Fake House by Linh Dinh Page B

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 producedin 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.