Fake House (12 page)

A couple of train-related incidents occurred during the early hours and late afternoon of June 3, 1995, but before we get to the details, I must give you some background information on what I was doing in Vietnam in the first place. On May 3, 1995, at the age of thirty-one and after an absence of twenty years, I returned from Philadelphia to Vietnam, the country of my birth, for a one-month stay. I had left Saigon on April 27, 1975, sitting on the floor in the hold of a C-130 cargo plane, a few hours before NVA rockets shut down the runways of Tan Son Nhat Airport.

Returning in a Boeing 747, my reentry into Vietnam’s airspace was lubricated by the sweet voice of Blossom Dearie, one of the many inspired selections on the jazz channel of Vietnam Airlines. Below, and a little to the right, was the red earth of the central plains, patched by swaths of emerald-green rice fields and hemmed on one side by the turquoise-blue of the Pacific Ocean. The Suntori whiskey I had drunk at Seoul’s Kempo Airport was starting to kick in, and I imagined myself to be greatly moved by the occasion. Alcohol, which always makes me either maudlin or violent, was the likely culprit for my agitated state. It is, again, last call at Dirty Frank’s—a bar I frequent in Philadelphia, where Blossom Dearie is also available, on the jukebox—and I hear the bartender’s raspy voice telling me to go home. “I’m going home, Al. I’m going home.”

Although Saigon-born and raised, I had decided early on to spend the bulk of my time in the northern part of the country, since both of my parents are from the North (my spoken Vietnamese, to this day, betrays this genesis). During my stay in Hanoi, Hai Phong, Thai Binh, and elsewhere, I was seldom mistaken for a local, and often assumed to be a Chinese, a Japanese, or a Korean. I was even called Ong Tay, literally “Mr. West,” a Westerner, a word that used to denote only a Frenchman. A practical consequence of this fact was that I was always seen as a foreigner and was always charged accordingly for my accommodations. I should point out that an overseas Vietnamese was also considered a foreigner, but if one looked a certain way, one could occasionally pass as an ordinary Vietnamese.

I did not look like an ordinary Vietnamese. Although a small man in America, I was deemed fat in Vietnam, with a belly well-stoked by case after case of Rolling Rock, the well-known Pennsylvania brew. On top of this I sported a goatee and a crew cut, two conceits seldom seen on Vietnamese men, who prefer to keep their face either clean shaven or with a small, well-trimmed mustache, and their straight hair like a mop of grass.

When it was time for me to buy a rail ticket for my trip from Hanoi to Saigon, I was willing to pay the foreign price. Any thought I had of presenting myself as a local and saving a hundred bucks was further discouraged by a story I’d heard of an overseas Vietnamese who’d managed to buy a cheaper ticket, only to be docked the difference while on the train, as he had sprinkled his Vietnamese conversation with one too many okays, thus revealing himself to be an outsider.

“Sister, give me a first-class ticket to Saigon,” I said to the lady behind the booth.

“Four hundred ninety thousand dong,” she told me.

I hesitated, knowing the quoted price was too low: “Sister, give me the foreign price.”

She looked at my face more carefully: “One million four hundred ninety thousand dong.”

I gave her the money. She continued: “You speak like a local.”

“My mother is from Hanoi.”

“Traveling alone, Brother?”

“Yes.”

“Fancy luggage?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you pay the cheaper price?”

I will have to pay this sly broad ten bucks for the transaction
, I thought. Not a bad deal. I said, “If you think I can get away with it, Sister, then give me the cheaper ticket.”

She gave me back my change, with the ten bucks already deleted.

I was half suspecting the ticket agent to have pulled a quick one on me, for even if I was penalized on the train, she’d still get to keep her ten dollars. Whatever the case may have been, the next task for me was to disguise myself accordingly: In conformity with local taste, I shaved off my goatee, bought off the street a 60-cent hat with “Noontime Lover” (in English) stenciled on it, and a $2.50 yellow shirt (bargained down from $4.00), waited for departure date, and hoped I wouldn’t be detected on the train. I decided against buying a pith helmet—worn by Communist troops during the war but common among civilians throughout the North—not because of politics but because I thought such an attempt at a makeover to overshoot the mark; truth is, many Hanoians, taking their fashion cues from imported videos produced
in Orange County, California, were going the other way, trying to look like Vietnamese-Americans.

“Buy earplugs,” an American friend advised, “because of the deafening noise.” A few others told me to bring along my own food since the meals on board were inedible. I went out and bought canned pâté, peanuts, a bottle of La Vie spring water, and boxes of La Vache Qui Rit, or Laughing Cow, an imported, buttery processed cheese, ubiquitous throughout the country, even in the most remote provinces. Petty thievery would not be a problem, since I would be sharing a cubicle with only one other person.

The reason for going through all the hassles of traveling by train, instead of by plane, was that I wanted to see the countryside. Never before a picture taker, I had suddenly developed the passion in Vietnam and was hoping to take a few good shots while on the train. Before I left the States, an aunt had lent me her camera, which I grudgingly accepted. “Take a few shots,” she said. “It is your country.” (This aunt also warned me against mosquito bites. “They like our flesh better than the locals’,” she said. “We have more protein in our blood.” I was incredulous: “How can they tell?!”

“They can smell it.”) Once I got to Vietnam, the impulse to take pictures—an impulse I had previously despised in other people—took over. Everywhere I went, I took shots of people going about their business: the Black Thai, White Thai, Kha Mu, Meo, and Muong peoples I encountered on the road from Dien Bien Phu to Sapa; a wiry old guy, in a faded army shirt and shorts, carrying a red chicken in a rattan cage, who snapped to attention with a military salute as I aimed my Canon at him (“I’ll send you a copy,” I promised); karaoke-bar hostesses; pool players; working people drinking. I fancied myself to be no tourist, no ordinary
picture snapper, but a spy, an infiltrator, capable of delving beneath the surface of things. With an irrepressible pleasure, I anticipated the moment of my return to the United States, when I could develop my twenty rolls of film.

The resumption of the Hanoi-Saigon Line, dubbed the “Unification Line,” on September 31, 1976, twenty months after the fall of Saigon, was a symbolic achievement and a source of great pride for the Hanoi regime. I entered a small cubicle, laid down my meager luggage, and sat on the lower berth to study an environment that would be my home for the next thirty-six hours: an oscillating fan bolted onto the ceiling; a small sink inside a cabinet; a table that folded into the wall; wire mesh in the window—a visual hindrance as far as the views were concerned. A very old man, my traveling companion, walked in, and it took me a few seconds to realize that I should yield him my lower berth since he was obviously in no shape to climb up and down from the upper one. The old guy appreciated the gesture. He took out from his blue vinyl bag a one-gallon Coke bottle filled with a homemade rice wine, and poured its content into two teacups, which we quickly emptied. For the duration of the trip the bottle was constantly out, and each time, except for the one instance I wish I could undo now, he managed to outdrink me.

“We’re both wine people,” he barked. “Be natural!”

“Thank you, Uncle,” I replied. “I’m lucky to meet you.”

“Be natural! Be perfectly natural!”

The old man was a Hanoi native, he told me. “Are you a Saigonese?”

“Yes, I live near An Dong Market.” (It’s my grandmother’s address.)

“I first saw Saigon in 1975. I liked it so much, I stayed.” He
chuckled. Now he went back and forth on the train several times a year, he said. To endure these long trips, he must be drunk from beginning to end.

“Not a bad idea,” I told him.

“But you know something?” He stared and leaned into me, his red eyes lit up. “I’m always drunk anyway, whether I’m on the train or not!”

I could have told him how I was also a twenty-four-hour drunk in Philadelphia. How, during an average week, I would go to maybe five different bars, sometimes five different bars in a single night. How drinking in America is often a solitary exercise, even if it’s done in public.

There is an after-hours club, the Pen & Pencil on Sansom Street, where you can drink until five in the morning and watch the pale orange light of dawn slowly illuminate its bay window.

When the train finally rumbled out of the station, I was immediately sorry I had forgotten to buy a set of earplugs, for, with rarely a letup, the old train made a racket equivalent to any industrial-noise band (Sink Manhattan, for example, or Missing Foundation). The food, on the other hand, did not turn out to be half bad—stewed pork over rice, roasted pork with rice noodles in broth, bananas for dessert—and I managed to eat what was given me, supplementing my meals occasionally with a wedge of Laughing Cow.

While the old man slept, I stared out the window. All views were obstructed by the rusty screen: the gold glare of the tropical sun, men standing in mud, a white heron shaving the green stalks of the rice paddies.… I took photographs of the cubicle, of the old man’s stiff body sleeping, of the oscillating fan. I took photographs of the vendors selling magazines and cans of soda
at the stations, of the civic posters hectoring the populace to improve their public behavior. I took photographs of the squatting toilet on the train, which I thought were among my best photographs.

Vinh. Dong Hoi. Dong Ha. Sink Manhattan. Sink Manhattan. Sink Manhattan. Hue. Da Nang. Quang Ngai. Sink Manhattan. Sink Manhattan. Sink Manhattan. Dieu Tri. Tuy Hoa. Nha Trang. Sink Manhattan. Sink Manhattan. Sink Manhattan. The cities ticked by, hives of humanity, old sites of battles, mortared, bombed no longer.

In spite of the deafening noise, I had to lie down. What an exhausting month it had been. Before this trip I had found myself in a particularly cantankerous mood in Philadelphia, and always, it seemed, on the verge of an altercation. “Stay anywhere long enough,” Céline wrote, “and the people around you will start to stink up just for your special benefit.” After Vietnam, however, Philadelphia will be possible again. One goes away merely to distract oneself from the complexities of home. On my first night in Vietnam, as I was walking on Hung Vuong Boulevard—literally, since there was no room on the sidewalk—disoriented by the motorcycle traffic and the congestion, a cyclo driver, pedaling alongside, hassled me relentlessly to ride in his cab. Despite my repeated refusals, he nagged on.

“Where are you from?” the guy asked.

It is my least favorite question, anywhere. I didn’t answer him.

“Where are you from?” he asked again.

Again I ignored him.

“You are a Nacirema,” he said, and pedaled away.

“We ran over a man,” someone whispered, rousing me from sleep.

“What?”

“The train just ran over a man, killing him, and we are collecting a donation for his family,” the man elaborated. It was very dark inside the cubicle, and as I tried to study his square face, I noticed, for the first time, two officious-looking women standing behind him.

“Give me a moment, okay?” I told him as I fished a bundle of bills from inside my jeans pocket. Five dollars? No, two. “Here,” I said as I handed over 20,000 dong (an equivalent of a good day’s wage there).

“Thank you.”

After they left, I thought it would really be funny if, in the morning, I asked one of the men in the next cubicle about the accident, only to be told, “What accident?”

“I think,” the skinny guy from the next cubicle said, “that it was probably a suicide, since no one would be lying on the tracks at that hour of night, although people do do that during the daytime.”

“Maybe he was drunk,” I suggested.

“That’s possible,” the skinny guy conceded, puffing on his 555. “Or maybe he was already dead. That’s another possibility. Maybe someone killed him and left his body on the tracks.”

The old man, who was listening, chimed in: “On my way up, we also ran over a guy; however it was clearly his fault, since he ignored the barrier at the crossing and tried to speed his Honda across the tracks.”

“Stupid,” the skinny guy said, shaking his head. Then: “There goes a Honda Dream! Two thousand bucks down the drain!” We all laughed.

Inspired by the general gaiety, I said, “You know, a hangover can make you feel so shitty that death might be preferable.”

The skinny guy stared at me. “This guy’s all right. He’s insane!”

“Drink up, everybody,” the old man urged as he filled our cups.

“Listen,” the skinny guy said, then sang:

And so the dead man drank seven cups, stumbled onto the tracks on his way home, passed out, and was run over. Although this theory was no more plausible than the other two, I was personally in favor of it because, while it would make his demise absolutely senseless, it would also hold him to be entirely responsible.

I made an analogous mistake only a few hours later. Taking up the old man’s offer, I drank at least a dozen cups of his hideous wine and was completely fucked up by the time we pulled into Ho Chi Minh City. Eager to get off the train, and in my altered state, I completely forgot about a plastic bag containing my rolls of film. The dead man lost his one roll of film. I lost twenty. One minute I was drinking and laughing, the next minute I was standing on the street. I thus lost, in one careless moment, all the impressions I’d been greedily hoarding for the previous thirty days.