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Now that I could speak a little bit, a completely different world was opening up to me, and I didn't know how to navigate it at all. With every new word I learned, I was drawn in deeper, into worrying about how to interact with people. I pondered their relationships, which seemed fierce and temperamental, yet unwavering. I could not place myself in these complicated hierarchies and began to seriously doubt if I should even be trying.

Also Visit our Vietnam: 25 Years Later site for more articles like this one.

Sunday afternoon when I walked up to the bench by the lake, Tuyen was already there. He grinned up at me.

"I have a present for you," I said, handing him a small package. Earlier that day, I had been wandering in the touristy part of town, where I spent $2 on a tiny pewter box. Lacking anything small enough to put inside, I had taken a shiny new quarter from my wallet and dropped it in. A quarter, I thought with shame as he opened the box. But he sighed with happiness, then said, "I can't take this. I don't need it."

I knew it. I had done something wrong. "No. It's for you. I bought it for you." I pushed it back at him. He sighed again, closed his eyes and held the box tightly. Somehow we managed to talk for a while, about art, about family relationships, about anything we could manage to describe. I watched his face, his slender hands, hypnotized by his low, intense voice. It began to get dark.

"Let's go eat." I motioned him to his feet. He was taller than me, which I hadn't noticed before.

He stood there, grinning. "I still don't have any money."

"I'm paying! Don't worry about it," I pleaded.

"First I want to take you somewhere." He pushed his bike out to the street and waited for me, with my heavy book bag, to catch up. The parade was starting again, and this time I was in it, in my bright American clothes, riding awkwardly.

We rode toward my end of town, then he turned abruptly down a dark alley. We were going slow enough that I could see the look of surprise on the faces of the people at the noodle stall on the corner. The alley was muddy, and a tangle of puppies yelped and tripped in front of our bicycles.

"Here we are." He pulled his bike into an open, lighted patio, where a stout, smiling man stood in a doorway in shorts with two children hanging on his legs.

"My brother Dinh." Dinh motioned for me to sit down in the wooden armchair in the front room. Most Vietnamese families had a room like this, filled with hard, decorative furniture arranged in front of the family altar. It was the guest's room. I had never seen any other room in a Vietnamese house.

Dinh brought out bottles of warm lemon soda from his shop next door and I sat there sipping nervously as Dinh and Tuyen had a hushed conversation. I heard Dinh say to him, "Go ask my wife." Then Dinh turned to me and went through the typical questions: Do you have children? How old are you? How many brothers and sisters do you have? Tuyen gazed at me from the loveseat, his cheeks flushed. Then Dinh's wife, a tiny woman with a scarred face, came quietly into the room in her nylon pajamas. Tuyen pulled her aside and they went out onto the patio, where I saw her give him a wad of crumpled bills.

"OK, let's go now." Tuyen swept me out of the room and we went back to the noodle stand on the corner. Everyone stared at me again, chopsticks poised halfway to their open mouths, until Tuyen told them to move over. They squeezed together on the low wooden bench, and Tuyen sat across from me.

"But I wanted to take you to a restaurant!" I whispered to him.

"No, it's better this way." He turned to the woman at the soup pot and I heard him order her to put only the best chicken in my soup.

"Do you want a beer?" he asked, probably thinking that all Americans have to drink beer, like water. I hesitated. Most women didn't drink beer in Vietnam, and besides, I didn't want him to waste all of his money on it, and I knew he wouldn't let me pay. But I was feeling so dizzy from the heat, this strange evening, that I thought a beer would help smooth the edges out.

"Yes. Let's share a beer."

We sat there forever, shoving long noodles into our mouths, drinking beer, laughing at nothing. All of the other customers left, but we continued to sit there. He took a piece of chicken out of his bowl and put it into mine, looking meaningfully into my eyes. Was I supposed to put chicken in his bowl too?

When it was time to leave, we wove unsteadily on our bikes as I tried to find my way back to my house. Although it was a Sunday night and quite late, everyone in Hanoi seemed to be out, laughing, eating, scolding children, sitting on the sidewalk on tiny stools watching televisions in cafes. My skin was thrumming with the noise, the heat, the heady smell coming from the blooming milkfruit trees that lined the streets.

We reached my house, with its metal folding grill over the entire front of the house. I knew that the housekeeper, a moody old man who lived in the attic, had probably locked me out when he closed up the house for the night, assuming that I was in my room reading as usual.

We stood straddling our bicycles as the crowd flowed around us. Horns bleated, engines revved, people yelled, but we just stood there looking at each other.

"So I'll see you Wednesday?" he asked. He held my hand briefly, pressing the knuckles on the back of my hand one by one. Then he was gone.

Next page | Tuyen visits me at home