Sounds Like

I’ve known Hung for sixteen of the twenty years he’s been in the US. He has four children, lives in Dorchester and owns three houses. He works hard now, but worked much harder when he lived in Vietnam or as he calls it, “My country.”

For twelve of those years I called him “Hung.” I didn’t say Hung, like hung by the neck. I tried to imitate his Vietnamese so I’d add my own musical lilt. And I’d do my best to leave off most of the “H’ as he does. I’d exhale forcefully, hit a high register and sound like, I guess, a donkey getting goosed.

I was never comfortable with my pronunciation, but it was the best I could do and then one day, I heard Hung tell someone on the phone his name was Hong. But not Hong as in Hong Kong. When he hung up, I said, “I’ve been calling you Hung all these years, why didn’t you tell me your name was Hong.” Again, I’d go easy on the ‘H’ and kind of bark it out.

I have no doubt if I was as close to the pronunciation of Hong as Joan is to John. And whatever it was I was saying before I switched to Hong, it was probably equally butchered. That’s why it didn’t surprise me when he said, “It doesn’t matter.”

Today, Hung and his son laid the Sand Mix, which is a mixture of concrete sand and Portland Cement, as substrate for the tile. Wednesday is an important day for the Kibbes because that will signify a huge step in the completion of the job – laying of the tile. But it’s an important day for me too, because I’m going to introduce Hung to multi-lingual Adam who will then help me with the proper pronunciation.

Doing the Deal

Hung exemplifies my utter confusion around money. This is the conversation we have at the end of every job and remember, this has been going on for years.

“How much do I owe you?”
“What do you think?”
“I think whatever you think.”
“You tell me how much.”
“I can’t tell you how much, it’s what the job is worth, Hung.”
“I don’t know, what do you think?”

Now I’m squirming and turning red, “Just tell me how much
I owe you”

This will continue until l’ve exhausted him, and he’ll finally say,
“How about six hundred?”

I’ll think to myself, that’s about half of what the job is worth; I’ve got to pay him more than that, “How about seven hundred?”
The deal closes when Hung replies, “How about six fifty?”

Diane reminds me that when I was asking him to price the Kibbe job, that I kept saying, “It’s not for me, charge what the job is worth.” He’s been tiling for twenty years and he knew the square footage of the job – small by his standards – yet he had to call me back with a price. When he did, it was about half of the so-called competing estimate.

Harder Work

Hung brought help, his twenty year old son. I shook his hand and noted that he looked like Matt after we ask him to take out the trash. Clearly, he did not want to be working with his father.

“We’re in the same boat.” Hung said to me. This after we commiserated about how our children get driven everywhere and how they would rather not work. For Matthew, that is work at home because he has had two jobs since he was fourteen and has missed maybe one day.

“When I was five or six I had to bicycle eight kilometers to school.”
I thought, here is the Vietnamese variation of walking six miles in the snow, but I can relate because I walked to school.

Then he said, “When I was fifteen to about twenty, I drove a tractor.”
I offered, that I too worked hard as a teenager. I thought to myself, Hung and I have a lot in common.

Then he said, “Many people in my country can’t go to school because they have little to eat. Each day they have to find their own food. Before school I would dive into the river and catch fish to eat. He held his fingers close together to show me how small the fish were.

I thought to myself, maybe different boats.

Mud job in progress.
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