The House on Dream Street by Dana Sachs Page B

“Well, you shouldknow better,” she said. Her voice was teasing, but her eyes were serious.
    We were silent for a while. Tra carried the tea over to the table and sat down next to me on the couch. “I’m just having a bad day with Vietnamese men,” she explained.
    The issue of whether or not Tra would go back to the States had been a point of contention with her husband since I’d arrived. She had postponed her return twice already, but now she was scheduled to leave in less than a month. “Are you really going back to Michigan?” I asked.
    “Of course I’m going back,” she said. She scratched at a mud spot on the cuff of my jeans, sending a tiny cloud of dust into the air. “I don’t know, maybe not.”
    I knew how Tra was suffering to get her M.B.A. When I was still in San Francisco, we’d often talked to each other by phone. Once, I’d gotten a call from her at eleven o’clock at night. In Michigan, it was 2:00 A.M. “Dana, I’m dying here,” she’d whispered.
    “What’s wrong?” I’d asked. In my mind, I was already racing to Michigan to get her to a hospital.
    “Exams. And I have a twenty-page paper due next week. How can I write twenty pages in English?” she groaned.
    I knew how Tra had to ride her bike home from the campus library in the freezing cold of winter and that she survived on $350 a month, $200 of which went to rent. I knew that her roommate, a nurse on morning shift, liked to run the vacuum before leaving for work at dawn. I knew about the local supermarket that only sold tasteless chicken and about Tra’s regular trips across the border to Asian groceries in Canada to stock her freezer with poultry she could eat. Tra had always told me these stories as if she were trying to entertain me with her comical adventures in America, but when I came to Vietnam I began to understandhow hard her life in the States really was. I didn’t know how much she suffered from homesickness until I saw the pleasure she got from eating a simple bowl of Hanoi phở. I only understood her longing for her son when I saw the way she watched him play. It seemed like those years away from Vietnam were tearing her in two.
    With Tra’s English skills, she could probably do extremely well in Vietnam, even without another degree. An ambitious person with a good grasp of English could earn more in Hanoi these days than almost anyone who didn’t speak English, Ph.D. or not. Of course, a Ph.D. was no ticket to wealth in the United States either, but I’d met enough Ph.D.s working as tour guides and secretaries for foreign companies in Vietnam to know that in a country that had traditionally placed a supreme value on education, wealth had begun to supplant knowledge as the great status symbol. With her background in economics and mastery of English, Tra could get a prestigious, well-paying job whenever she was ready. “Are you sure you need that M.B.A?” I asked.
    Her head jerked up from her cup of tea. “Of course I do,” she said. “You know how much I want it.”
    “But you have to struggle so much over there.”
    Tra leaned over the coffee table and opened a plastic bag of yellow candies that looked like sugar-coated garbanzo beans. “This is mứt sen, candied lotus seeds. They’re a Vietnamese specialty. You should try them,” she said. She attempted to pour them into a dish but they fell out in one large clump. “They’re a little sticky from the humidity.”
    I pulled one candy apart from the pile and put it in my mouth. It tasted like a sugar-coated garbanzo bean. “Delicious,” I said.
    Tra nodded, absently chewing her candy. She said, “You know how well educated my family is.”
    I nodded. Tra’s father was in Ho Chi Minh’s first cabinet. Her mother was one of the only Vietnamese ever elected to the French society of engineers. Her sister and brother had gotten doctorates in Moscow. Her husband had trained to be an architect in Prague. “What do I have?” Tra asked. “A