small tea table just before the intersection, I jumped off my bike and quickly pulled it out of the flow of traffic. I was famished. The food stand was nothing more than a bench and an old wooden table set into a small empty space between two buildings. The proprietor, a middle-aged woman in spectacles, looked at me placidly, as if Americans regularly stopped by. “
Cô muôn gì?
” she asked. What would you like, miss?

I had a craving for
bánh bao,
the steamed meat-and-egg filled roll that was both tasty and unchallenging. I didn’t eat red meat in the States, but following such a regimen had come to seem futile here in Hanoi. Northern Vietnamese considered meat a delicacy. Since arriving, I’d been offered pig’s feet, cow’s tongue, dog meat, and the roasted heads of tiny birds. All of these things I’d managed to avoid, but when it came to basic dishes with chicken, pork, or beef, I’d chosen to eat rather than argue with my hosts, who invariably couldn’t understand why I would skip the best part of the meal. Just in case I found myself face to face with something I absolutely could not eat, Tra had taught me the Vietnamese way to avoid anything unappealing. “Just say, ‘
Không biết ăn,
’” she instructed: I don’t know how to eat it.

I didn’t see any
bánh bao
at this tea table, so I pointed my finger at a bowl of hard-boiled eggs. The proprietor nodded and handed me a cup of tea. I accepted it gratefully. The bike ride
had chilled me, and soon, after taking the first bitter sip, I could feel the liquid spread its heat through my stomach. Holding the warm cup against my cheek, I looked around. On the other side of the lane, a young mother squatted on her front stoop, trying to get her distracted toddler to take a bite of rice. The notes of
Swan Lake
floated out the front door of the house, and the little boy was too busy dancing to pay attention to his mother. “Child! Child!” the woman coaxed, following her son back and forth across the stoop. Finally, the little boy stopped long enough to take a bite, then instantly spit it out. The rice sprayed the leg of a passing cyclist. The little boy cried, “Hot!” His mother nodded, slid a spoonful into her own mouth, held it there for a moment to cool it for her son, then spit it back out onto the spoon. “Child!” she said again. The boy opened his mouth like a little bird and let his mother slide the rice on in. Then he stood on his tiptoes, lifted his arms into the air, and pirouetted like a swan.