9

"I DON'T THINK I'm helping at all," Vanessa says. "They're either sleeping or talking on their cell phones."

We stand on the corner of a large rotary and watch the whirlpool of traffic. Earlier that day, one of her students received a call in the middle of Vanessa's lesson on STDs. She stood up from the conference table and walked to the corner of the room. Vanessa hesitated for a moment, then continued her lesson.

"Just when I was about to start talking again, she starts smiling and clapping and jumping up and down."

I lean close to hear Vanessa's voice. Motorbikes sputter past, some hopping up on the sidewalk to bypass traffic. Cyclo drivers ring bells or yell Hey!until we gaze in their direction. We shake our heads.

"So she jumps up and down and announces that her T-cell count is high enough for her to get pregnant."

A teenager tries to sell me a wallet with POW/MIA stamped into the leather, then he offers a Zippo that reads Wine 'em, Dine 'em, 69 'em. By now, I've learned the Vietnamese word for "No."

"That's good news for her, right?" I ask.

Vanessa wipes sweat from her forehead. "Yeah. But she basically told the whole class she's HIV positive and now she wants to have a baby. This is a woman who was taught it was wrong to look at herself naked."

We play a frightening game of Frogger as we try to cross the street, then follow our map through side streets of crumbling French villas and people of all colors eating croissants and drinking wine at open-air cafés. The movie house is tucked down a narrow alleyway lined with bicycles. At the end is a Vietnamese woman shaded by the Oscar Mayer umbrella on her hotdog cart. Before we attempt to ask her where we can buy our tickets, she points to a window.

"What are we seeing again?" Vanessa asks.

"Casualties of War." She looks at me as if I still haven't answered. "Michael J. Fox? Sean Penn?"

"Oh."

"It's good. You'll like it." I smirk, thinking about when I went away for a week and Vanessa hijacked our Netflix account. I'd check my e-mail and see that The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly had been replaced with Orgasmic Birth, The Big Lebowski with The Business of Being Born. She'll humor me and watch my movies, but she's never as captivated as I am. Once, in the middle of Steve McQueen's famous car chase in Bullitt, she started flipping through a magazine. I wanted to shut it off. It's like when you're dying to play your favorite song for someone during a road trip and the person doesn't like the song and now you don't even want to listen to it anymore. Somehow their response affects yours. Sometimes I wonder if the films I like are just "guy movies," as my mother would say. Or perhaps the movie I'm seeing is not the movie Vanessa sees. We don't have the same connotations. Perhaps the movie I see is the movie of me watching the movie.

Carrying frosty mugs of Tiger beer, we enter the small dark theater and sit near the back. The crowd is mostly older white couples. Several people walk in as the house lights fade and I wonder where they're from.

Michael J. Fox is on a trolley in San Francisco. An Asian woman boards, takes a seat further down the car. A wood flute that could either be the original score, or one lifted from The Karate Kid soundtrack, fades in, and we prepare ourselves for a flashback.

I remember watching this with my father years ago. He sat on the couch, cracking open peanuts and popping them in his mouth, prefacing the action scenes with: "Good part coming up, boy." The film follows a platoon of U.S. soldiers after they kidnap a Vietnamese girl. Sean Penn plays the psychotic, trigger-happy sergeant; Michael J. Fox is a scared young man fresh out of boot camp. The soldiers take turns raping the girl. Michael J. Fox is the only one who refuses. That, to the other soldiers, is evidence of his homosexuality. Two things the platoon can't trust: a snitch and a faggot.

I look over at Vanessa during one of the rape scenes, which is as disturbing as it is loud. She raises her eyebrows and mouths the words: Nice choice.

In the middle of the movie, I want to reach into my pocket for my headphones, drown out the actors' lines with my father's words. I must have missed something in the recording. I remember scenes in mystery movies where detectives turn up the volume on a crackling 911 call and reveal a hidden voice, a faint sound, an unidentified person in the background, breathing. I often lose track of time listening to my father's voice, my neck stiff from leaning forward, as if pressing my ear to a door: Who's there?

The flashback that opened the film subsides to present day, where Michael J. Fox runs after the girl on the train and turns her to face him, but—sigh—it isn't the same girl. Music swells, the screen fades, and we know everything will be all right. Someday.

"That's really weird," I say as we leave. "I remembered it being a lot better."

Vanessa walks a step or two in front of me, her hands in her pockets.

"Wait up."

"It's hot," she says. "I just want to get back to the hotel and shower." She tries to hail a cyclo driver. "An hour ago, we couldn't walk ten feet without one of these guys yelling at us." She walks closer to the corner and waves her hand.

"What are you doing?" I ask. "They'll screw us. We're better off walking."

She looks at me. We had wandered around Hanoi enough times. I can find our way back.

I start walking up the street, but Vanessa stays on the corner, waving. I stop and look back. A cyclo driver pulls up and rings his bell. "Very cheap," he says. "Very cheap." He repeats the words over and over until they lose their meaning. I hold my arms out by my sides. Vanessa looks at me, then the driver and shakes her head. As we walk away, the driver peddles slowly beside us for a few blocks before he gives up and coasts across the street.

We are lost. Again. My sense of direction is never any good, but in Vietnam, it's pitiful. We have been here for three months and just when I think I know where we're going, the city clicks like a Rubik's Cube and nothing is where it should be. Vanessa lets out a long exhale and I decide to keep walking straight. I open Lonely Planet, but it's too dark to read. I stare at the tangle of streets in front of us.

Several street vendors are still open, selling ginger, exotic mushrooms and baskets of raw meat. Couples browse the selection and the vendors smile when the customers point to what they want. I give in and walk over to one of the vendors and point to the name of our hotel in the book. She nods and smiles, draws an invisible map in her palm, but this one is clearer than the man's in Ho Chi Minh City. She traces the lines on her palm. I read them like street signs.

We are almost there. A man holding two baskets overflowing with leafy vegetables steps into our path. Vanessa lifts her head off my shoulder and smiles. He pushes me with both hands and I stumble back. I hear Vanessa shout "No!" and I echo her, but the man reaches out for her and I push Vanessa behind me. The man's swollen cheeks and dry, cracked nose look like a tree grown around a wiry smile. He pauses when I say "no" in Vietnamese, but then holds up his basket of vegetables and points to my pockets. We quickly cross the street and at first the man follows, then he turns away. At the end of the block, I look back and he's gone.

In our room, we lie in bed with the door locked. I keep picturing the man's angry face, the way he held up the vegetables as if they were the only thing I would ever need and he was outraged that I didn't understand that. His body screamed, "What are you waiting for, you idiot? BUY THESE!" Vanessa and I had been cornered by beggars or belligerent drunks in Boston plenty of times, but this man was different. His aggression seemed specific, focused, as if he had been waiting for us.

Vietnam, the past and present, the truths and replicas, the images I see and the stories I've heard—none of it... This isn't working out the way I planned. Perhaps it's my Hollywood education that makes me assume the man with the vegetables was anything more than a random event—the wrong place, the wrong time. My father often said he didn't trust any of the Vietnamese: They help you during the day and shoot at you at night. But the Vietnamese were not trying to kill me or Vanessa, and Ngon and Teddy and plenty of others have been kind and generous to us, so why then do I still have this persistent suspicion or, even, fear? Is it because I've never traveled this far from home? Or that Vietnamese is the most difficult language I've ever attempted to decipher? Or is it that for years, Vietnam was not a country to me, but only a war?

Vietnam was the first televised war. One of the first reality shows, before actors were paid to act like real people. In living rooms nationwide, Americans watched bombs green as watermelons tumbling above patchwork farms. Villagers in conical hats and ao dais running silently from Pac Man pellets. Thatch-roofed structures, ignited by Zippos, crackling like Duraflames. For most of my generation, Vietnam remains a televised war.

I thought I came here because I was sick of war films and still-shots of my father in his hooch. Yet I retreated to a movie theater, as if the Vietnam outside offered no insight. In my father's Vietnam, women walked from hooch to hooch, buffin' their snatches with white rags. Old fathers sold their daughters for household appliances. Children made weapons out of Coke cans. They didn't seem related to the people outside the movie house: the families waiting in line for a puppet show; an old man guiding Vanessa and me across a busy intersection; a group of hip teenagers in a Mercedes idling at a red light.

Even the women in The Cowboy Saloon, pressing themselves against men in suits, seemed to have little in common with the women my father dealt with thirty years ago. The younger Vietnamese we chatted with in hotels or on tours didn't care about the war, and the older generations were calloused or indifferent or dead. As in most of the world, the Vietnamese we met were busy people who worked to support their families. It is disturbing yet ingenious that many Vietnamese businesses now capitalize on the war. In a single day, Vanessa and I could take a bus tour through Khe Sanh, shoot Vietnamese and American guns at paper targets, drink cocktails called Napalm or Agent Orange, eat dinner at the DMZ Bar, and catch a late-night showing of Hamburger Hill.

I sit up in our bed and reach for my recorder.

"Babe, you gotta hear this. My Dad once told me about this Vietnamese dude who—"

"I'm really not in the mood right now."

"It's not that long."

She sits up. "I don't want to hear anymore. I don't care about the girls he was with or what he spent his money on. I don't get why you're so obsessed with it."

"I'm not obsessed with it. It's not like I'm getting off on these stories."

Vanessa reaches for her water bottle. Then she stands up and tries to turn up the air conditioner, but it's already on high.

"Have you even been listening to yourself on that tape? You snicker each time your Dad says "beaver" or "jugs."

I fight the urge to snicker now. "Oh, come on. Those words are hilarious. I don't condone his behavior."

"Whatever. You stare into every massage parlor we walk past. You take us to that saloon. Then, after I spend all day talking to these women with horrible stories of rape and whatever else, you take me to a movie that's basically a 90-minute rape scene. And you keep playing me these stories about your Dad doing whatever he did here."

"Yeah, but there's a big difference, babe. He didn't rape or kill anyone." My voice echoes off the low ceiling.

"I'm not saying he did, but those women he was with-"

"He was only nineteen! Show me another nineteen-year-old guy who would have done any different."

She shakes her head. "You really think we're only talking about your father right now?"

My face burned. "What?"

"You can't think of any other sketchy situation where a guy doesn't question his behavior?"

I shake my head. "Sure I can. And I can also think of a situation where a woman keeps bringing up the same shit even though the guy and the woman have talked about it a thousand times."

Vanessa nods her head, but not in agreement. She walks to the bathroom and slams the door. The room hums like a phonograph, the needle hissing between tracks. I want to pound on the bathroom door and unload every curse in the book, or knock gently and apologize and tell Vanessa I love her. My mind and body struggle like two negative magnets—a pair of objects that could fit together or push each other away.

I feel fire move inside my head, burn down my throat, smolder in my stomach. I take a long sip of warm water. I want to close my ears. I want to mute my brain. I want to reclaim my spot beside my father on the couch, crack open another peanut, and let Hollywood return me to a Vietnam I remember.

Before we left, I couldn't articulate my purpose for traveling to Vietnam. Now that the trip is almost over, I still can't. Maybe I should have brought him with me. Maybe if he was here now, I could point to the places he stood and ask, "What happened here?" But no matter how romantic I am in my imagination, I can't pretend that my father would suddenly have the answer, that he would turn and look me in the eye and say, "Son, here's what happened. And here's why."