THE HOUSE ON DREAM STREET: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam
By Dana Sachs
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 348 pages, $22.95
For me, Vietnam has never been just a war. It was the country where I was born. In the ’80s and through the ’90s, my family there wrote long, sad letters to us here in the U.S. about their disintegrating lives. Socialism never took off after North and South Vietnam reunited in 1975, when the U.S. pulled out of the war. Vietnam’s isolation, exacerbated by the U.S. and its allies’ trade embargo, nearly collapsed the economy. Families struggled to feed themselves as the rice supply dwindled, consumer goods disappeared and per capita income dropped to the second lowest in the world, just four years after the war.
So I picked up Dana Sachs’ “The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam” with much interest. A journalist who had briefly backpacked through the country in 1989, when communist countries in Eastern Europe began crumbling and Vietnam opened its doors to Western tourists, Sachs had a singular look at what remained of socialism, having returned there to live for two years in the early ’90s. Disappointingly, she blathers on more about her cross-cultural relationship with a Vietnamese mechanic and the guilt she shouldered because of the U.S. involvement in the war than about any economic recovery she witnessed. “The House on Dream Street” is Sachs’ paean to Vietnam, a tender, unprofound account of her life there.
It was Vietnam’s mysteriousness that drew Sachs to visit: “I’d never heard of `Vietnam’ except as war, and the place itself conjured nothing in my mind but dust and blood and wailing faces.” In 1989 she found a country trying to recast itself, a “lush vegetation growing out of the broken carcasses of airplanes,” where she met “passionate, stubborn, intensely engaging people who, far from being beaten down by their past, focused limitless energy on constructing for themselves a less troubled future. . . . I fell in love with Vietnam during that visit.”
Armed with that love, Sachs moved to Hanoi in 1992. She rented a room in a house owned by a young couple. To support herself, she taught English. And so began a series of quixotic adventures in which she bicycled through Hanoi’s crowded, crazy streets, introduced American cuisine (hamburgers and fries) to her landlords and friends, deflected advances from Vietnamese men (who believed all Western women sleep around) and begrudgingly grew accustomed to nosy questions (such as why she’s still unmarried at the advanced age of 29). So much of the book is set up as a primer on Vietnamese culture, customs and language, told in neatly bundled anecdotes, that it rivals the Lonely Planet travel guide to Vietnam.
Sach’s memoir is less a social commentary than a personal commentary, and unfortunately Sachs isn’t, with all her painful self-consciousness, all that complex. She experiences a spiritual moment as she stands inside a pagoda and inhales too much incense. She bemoans the Vietnamese habit of rarely saying “Thank you” or “Please,” as she had been taught by her parents. She adapts to Vietnamese culture and learns to order beef noodle soup without the beef.
“Living in Vietnam had caused a shift in the way I saw the world. When I read about the war in Bosnia, the genocide in Rwanda, or our bombing of Iraq, the people of those countries no longer seemed so far away, or impossible to comprehend. . . . I had learned, finally, that I am not so different from all the other people in this world,” she reveals.
Sachs spends too much time either agonizing about the war’s effects or apologizing for the U.S. role in it. “I was standing before a Vietnamese man who had been permanently disfigured because of the war my country fought there. Suddenly I had to say it. Even if he didn’t want to hear it, I had to apologize. Slowly, I raised my hands in the gesture of supplication I’d seen Vietnamese make before altars to the Buddha. `Xin loi, bac,’ I said. Uncle, I’m sorry.” Predictably, the book moves toward unshackling Vietnam from being a mere stereotype–“miserable, victimized, helpless”– as Sachs realizes that it did not need her guilt.
Sachs’ fetishistic embrace of the culture keeps her from ferreting out a truer Vietnam. For a country that had struggled for centuries to oust either the Chinese, French, Japanese or Americans, the people she encounters are forgiving, hard-working and, if not living wholly happy, prosperous lives, then striving to. If this is the only Vietnam that exists, it is a world Sachs has constructed through nostalgia and affection. It’s a pretty postcard and a nice love letter to another land, but it is superficial. She Anglicizes all her students’ names and the name of the street on which she lives. Instead of Tran Phu Street (and the rather unpoetic title of “The House on Tran Phu Street”), she rechristens it Dream Street, for the Honda Dream motorbikes parked along the sidewalk.
Sachs’ book is in some ways an attempt to sift through what Vietnam is and isn’t, almost always in contrast to the U.S. It’s a valiant attempt, but in the end it is an unremarkable look at Vietnam through a Westerner’s eyes.
