Read Online The House on Dream Street by Dana Sachs - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Dana Sachs
Tags: Travel
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the couch together, not only not discussing the past, but—on my part and I believe hers as well—not even thinking about it.
Something was finally shifting between myself and Huong. I couldn’t mark any exact moment that had caused the change, but each time we passed each other on the stairs, each time she came into my room to water my plants, our smiles became more relaxed, our exchanges easier. I don’t know that my Vietnamese tones had gotten any better, but she had gotten much better at understanding them. The more time I spent with her, the more I realized how smart she was, and the more incomprehensible became my initial reaction to her as a timid young wife cowering behind her husband’s back. That image seemed laughable now, as I watched her directing Tung through his daily chores like a factory boss. She spoke to her older brothers with a voice of authority, and they listened to her. I don’t think I was the only one intimidated by her.
Huong had not only never shown an interest in why I came to Vietnam, she never asked me anything at all about my past. Her world was compact, as tightly woven as the finest straw basket, leaving no space to contemplate my existence in America. She acted as though the span of my life began at that moment I’d first stepped through her front door. I think this assumption accounted for how, although I was actually a year older than she was, she treated me like her innocent younger sister. As our conversation became easier, she took to giving me advice on everything from my love life to how I washed my towels. On quiet mornings, she rested her hand comfortably on my knee, just as she rested it on her sister Nga’s knee, and taught me new words,all the while keeping her eyes out for passing vendors hawking something she might like to cook for lunch.
One day, Huong was trying to explain to me all the Vietnamese words for rice. She found it incomprehensible that I could use the same term for the plant growing in the fields, the uncooked grain sold in the market, and the food we ate for dinner. To prove to me that these were in fact three very different things, she opened the cabinet under the glass coffee table and pulled out the Vietnamese-English dictionary. I leaned back on the sofa and prepared to wait. I had already found out, during any number of dictionary-aided conversations with Huong, that, like many Vietnamese, she didn’t know the system of alphabetical order. Every time she wanted to find a word, she did a random search for the first letter, then slowly scanned the rows until she finally found the word for which she was looking. It could take her fifteen minutes to find a single word, and by that time I’d nearly forgotten what we were talking about. But Huong hadn’t. She was patient. The two of us experienced time in completely different ways. Sometimes I tried to imagine what kind of person she’d be if she were an American. I could see Tung wrangling his little deals in New York or Dallas as easily as here in Hanoi. But Huong’s pace, the steady and absolutely certain way she moved through her days, was an exact mirror of her surroundings. She was rooted to this place in the same way that a tree is rooted to the soil. I sensed that if she were ever torn away from this house, this street, this city, she might not survive.
I was waiting for Huong to find the third of her rice words when, suddenly, from out of the normal roar of traffic, we heard the sounds of screaming. Both of us jumped up and ran outside. A crowd of thirty or more people was forming at the edge of the street. Passing motorbikes, bicycles, and even a couple of cars had stopped to look at whatever was going on in the middle ofthe road. This is it, I told myself. Our neighborhood’s collective karma had been used up. Now, instead of another near miss, we’d had the real thing. “Viet! Viet!” Huong shouted. My stomach turned, but then I saw him trying to nose his little body into the middle
Something was finally shifting between myself and Huong. I couldn’t mark any exact moment that had caused the change, but each time we passed each other on the stairs, each time she came into my room to water my plants, our smiles became more relaxed, our exchanges easier. I don’t know that my Vietnamese tones had gotten any better, but she had gotten much better at understanding them. The more time I spent with her, the more I realized how smart she was, and the more incomprehensible became my initial reaction to her as a timid young wife cowering behind her husband’s back. That image seemed laughable now, as I watched her directing Tung through his daily chores like a factory boss. She spoke to her older brothers with a voice of authority, and they listened to her. I don’t think I was the only one intimidated by her.
Huong had not only never shown an interest in why I came to Vietnam, she never asked me anything at all about my past. Her world was compact, as tightly woven as the finest straw basket, leaving no space to contemplate my existence in America. She acted as though the span of my life began at that moment I’d first stepped through her front door. I think this assumption accounted for how, although I was actually a year older than she was, she treated me like her innocent younger sister. As our conversation became easier, she took to giving me advice on everything from my love life to how I washed my towels. On quiet mornings, she rested her hand comfortably on my knee, just as she rested it on her sister Nga’s knee, and taught me new words,all the while keeping her eyes out for passing vendors hawking something she might like to cook for lunch.
One day, Huong was trying to explain to me all the Vietnamese words for rice. She found it incomprehensible that I could use the same term for the plant growing in the fields, the uncooked grain sold in the market, and the food we ate for dinner. To prove to me that these were in fact three very different things, she opened the cabinet under the glass coffee table and pulled out the Vietnamese-English dictionary. I leaned back on the sofa and prepared to wait. I had already found out, during any number of dictionary-aided conversations with Huong, that, like many Vietnamese, she didn’t know the system of alphabetical order. Every time she wanted to find a word, she did a random search for the first letter, then slowly scanned the rows until she finally found the word for which she was looking. It could take her fifteen minutes to find a single word, and by that time I’d nearly forgotten what we were talking about. But Huong hadn’t. She was patient. The two of us experienced time in completely different ways. Sometimes I tried to imagine what kind of person she’d be if she were an American. I could see Tung wrangling his little deals in New York or Dallas as easily as here in Hanoi. But Huong’s pace, the steady and absolutely certain way she moved through her days, was an exact mirror of her surroundings. She was rooted to this place in the same way that a tree is rooted to the soil. I sensed that if she were ever torn away from this house, this street, this city, she might not survive.
I was waiting for Huong to find the third of her rice words when, suddenly, from out of the normal roar of traffic, we heard the sounds of screaming. Both of us jumped up and ran outside. A crowd of thirty or more people was forming at the edge of the street. Passing motorbikes, bicycles, and even a couple of cars had stopped to look at whatever was going on in the middle ofthe road. This is it, I told myself. Our neighborhood’s collective karma had been used up. Now, instead of another near miss, we’d had the real thing. “Viet! Viet!” Huong shouted. My stomach turned, but then I saw him trying to nose his little body into the middle
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