Read Online The House on Dream Street by Dana Sachs - Free Book Online
Authors: Dana Sachs
Tags: Travel
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and understanding of Vietnam expanded, while every day the central focus of it constricted, until it seemed like the whole universe centered on this little living room and the sidewalk in front of it.
The living room of the house was always crowded, and I had to develop tricks to remember who the players were. The sweet-faced older man who rode the rickety bicycle was Tung’s father. Huong’s father wore a black beret and spoke to me in French. Tung’s mother was bony and cheerful. Huong’s mother was round and sullen. Two of Huong’s brothers looked like twins, but the one with the Vietnamese flag tattooed to his forearm was the older one, who had driven a supply truck during the war, and the one who wore the flashy shirts was younger and would have barely reached puberty by the time the war ended. Huong had three sisters-in-law, and, because of the limited number of Vietnamese given names, two of them were also called Huong. Thus, I had the advantage of greeting all of them with, “Hello, Huong,” and being fairly certain I was right.
Then there was Huong and Tung’s five-year-old boy, Viet, the wild child. Sometimes I’d sit down on the couch and he’d jump onto my lap, throw his arms around my neck, and let out blissful coos. At other times, he’d lure me with the promise of a kiss and punch me in the mouth. One night I brought home a flower-covered chocolate cake for Viet. He took one look at it, breathed deeply, then plunged his whole face into the middle. Viet could hold nearly a whole bowl of rice in his mouth and eat it while singing a song and standing balanced on the seat of his father’s Honda Dream.
The family drifted in and out of conversation as easily as one drifts in and out of sleep. At first, I kept wondering why they didn’t get bored. We Americans are always searching for distractions,even at those moments that demand we do nothing but stare at whatever’s right there in front of us. We read while sitting on the toilet, thumb through magazines in supermarket checkout lines, and listen to the radio while driving to work. Even “relaxing” involves some action verb: eating, watching TV, going for a walk. Now I found myself in a place where people could sit for hours observing the relentless monotony of traffic. Only Tung had trouble. He could only last for a few minutes before he’d start to fidget, jump out of his chair, light a cigarette, comb his hair, walk into the kitchen, walk back out, make a phone call, then sit down again, finally ready for another stint at it. Everyone else could last forever, silently staring out the front door.
In the beginning, when I spent a lot of time downstairs, I wondered what I was missing. I’d only walked by the Army Museum, and I wasn’t even sure where the History and Fine Arts museums were yet. Maybe something major was happening in this city while I sat on a plastic-covered sofa watching traffic. Maybe revolution was fermenting in Hanoi and I didn’t even know it. But ever so slowly I became completely absorbed by the life of this house, and my American compunction to “use my time wisely” disintegrated. Whole hours passed unaccounted for, marked only by the steady rise and fall of noise. Time started to pass in a different way, not so much in the turn of the clock as in the change in the light, the growling of my stomach, Viet’s ecstatic return from school, or the smell of Huong’s cooking.
If someone had told me, even a month before, that I would spend so many hours hanging out on a couch with a native Hanoian, I still might have doubted it. It was hard to believe that I could feel so relaxed around a woman like Huong, who wasn’t Westernized and who had never had a chance, as Tra had, to make peace with America. About the time I was polishing myPOW/MIA bracelet back home in Memphis, Huong was hiding out in the countryside, avoiding the bombs the United States was dropping on her city. But here we were, twenty years later, sitting on
The living room of the house was always crowded, and I had to develop tricks to remember who the players were. The sweet-faced older man who rode the rickety bicycle was Tung’s father. Huong’s father wore a black beret and spoke to me in French. Tung’s mother was bony and cheerful. Huong’s mother was round and sullen. Two of Huong’s brothers looked like twins, but the one with the Vietnamese flag tattooed to his forearm was the older one, who had driven a supply truck during the war, and the one who wore the flashy shirts was younger and would have barely reached puberty by the time the war ended. Huong had three sisters-in-law, and, because of the limited number of Vietnamese given names, two of them were also called Huong. Thus, I had the advantage of greeting all of them with, “Hello, Huong,” and being fairly certain I was right.
Then there was Huong and Tung’s five-year-old boy, Viet, the wild child. Sometimes I’d sit down on the couch and he’d jump onto my lap, throw his arms around my neck, and let out blissful coos. At other times, he’d lure me with the promise of a kiss and punch me in the mouth. One night I brought home a flower-covered chocolate cake for Viet. He took one look at it, breathed deeply, then plunged his whole face into the middle. Viet could hold nearly a whole bowl of rice in his mouth and eat it while singing a song and standing balanced on the seat of his father’s Honda Dream.
The family drifted in and out of conversation as easily as one drifts in and out of sleep. At first, I kept wondering why they didn’t get bored. We Americans are always searching for distractions,even at those moments that demand we do nothing but stare at whatever’s right there in front of us. We read while sitting on the toilet, thumb through magazines in supermarket checkout lines, and listen to the radio while driving to work. Even “relaxing” involves some action verb: eating, watching TV, going for a walk. Now I found myself in a place where people could sit for hours observing the relentless monotony of traffic. Only Tung had trouble. He could only last for a few minutes before he’d start to fidget, jump out of his chair, light a cigarette, comb his hair, walk into the kitchen, walk back out, make a phone call, then sit down again, finally ready for another stint at it. Everyone else could last forever, silently staring out the front door.
In the beginning, when I spent a lot of time downstairs, I wondered what I was missing. I’d only walked by the Army Museum, and I wasn’t even sure where the History and Fine Arts museums were yet. Maybe something major was happening in this city while I sat on a plastic-covered sofa watching traffic. Maybe revolution was fermenting in Hanoi and I didn’t even know it. But ever so slowly I became completely absorbed by the life of this house, and my American compunction to “use my time wisely” disintegrated. Whole hours passed unaccounted for, marked only by the steady rise and fall of noise. Time started to pass in a different way, not so much in the turn of the clock as in the change in the light, the growling of my stomach, Viet’s ecstatic return from school, or the smell of Huong’s cooking.
If someone had told me, even a month before, that I would spend so many hours hanging out on a couch with a native Hanoian, I still might have doubted it. It was hard to believe that I could feel so relaxed around a woman like Huong, who wasn’t Westernized and who had never had a chance, as Tra had, to make peace with America. About the time I was polishing myPOW/MIA bracelet back home in Memphis, Huong was hiding out in the countryside, avoiding the bombs the United States was dropping on her city. But here we were, twenty years later, sitting on
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