Single White Female in Hanoi Page 11

  But for now – with August nigh– there should be plenty more monsoon behaviour to come. Students have told me August is a time of fierce rains and flooding.

  Students are becoming a prime source of information now. It seems teaching English in a foreign country is the fastest way to learn the ropes.

  My advanced adult class at UNCO gives me a window into the culture, although the glass can be very streaky. I take my questions and queries into the classroom – and sometimes they lead to grand discussions that occupy most of the lesson period.

  Since the initial shyness receded, opinions have started to emerge. I catch the odd glimpse of an open mind, a thirst for knowledge. But other attitudes seem entrenched and intractable.

  In last night’s class we discussed the old chestnut ‘A woman’s place is in the home’.

  Today I’m still mulling that hour and a half. In particular, one highly educational segment. The education, of course, was mine. The short scene replaying in my mind runs like this:

  I’ve asked the men how many of them would prefer to have been born female. There’s an avalanche of chortling.

  ‘That is a ridiculous question,’ a smirking, rather macho guy called Cong tells me. ‘Of course, no man would prefer this.’

  I look to the other guys. They look away. The discussion is over.

  So I pose the opposite question to the women.

  ‘How many of you would prefer to be a man?’

  An outbreak of excited discussion in Vietnamese suggests this question has never been put to them before.

  About half of them eventually raise a hand. A fair choice, I muse, considering the division of labour I’ve observed.

  Life in Hanoi takes place on the street. Men loiter in small groups on busy corners with basic tools and an air-compressor, ready to repair, re-fuel or re-tread any troubled two-wheeled vehicles. Beside them are women washing clothes in big sudsy metal pails, men playing cards, women sweeping, one hand held behind their back, men drinking beer and smoking rough tobacco through large bamboo bongs, women selling fruit from 50 kilo baskets yoked across their shoulder, men sleeping in hammocks. It may look like a ‘Where’s Wally’ picture at first, but there’s an underlying order that Martin Handford’s eccentric illustrations lack. On average, the loungers, loiterers, beerers and bongers are all male.

  ‘So – you’re happy to be a woman?’ I ask one of the abstainers. She shrugs.

  ‘It is the woman duty serve her husband,’ she replies. Other women nod in agreement.

  ‘Mmm … and you’re … happy to do this?’ I ask her in a tone that registers my bafflement. Apart from the jarring sentiment, like so many replies I’ve been hearing lately, hers didn’t seem to address the question. I had presumed the canon of question-answering was universal, trans-cultural. Apparently it’s not, because in Vietnam, a viable answer to the question: ‘Do you prefer frog porridge or fish porridge?’ is ‘Yes.’

  The other women giggle at my reaction. ‘Of course,’ the abstainer says, smiling. The outspoken Pham, who’s sitting over on the male side of the room, elucidates.

  ‘It is an honour for the woman to look after her husband,’ she tells me. ‘ … To make the food for him and his parent and to have children. Children are our future. The wife feel happy when she do this.’

  The semester of women’s studies I undertook as a bright-eyed student in my early twenties comes crashing down about my feet. There I was learning about why the pronoun ‘I’, as a phallic symbol, is a patriarchal affront to our language, when, more than a decade later, a member of Vietnam’s educated elite tells me it’s an honour to live life as a domestic drudge.

  I ask myself – is this the result of brainwashing, or a pandemic of Stockholm syndrome – where the captive becomes willingly and perversely subservient to the needs of the captor? Or is this simply a viable opinion suffering harsh judgement at the hands of my own skewed and selective Western sense of morality? Is it wrong to want to be a good wife?

  I’m not blessed with the capacity for certainty; it’s not in my make-up. And now, with my previous convictions taking on water, I’m beginning to succumb to a deep philosophical confusion.

  In fact, the duties that await a wife are more onerous than I know at this time.

  After her wedding, a Vietnamese bride traditionally moves out of her parent’s home, where she has spent every night since her birth, sharing a bed with her mother, where she has eaten each day of her life with her family, and she moves to the house of her husband’s family. Although I never see any evidence of it, I imagine this must cause considerable trauma for both daughter and parents. But that’s not all. At the new residence she becomes the property of her in-laws, and the burden of domestic duties now includes looking after them.

  Once I understand this, many things become clear. Clearest of all is the relief and joy expressed by parents who have a baby boy. In a year, a Vietnamese friend of mine and his pregnant wife will learn from an ultra-sound test that their baby is male. My friend, who’s a thoroughly modern and well-educated man, will celebrate, because, he says, a boy child has ‘higher status’.

  Whereas once I would have taken umbrage at this, I come to sympathise. When you look at it their way, a girl is basically a waste of resources. You clothe her, feed her, educate her, and then lose her completely on her wedding day. A son, on the other hand, is a good solid investment and a virtual guarantee of home help later on down the track.

  Last night’s class has been timely, dovetailing dangerously with my growing disenchantment.

  My ‘get-up-and-go’ deficit is running towards weariness, owing as much to the social climate as to the meteorological one. I’m being incrementally worn down by a failure to connect with the locals. There’s clearly more than just the language barrier in the way.

  With the exception of Nga’s mother, Xuyen, who enters the compound regularly to cook in the tiny dark kitchen next to my downstairs door, the women in my compound glare at me when I pass. Sometimes I return their glares with big friendly grins and a ‘hello’, just for the sport of watching the glare turn several degrees sourer. It’s a loser’s game in the end though. In exchange for a freak-show, the entertaining sight of a hissing human gargoyle, I’m reminded of the unfortunate truth. For some of the population here at least, I’m not just a foreigner, I’m a foreign object.

  Yet it’s the reaction from the male of the species that can really dampen a girl’s spirit. In general, I’m either invisible or the subject of leering fascination.

  Time spent on the street is time spent in the unflattering gaze of groups of guys who point, snigger, call out words, and then snigger some more. Without knowing the language it’s hard to be sure, but I can feel echoes of behaviour I witnessed at high school.

  As a fat man, Zac is as much a target as a Western woman. Everywhere he goes, men point, stare and laugh openly, and inevitably he hears that word – ‘beo’ – fat. This contributes to the permanent and sometimes unnerving racial antagonism he bears when outdoors, and which will eventually help drive him from Hanoi.

  While I look sadly at these men and see good-looking idiots, Zac’s appraisal is excoriating, although the fact is, his idea of a good-looking guy is Lou ‘The Hulk’ Ferrigno. Where I see almond eyes, full lips, white teeth, smooth coffee-coloured skin covering taut muscular bodies, high cheekbones, thick shiny hair, lean hips, Zac sees diminutive, sallow-chested half-children, hirsute facial moles, filthy five centimetre-long fingernails, cretinous expressions and behaviour.

  Zac worships all things Japanese, and has an unlikely cultural affinity with China, but he won’t let Vietnamese men touch him.

  He likes to draw his audience’s attention particularly to those twin horrors: the cultivated hairy mole, and the talon-like fingernails. While it’s true I’ve been baffled and bothered by the predominance of facial moles with long hairs growing out of them, I’ve seen long fingernails on men in other parts of Asia and been charmed.

  But Za
c’s revulsion is contagious and eventually takes its toll on my enchantment.

  More damning still is his assertion that wife-beating is common practice in Vietnam. He supplies numerous anecdotes to prove it, but I remain sceptical – until observation and stories from Vietnamese friends seem to confirm it.

  In fact, during my time in Hanoi, a World Bank-supported survey will find up to 20 per cent of Vietnamese households to be affected by ‘gender-based violence’. Anecdotal evidence puts the figure much higher. Tu Giang, one of the country’s top journalists described his as ‘a society where a man can bash his wife with virtual impunity.’ Vietnam at this time is one of only five out of sixteen regional nations with no specific law against domestic violence.

  Zac’s disdain is beginning to infect Natassia too, and she’s upset about this.

  ‘Why did I not see this stuff before?’ she demands of him. We’re in the Global staffroom. She’s just suffered jeering and harassment and witnessed a guy hit his girlfriend, all while riding to Global on a recently acquired bicycle.

  ‘You didn’t notice it because you didn’t have a bicycle,’ Zac explains patiently. He’s been forced to use a bicycle here since he refuses to get on a xe om and doesn’t ride a motorcycle. Zac’s theory is that bicycle riders, as a result of their slower speed, are able to observe more. As far as he’s concerned, this can only be a bad thing.

  This afternoon, however, my own state of disillusionment is tempered with anticipation. The mould-sponging routine did not arise spontaneously. I discovered the creeping mildew while rummaging through my wardrobe for something stylish to wear tonight.

  It’s the last Saturday in July. I’ve been in Hanoi for one month, and there’s a party to go to.

  I’ll be turning up with Cassie and Bryn – an Australian couple travelling through Vietnam. They arrived in Hanoi earlier today with my phone number, supplied by a mutual friend in Sydney. Natassia will be there. Zac was invited, but declined on the grounds that he dislikes parties.

  ‘What’s in it for me?’ was his reasonable reaction. As a non-drinking, non-smoking, non-dancing, offensive man, I appreciate that his presence would benefit nobody.

  The party is at the house of a young Australian guy called Justin. He teaches English at Global and arrived in Vietnam about a fortnight before I did, with his sister and her boyfriend, which meant he had a ready-made social group that seemed to expand with alarming rapidity. Committed drinkers, they knew what I didn’t – the thing to do in a new town is find out where people go to drink.

  Anyone who stays in the Old Quarter quickly discovers the Bia Hoi (street beer stall) on the corner of Ta Hien and Luong Ngoc Quyen streets, where expats, backpackers and locals alike meet to drink local beer at about US12 cents a glass. From there it’s only a short stagger to at least three Western-style bars where a person can drink on through the night.

  My problem is that unlike most new arrivals, I didn’t start out in a hotel in the Old Quarter, where all the action is. Instead, I went straight from the airport to my apartment, out of range, and was shown around by a French woman with her own, very separate social group. And I didn’t even think to go looking for Westerners. With blinding naïveté, I expected to be socialising exclusively with locals while in Vietnam.

  Before the party, Cassie, Bryn and I wander the neighbourhood to buy a bottle of alcohol to take along. Eventually we find an old shop selling dusty bottles of spirits with Vietnamese labels. There’s nothing familiar. We select a bottle of locally-made vodka. It seems alarmingly cheap, but the other options look like rocket fuel.

  We climb out of a taxi ten minutes later, and walk into a groovy-looking four-storey house. In the large downstairs area, music is pumping and groups of people are scattered around talking and smoking. There’s a cool-looking guy DJ-ing behind what looks like a bar area. We hand over our bottle of Vietnamese Vodka to Justin, who’s mixing drinks there.

  ‘Whoah! Cheapskate!’ he exclaims when he sees the label. He opens a fridge and pulls out a bottle of Absolut.

  ‘Here, have one of these,’ he says, pouring me a generous glass, which I need merely to dampen my mortification. I resolve to leave no paving untrodden in a quest to find Hanoi’s bottle-shop district.

  I take a look around the room. It resembles the closing scene from feel-good Hollywood films such as Groundhog Day, where all the film’s disparate characters end up at a big party and have a shin-dig together. Jim and Irene, the two Russian English teachers from Global are knocking back vodkas in the corner. Hanging at the bottom of the stairs, chatting comfortably with another girl, is Alexa, the Kiwi girl I befriended in the Old Quarter. Behind the sofa, on which Natassia is relaxing glamorously, I spy the unmistakable proportions of Davey, the wall-eyed English teacher from the UNCO school.

  In fact, this is the closing scene for July. The party marks the end of my social isolation.

  I circulate enjoyably, touching base every thirty or so minutes with Natassia to report any new intelligence. Someone is walking round with shots of tequila on a tray, so the night grows blurrier. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m in Hanoi.

  Standing at the bar for a refill, I find myself smiling benevolently around the room and my eyes make contact with one of Davey’s. His emerald iris is sinking into a network of crimson capillaries. He grins and shambles over.

  ‘Hi Davey’ I say.

  ‘How do you know my name?’ is the friendly response.

  ‘Oh, we’ve met,’ I tell him. ‘How are your plans to go to Taiwan?’

  ‘Great! I’m off in two weeks!’

  I feel happy for the guy. And happy for Justin, who’s just opened a drawer and found a forgotten stash of grass in there. And happy for Jim and Irene, the Russians, who have just moved their vodkas aside and begun to kiss across the table.

  And happy for Alexa, who tells me she’s found a fantastic house with two other vegetarians. There’s a bedroom for me if I want to move in, she tells me. I consider, but decline, realising with some surprise that I’ve become attached to my neighbourhood – to Ba Gia, to Nga’s visits, to the xe om drivers at the end of the street, the one with the husky voice in particular, and to the little girls who play in the cul-de-sac and always say ‘hello?’ with a rising tone when they see me.

  As the night draws on, the crowd migrates to a large bedroom upstairs. There’s a queen-sized bed and a large hammock too. It’s the bedroom of a cute young guy from Akron, Ohio. His name is Leo, and he has energy to burn. He entertains the room by playing didgeridoo on a vacuum cleaner hose, pausing only for a shot or a toke.

  Joints are circulating, but most of the pot is being pulled through the dry bamboo bongs used to smoke tobacco on the street, so that there are outbreaks of uncontrollable coughing from around the room. People are starting to slur their words a little. Intense conversations break out in every corner of the room, then fade away as speakers lose their train of thought. Somebody again admires the Valentine ring on my right ring finger, wondering at the turquoise stone. ‘It’s tourmaline,’ I tell them as they drift off into anonymity. Soon, guests start to pair off in twos.

  If I’m looking for a one-night-stand with a foreigner, I’m spoilt for choice tonight. Several guys have already signaled interest. But unlike other female expats here, I’m focussed on finding a local partner. I’m realising how this fact separates me.

  The cyclic throb of the hoseridoo inspires my guest, Bryn, to perform some Aboriginal-style dancing and he acts out a series of Australian animals. His girlfriend Cassie is engrossed in a conversation with a Finnish guy. I smooch half-heartedly in the hammock with an American journalist, while on the balcony outside, Natassia has found a tall English expat for company.

  When the good liquor runs out, Justin goes downstairs and brings up the Vietnamese Vodka. As the person who brought it, I’m made to drink two shots in a row. The stuff has a strange chemical sweetness – not entirely unpleasant, but not Vodka either.

  But Leo from Ohio st
eals the night.

  ‘Man,’ he tells Cassie, Bryn and me in the small hours. ‘I love this town. I’ve never had so much fun in my life.’

  A few others have gathered around, and there are whoops of agreement.

  ‘Back home,’ says Leo, ‘I’m no one. Here, I’m a fucking rich man!’

  With an exultant ‘Yeehaa’ of invincibility he jumps the banister to the ground floor in a single leap, breaking his ankle in two places. He’ll fly to Bangkok tomorrow for surgery, but for now, the party goes on. We head out to a bar and drink till sunrise.

  Magic faraway land

  Anyone who ever read Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree series as a child would relate to the way Hanoi can transform itself overnight. In the books, three kids discover a very special tree in an enchanted forest. Up high in the branches of this tree is a portal to a strange and magical land. They explore the land and have adventures there. But one day soon after, they climb the tree to discover their magic land has moved on – and been replaced by a different one.

  Hanoi is what you’d find at the top of the Faraway Tree. Sometimes, while everyone’s asleep, it seems to pack itself up and move on, to be replaced by a similar land – ‘same, same, but different.’ There’s no predicting what will lie outside my compound when I walk through the gate each morning.

  One morning I step outside and find my path blocked by a towering sand dune that wasn’t there when I got home the evening before. Sullen men in uniform are guarding it. They watch indifferently as I edge around it. When I return that evening the pile and its sentinels have vanished.

  With August afoot, Hanoi has a new look. Decorations have been hung, overnight, across Nguyen Thai Hoc, beautiful starry patterns in lights that are switched on in the evenings. The public address speakers are broadcasting more information than usual to the streets, including, sometimes, choirs of children singing nationalistic-sounding tunes. Like all streets, Pho Yen The has its own ‘propaganda’ post, situated halfway along the short street, and it crackles into action at seemingly random intervals.