Getting adopted

The chicken toes were on Friday. About midday on Sunday I was surprised by a phone call from Phuong, who was following through on that promise to find me a cheaper room (apartment, okay). I'm pretty happy where I am right now, but at the same time I'm curious to know what's to be had for $200 a month. I would also like to prolong my contact with this group of students. So I arranged to meet Phuong at St. Joseph's Cathedral at 7 pm. I picked this spot because it's a major landmark. I figured that—like the Empire State Building—the cathedral's whereabouts is known to all locals and most tourists. Wrong! Phuong called my cell phone six times between 7 and 7:30 asking me to repeat the street name, spell the street name, confirm that I was there, confirm that I was easily visible from the street, confirm that the church was near the lake, spell the street name again. I finally told him to meet me in front of the nearby KFC restaurant and we rendezvoused there five minutes later.

I climbed onto the back of Phuong's motorbike and we set out for his neighborhood. I don't know how long it would have taken me to pedal there on my bicycle, but it took 30 minutes on the motorbike. A bit drabber and dirtier than the Old Quarter, but organized along the same lines. We parked the bike in front of a ten-foot-wide photocopy shop and went in.

'This is my uncle's house,' Phuong announced. Against one wall were a couple photocopy machines, against the opposite wall an enormously heavy iron paper cutter that recalled the Spanish Inquisition. Phuong offered me a cup of tea while his aunt hurried out the front door to look for her husband. The shop was about 30 feet deep and in the back corner was a tiny spiral staircase made of concrete. Phuong motioned for me to follow him and headed up the stairs. I crouched down but had to remove my motorbike helmet to gain enough clearance to corkscrew my way up the tunnel-like stairs. We emerged into a ten-foot-square loft space that overlooked the shop. The loft contained a wide-screen TV in a cabinet and the kind of bamboo mat on the floor that, from my evening at Thu's house, I recognized as the family 'dining table'. In the back corner near the stairs was a tiny chair in front of a laptop computer on a small shelf.

The spiral stairs continued up to a higher loft where I assume the family slept. A young boy appeared down these stairs and Phuong introduced his nephew and asked him to bring me some tea. The boy left and reappeared a minute later with the news that there was no more tea. 'Would you like anything else?' Phuong asked.

'Just a cup of hot water would be fine,' I said. My throat was feeling a bit scratchy.

The boy left and reappeared with a tiny glass of tepid water, which I assume was run from the hot water tap but had been sitting in the supply pipe for a bit of time. At this point, the aunt and uncle returned and we went back down the stairs. As I snaked my way through the narrow hole, I realized that a hoist was the only practical way to get anything larger than a glass of water to or from the loft. Exiting the hole I noticed for the first time a small bathroom-sized sink and a little unvented gas cooker against the back wall. Next to the cooker was a tiny windowless lavatory. I believe these served as the family's kitchen and bathroom. Phuong had mentioned that his family was poor, but I found this visit to his uncle's home disquieting. The only window in the entire place was the curtainless plate glass looking onto the street.

Aunt and uncle now led us out of the shop, up the street, and into a narrow alley. After several turnings leading us deeper into a warren of four- and five-story houses built with no thought of delivery van access—or even Cooper Mini access—we arrived at our destination, the newly constructed home of the uncle's good friend, a professor of law at the nearby National University of Science and Humanities.

It took me some time to realize the house was new, because it was not built with new materials. Oh, I suppose the concrete was newly poured and some of the flooring was new, but the plumbing and electrical fixtures, doors, banisters, and wood frames appeared to be salvaged from a tear down. When we came in, there appeared to be a party going on. Three adult couples were sitting around a recently finished meal—at an off-the-floor dining table. On a coffee table in front of a sofa were the remains of a tea party—pot, saucers, cups, dirty ash trays.

We new arrivals were invited to sit on the sofa and have some tea. A fresh pot was brought from the kitchen and poured into the unwashed cups in front of us and while we sipped, I was introduced around the room—the law professor, his wife, mother, father, friend, and pretty daughter Dieu Linh who spoke better English than my student and immediately began helping him translate for the family.

When the teapot ran low Linh led me on a tour of the house. As I've come to expect: a staircase up the middle and on each floor one room in the front and one room in the back. The front rooms were more desirable since they had windows looking out on the street (plus a narrow balcony with no railing of any kind). The back rooms only had windows looking onto the stairwell. Linh told me with convincing sincerity and warmth that if I preferred the front room she was now sharing with her younger sister, they would gladly take the smaller, darker, back room.

Despite feeling like a character in a story about a farmer's daughter, or maybe partially because of that, I realized this rental opportunity would not budge me from my current overpriced digs. Even if it hadn't been a hour's worth of pedaling from my colleagues and favorite hangouts, it had no privacy and very little charm beyond the considerable charm of the family itself who graciously offered to share their kitchen with me, to let me share meals with them at no extra cost, to install broadband cable and buy me a TV and any other furnishings I wanted, and to let me name my own rental rate. "It's not the money," the professor said, "but the relationship that's important." Or at least that's what his daughter told me he said. She later sent me an email that began: 'I'm very exciting to talk you! this is the first time I've talked to foreigner for long hours like that.'