Single White Female in Hanoi Read online

  SINGLE

  WHITE

  FEMALE

  IN HANOI

  SINGLE WHITE FEMALE IN HANOI

  Carolyn Shine

  First Published 2011

  This e-book edition 2012

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  95 Stephen Street

  Yarraville, Australia 3013

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  [email protected]

  Copyright © Carolyn Shine 2011

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Every effort has been made to obtain permission for excerpts reproduced in this publication. In cases where these efforts were unsuccessful, the copyright holders are asked to contact the publisher directly.

  Front cover photograph: Kip Scott

  Back cover photograph: Tara Winkler

  Map: Zvonko ‘Zonk’ Jovicic

  Design by Peter Lo

  Printed in China by Everbest

  Transit Lounge is a proud member of the A.P.A. (Australian Publishers’ Association) and S.P.U.N.C. (Small Press Underground Networking Community)

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Shine, Carolyn 1965-2012.

  Single white female in Hanoi / Carolyn Shine.

  1st ed.

  9781921924224 (e-book edition)

  Shine, Carolyn--Travel--Vietnam--Hanoi.

  Hanoi (Vietnam)--Social life and customs.

  Hanoi (Vietnam)--Description and travel.

  959.7044092

  ‘You take your life in your own hands, and what happens?

  A terrible thing: no one to blame.’

  Erica Jong

  Contents

  Home

  Baptism by soup

  Kind of blue

  All too perfect

  Heat poisoning

  Going global

  Ten green bottles and a pound of flesh

  Drop-dead gorgeous

  Waylaid

  Hanoians

  Please have peety

  Peasants with pitchforks

  Something is rotten

  Magic faraway land

  The capture window

  Deluge

  Tales of woe

  Genius boy

  The revelations of Hoa

  Arrogant

  When classes go awry

  The hottest chick in Hanoi

  Message from a chicken

  Patriot games

  Fellowship of the ring

  Ex-Adonis magnet

  Crush

  The interview

  ‘A moving horrible’

  Mooncakes

  Chuot

  Chopsticks of doom

  Foreign object

  Rat sack Zac

  A night of uninvited guests

  The Itchy and Scratchy show: Part I

  The Itchy and Scratchy show: Part II

  Leguma

  November

  Nga and Tuan

  Special medicine

  Farewells all round

  Quan

  Island of green, in a blue stream

  I see cold people

  Huong and Cuong

  Tet

  Excuse me while I kiss the tarmac

  Poor Ly

  Birthday

  Wedding

  Kim

  Fat lady sings for me and the fat man

  Bill’s new job

  The rise and rise of caboose

  One long, strange year

  Ring cycle

  Dinosaur!

  This is not a swan song

  Epilogue

  Glossary of Vietnamese terms used in this book

  Acknowledgements

  Dramatis Personae:

  (Main Vietnamese characters)

  Nga My landlady at Pho Yen The

  Tuan Her husband

  Xuyen Nga’s mother, who lives in the compound, with Ba Gia

  Ba Gia Nga’s childless great aunt

  Ly Tuan’s sister, who works at an English School

  Hien A homeless woman who lives outside my local supermarket

  Nguyet A friend of mine – a pianist and piano teacher

  Quan A xe om (motorcycle taxi) driver who lives on my street

  Lien Nguyet’s family’s maid

  My Linh A friend of mine – an offbeat woman with a mysterious job

  My time in Hanoi is drawing to an end. From the back of the motorcycle I watch the streetlights illuminating the incomparable madness on the streets. The chaos now so familiar, yet still as strange as the first time I laid eyes on it, a lifetime ago.

  No. Stranger. Stranger and more exotic with every passing day, with every new fragment of language learnt, with every piece of cultural knowledge gained. Stranger, like me.

  I picture myself arriving at Noi Bai airport. A suitcase heavy with mostly useless books and a single address on a piece of paper. Ignoring the insistent voice in my head. What the hell am I doing here?

  Home

  Hanoi’s Noi Bay Airport is little more than a shed – grimy and dilapidated. Customs officers, severe and unsmiling, sit before identical portraits of a saintly-faced Ho Chi Minh.

  High on the wall above these men in their drab olive uniforms are colourful back-lit screens advertising 5-star resorts and hotels. They have swimming pools, golf courses. I scan the visible flora for lurking hints of Vietnam, but the vistas are inscrutable, universal.

  Through the exhaustion, the sides of my mouth flex upwards a little. I’ve done it. On the other side of that wall lies terra incognita – an elongated ‘S’ of land, a beckoning finger of land, a land I’ll be calling ‘home’.

  The queues move slowly. Eventually we’re released into the morning heat haze. I jump into an air-conditioned taxi clutching a print-out of Yvette’s email, which includes my new address.

  I wonder what Yvette will look like. I’d never heard of her until a fortnight ago, when a woman I’d just met at a party gave me her email address. It was the nick of time. I was about to head to Hanoi without a place to live or a job, and my calm demeanour belied the gathering panic within. The two women had gone to school together in New Caledonia. Yvette was French, I learnt, but lived in Hanoi with her Vietnamese husband.

  Vietnamese husband. This phrase lingered, with promise. Not the marriage bit, exactly, but the idea of an inter-cultural romance. With my love life recently derailed, after more than a decade of serial good luck, I was ready to explore a lifelong attraction to South-East Asian men.

  Within two email exchanges, Yvette had organised for me to rent her old apartment, near the centre of town. She and her husband had moved further out, to a larger house.

  As we head into town I’m captivated by rice paddies, water buffalo, people wearing conical hats. Postcard Vietnam. Then we hit Hanoi and the pastoral view from the window dissolves into complete mayhem. The driver wants the address again. Number 6, Pho Yen The. He shakes his head. He can’t take me there without more information; it occurs to me that I might have to book into a hotel and email Yvette.

  My spirits falling fast, I study the email again, and notice some more Vietnamese – the words ‘Nguyen Thai Hoc’, further down the page, barely conspicuous among Yvette’s eccentric English. I point this out, and there’s a grunt of comprehension from the driver’s seat. I don’t know what he’s comprehended, but he now seems to know where to go.

  Nguyen Thai Hoc, it transpires, is a main street, and Pho Yen The, a cul-de-sac coming off it. Number 6 turns
out to be a compound of several dwellings, deep in the ‘sac’. We pull up at the gate and a sharp shout penetrates the glass window.

  ‘Nga oi!’ (Hey, Nga!)

  A loud ‘Oi’ is shouted back, then a tall Vietnamese man runs to the back of the taxi and starts removing my bags. A slender, serious-looking woman appears at my door and introduces herself before I can reel out, blinking into the steaming air. She’s Nga, my new landlady, and her husband, busy at the boot, is Tuan.

  We walk through a decaying wooden gate into the compound, past a mysterious three-foot-high wall enclosing a series of brick cells. We turn right through a wooden door and we’re in a cool dark staircase. My two groaning bags are heaved up to the first floor and through a doorway to the right, and I’m standing in my new living room.

  Yvette and her Vietnamese husband Khai are there, with a Parisian friend called Collette. There’s a round of hellos and introductions before a low stool is procured from somewhere and I’m gestured to sit down. Everyone looks larger than life, which I ascribe at first to my exhaustion, before realising it’s because we’re all lit by a large fluorescent tube high up on the wall.

  I look around. The room is small and not-quite-square. None of the walls are parallel, none of the corners 90 degrees. A massive whirling green fan occupies most of the high ceiling. There’s some bamboo furniture, a low glass coffee table, and a desk, above which is a window overlooking a neighbour’s rooftop laundry area, providing little sunlight. The remainder of the light in the room blares down from the fluorescent tube. In the far corner is a noisy refrigerator.

  Noticing the shining faces around me, I look down and see, to my surprise, that sweat beads have formed across my chest. I’m surprised because, for reasons I’ve never known, I don’t tend to sweat at all, not even in a sauna.

  Had I researched things a little more thoroughly, I would have learnt that arriving in Hanoi on the first of July has put me right at the start of the monsoon season.

  Tuan hands me a small bottle of a lurid orange fizzy drink, and then to my relief, offers me a cigarette. Common ground. We sit smoking in the wet air. The fan blows ash all over the room.

  ‘’Ow was your journey, okay?’ Yvette.

  ‘Did you eat yet?’ Khai.

  ‘Carolyn, how old are you?’ Nga.

  ‘Do you feel tired?’ Khai again.

  The questions continue, both polite and curious. It takes concentration – Yvette’s English is surprisingly patchy. Khai’s is probably better, but his pronunciation makes him harder to understand. Tuan speaks no English at all, and Nga’s English strikes me at the time as very limited.

  The finality of what I’ve done to my life now hits me and a feeling of dislocation begins to take hold. I’m in a strange room in a strange country among strangers, but this is now my home, and these are my only acquaintances. The fluorescent lighting and the lack of soft surfaces anywhere underline the foreignness of my new setting.

  I try to project my future self in this scenario. And I fail. I have a brief image of my friends and my apartment in Sydney, my cat, my piano, my Van Gogh prints, my music collection, my plants, then, with a blink, I’m in Hanoi – even the name is still strange to me – and there’s nothing I relate to. Perhaps sensing my plummeting mood, the congregation departs.

  ‘I come back with Khai in one hour,’ Yvette tells me before heading down the stairs, ‘and we take you for the lunch.’ I hear a chorus of roars outside as my welcome party rev their motorbikes out of the compound. The sound fades into the general din. My heart is pounding.

  Alone, I wander the apartment. Attached to the living room is a tiny windowless kitchen with a small basin, a cupboard and an electric stove. It’s unstocked and looks barely useable. On the other side of the landing is my bedroom, which adjoins a small balcony and an en-suite bathroom. The bathroom has a sink, shower and toilet, and is paved in well-scrubbed white tiles. Definitely useable, although the shower is unenclosed, so the room will get soaked whenever I use it.

  Everything is clean, and high, stuccoed ceilings and terracotta floor tiles give the apartment a nice, if deceptive, spaciousness.

  I unpack a few things. A friend had flown down from Brisbane, on the eve of my departure, to help me pack. I now see the prudency of her decision to make me bring white things and cotton things. I’m not so sure about the ten or so pairs of fancy nylon tights though. There’s a large, ugly wooden wardrobe in the bedroom with a stiff drawer in the base of it. I hang a few garments and put others on the shelves. I throw the nylon tights into the drawer (their extraordinary fate is some way away). I put some familiar things in the bathroom and grimace at the kitchen. I set up my CD player and two little speakers my mother lent me, and put on the Rickie Lee Jones album ‘Pirates’. Her sweet voice bounces agreeably around the room, mixing with the sounds of kids playing in the street outside the gate. The panic has subsided, and now a restless excitement is gathering inside me.

  A place of my own.

  Over the next days, weeks and months, I’ll discover that ‘a place of my own’ is a loony Western concept not applicable in Hanoi. Nga and Tuan have keys to the apartment, as does Nga’s mother, which also gives access to Nga’s younger brother, who lives somewhere in the compound.

  Things will start to appear in my apartment. One day I’ll find a second phone in the bedroom; another, that the furniture has been rearranged in the living room and an antique table added. Occasionally I’ll come home to find that tradesmen have taken over my living room or bedroom. They’ll yell at each other in Vietnamese and drop cigarette ash everywhere. They’ll stare at me and make amused remarks to each other. Nga will refer to my apartment as her apartment.

  One weekend I’ll go away and return to find Nga and Tuan putting the finishing touches of varnish on all the wooden doors.

  ‘Oh. We think you come back next week!’ Nga will exclaim by way of greeting. ‘This smell very strong. Not good healthy. Maybe you must not sleep here tonight.’ She doesn’t offer me another option.

  On the landing between my two rooms I notice a strange smell gathering. It’s the smell of rotting animal. I sniff a few times and walk back into the living room. The smell is there too, insinuating itself greasily into the air. In the bedroom, it’s worse. Disconcerted, I set myself to the task of arranging my CD collection.

  I’ve just finished this when Yvette, Khai and their friend Collette return and call me down. At the bottom of the stairs I step through the wooden door into the compound and find a stout middle-aged woman at my feet. She’s squatting over a wok, which is on a gas burner. Lunch. She stirs the grisly-looking ensemble with long chopsticks, but her attention is on me – focussed into a forbidding stare. Her dull black hair is short, apparently dyed and apparently permed, and she has the face of a gargoyle from a Peking opera. I smile and nod at her, but her expression remains as stony as a basilisk, and I eventually look away, shocked.

  ‘Don’t worry about her,’ Yvette says, touching my arm.

  But a great part of my shock has come from the realisation that the contents of her wok are the source of the smell that nearly sent me fleeing from my apartment. It’s my first encounter with Nuoc Mam, the local fish sauce.

  Yvette rides with Khai, I climb onto the back of Collette’s motorcycle and we take off. No one wears a helmet, so conversation and smoking can take place. Yvette tells me about our destination from her pillion seat – an up-market French-owned café on a historic street near the city’s Old Quarter.

  When we arrive, my escorts hand their bikes over to a man on the street, and I wonder if the vehicles were hired, and are now being returned. I don’t yet know that bikes must be supervised at all times when parked in Hanoi. All businesses employ someone to Trong xe (‘mind vehicle’) on their patch of sidewalk.

  Inside the café we join a large French crowd. In an unlikely twist of fate, the first meal I eat in Vietnam is a delicious Indian curry, with homemade buffalo cheese in it.

  The French folk
are friendly but prefer to speak their own language. I decide I’m going to have to brush up on my French, which has two decades of rust clinging to it. But this turns out not to be necessary, since after a couple more polite invites, the French crowd drop me like a hot pomme de terre. At the time I wonder if it’s something I said – or rather, did, since as a non-French-speaker, my presence at their gatherings is mostly decorative, but later I learn this is the normal procedure with non-French-speaking add-ons to the social circle.

  The social scene for expats in Hanoi, I’ll learn, divides roughly into two groups: French-speakers and The Rest, whose default language is English.

  Until my fall from grace, however, Yvette, is a model of hospitality. She’s in her mid-twenties and, with her fair hair and glasses, quite unassuming. She dresses very casually and wears no make-up. But she’s warm, and once you begin to notice her, very attractive, with that cosmopolitan charisma I’ve often found in young French people.

  Later in the afternoon, Yvette arrives to take me shopping at a supermarket just up the road. This seems perfectly normal. I’ve no idea that this is one of only five, relatively new supermarkets in the entire city. Hanoians don’t shop at supermarkets. They buy their groceries in the street, without getting off their motorbikes. Eight months after my arrival, Hanoi’s first shopping mall will open, but after a dangerously crowded opening ceremony, business will be scant. Most of the people milling around will be families who have left the rice paddy, travelling many hours to see first-hand the legendary ‘moving stairs’ – Hanoi’s first public escalator.

  Yvette and I spend nearly an hour and about US$50 at the supermarket buying kitchen essentials, such as plates, pots, and pans – replicas of things I threw out of my Bondi apartment 36 hours earlier.

  I while away the rest of the day setting up the place a bit more, then, just before 7pm, I fall into a sleep so deep that I don’t surface for twelve hours.

  Baptism by soup

  There’s something to be said for being in new places. Accidental death notwithstanding, it extends your life. Subjectively, that is. When you go to a new place, your brain has to make so many new neural connections that, experientially, time elongates. Maybe that’s why time passes so slowly when you’re a child, too – so much information going in, being laid down like a map.