Read The House on Dream Street for Free Online

friendly. When I’d made plans to come back to Vietnam, I’d had every intention of moving to the south. Then, when I studied Vietnamese in the States, I met a professor from the Institute of Linguistics in Hanoi who told me he could arrange a long-term visa for me to continue my studies in his city. Securing long-term visas in Vietnam was no easy thing for an American to do, so I’d decided to give the north of Vietnam another chance. I’d met Tra by then, and she’d promised to help me.Now, after almost a month here, I was making progress in Hanoi, but I often wondered if I would have had a smoother acclimation had I lived in Saigon.
    I looked at the lawyer and smiled. “I really loved Saigon,” I said.
    The expression on the lawyer’s face hardened. “Excuse me,” he said, “we haven’t called it Saigon since we reunited the country in 1975. We Vietnamese call it Ho Chi Minh City now.”
    I felt my stomach tense. On my first visit to Vietnam, I’d been determined to use the name Ho Chi Minh City, proving that I, for one, was an American who recognized the legitimacy of the Hanoi government. But the local people insisted that I refer to their city by its original, prerevolutionary name, Saigon. I might have attributed this behavior to linguistic dissent were it not for the fact that, even in Hanoi, I seldom heard anyone use the name Ho Chi Minh City. Even Tra, whose father had fought in the revolution alongside Ho Chi Minh, always called the place Saigon. After much thought, I had finally decided it was both more prudent and more convenient to use the term Saigon.
    The lawyer was staring at me like the cherubic baby doll in a monster movie, suddenly possessed with the dazzling pinwheel eyes of the devil. Clearly, the “everybody else calls it Saigon” argument would not do here. I was an American. “Ho Chi Minh City,” I mumbled. With a sense of surrender, I gazed down at my orange. “Sorry,” I added.
    Suddenly I felt overcome with exhaustion. I had come to Hanoi to discover some other Vietnam, a Vietnam that wasn’t exploding bombs and burning villages and screaming babies. I had come with a belief that by learning about the country at peace, even learning such silly things as a new way to peel an orange, I could develop an understanding of this place that was broader and deeper than what my country had learned during so many years of war. But now I saw that Americans weren’t theonly ones who could reduce an entire nation to their own country’s experience with it. Here was a Vietnamese who believed he could judge my political opinions by my choice of a proper noun.
    Tung seemed aware that the conversation had taken a turn for the worse. He suddenly stood up and said, “We’ll go downstairs now.”
    Tung didn’t follow the other two down the stairs immediately. Instead, he stood for a moment on the landing outside my door. Behind his head, the lines of the rooftops zigzagged across the dark horizon. I looked in his eyes and I saw something I’d never seen before, concern. “ Ngủ đi. ” Go to sleep, he finally said, adding with a gentle smile, “ lo nhiều quá. ” You worry too much.
    After Tung went downstairs, I stood on the landing for a long time, the loneliness seeping into me like dampness through the porous walls of this house. I had felt alone almost every minute since I’d gotten here, but it was always simple homesickness mixed with the uncertainty of finding my bearings in a foreign place. What bothered me now was not the pain of physical distance so much as the absolute sense of mental isolation. My relationship with Hanoi had to be more complicated than my relationship with Saigon. After all, the United States had bombed this city. Maybe no one would ever completely trust me here. Maybe I wouldn’t trust anyone myself. In the space of ten minutes, Hanoi had switched back to “Hanoi,” the totalitarian, eternally frowning center of a Communist dictatorship. The war