Single White Female in Hanoi Read online

  The longans and rambutans that overflowed from bamboo baskets have gone. The vendors are now hauling a strange new fruit though the streets. It’s large and oval with an intense fuchsia colour and rudimentary leaves nestled to the body, like the stout German turnip known as kohlrabi. The weight of it in the baskets bends the bamboo yoke that lies across the shoulders of vendors, and the look of strain on their faces is keener than ever.

  At my little indoor market, the ancient women are dozing off behind new and strange produce, while other products have disappeared. Broccoli appears and so does a vaguely familiar kind of spinach. In the fruits section I notice the oranges and apples have gone, while guavas and jackfruit have appeared. To my delight, custard apples are now everywhere too.

  Zac introduces me to the delights of sinh to – a local style fruit frappe, thick as shaving foam and rich as ice-cream, which can be ordered at most cafes.

  Sinh to can be made from any fruit – banana, guava, watermelon, mango, but soursop, or its cousin, custard apple, seems to give it the best of all possible textures. Zac and I start to spend time in cafes experimenting with fruit combinations, and soon discover the mango and custard apple combo, a mixture of fragrance, flavour and texture that’s possibly unrivalled on the earthly plane.

  I begin to notice people on the street eating something I’ve never seen before. It appears to be a round white cheese with crushed black pepper broadcast throughout, and a deep pinkish rind. It looks delicious, but I have to concede my cheese hypothesis is unlikely. The Vietnamese don’t generally eat cheese. One day I finally put two and two together and come up with Dragonfruit. The fuchsia-coloured objects in the bamboo baskets are Hanoi’s most famous fruit. Beneath the cerise skin lurks a refreshing white flesh with tiny black seeds. My fascination with Dragonfruit blinds me to the fact of its tastelessness. I gorge myself on it for some time, before realising I don’t actually like it.

  In the first week of August, a blue marquee appears halfway along Pho Yen The, conjured there during the night. It juts well into the road. At the entrance, someone has affixed some large cut-out Chinese characters. A fleet of motorcycles sits alongside and strange melodies issue from its interior. Peering in, I see a ghetto-blaster, the source of the music, on a table, and people sitting around wearing white headbands. Some are weeping. Others are reading the daily papers. It’s a funeral. One of my countless neighbours has died. The unearthly, keening music continues all day, then all through the night.

  At the end of my street, I discover two new things: Vietnamese black coffee, which is powerful, cheap and legal, and its source, a little café on Nguyen Thai Hoc, just where it joins Pho Yen The. The café is a long gloomy room with a wall-mounted fan above each table and a baffling number of flies. Ordering involves waking the proprietor, an amiable old woman who dozes by day on the hard wooden bench near the counter.

  Problems with the coffee are twofold though – it issues dangerous-smelling fumes, and it seems to me excessively salty, although how much salt is too much, I can no longer say. I feel I’ve lost my judgement on such things. I expect milk would make it easier on the palette, but, outside of the five-star buffet at the Daewoo hotel, I haven’t seen milk yet in Hanoi.

  The coffee is not made in a machine, but poured out of a plastic bottle into a charred saucepan and heated over a gas burner at the counter. A glass of it choked down in the afternoon can propel me through two back-to-back classes at Global or UNCO, without so much as a glance at the clock. This is the clincher. I immediately begin to spend my spare time drinking coffee at the end of my street.

  Spending time at the end of my street means spending time hanging out with the xe om drivers. The truth is, I’ve already got a crush on one of them, the one with the husky voice, but I haven’t realised it yet. It’s unconscious. But all hell is about to break loose.

  The capture window

  In ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, King Oberon sprinkles ‘magic love drops’ into the eyes of the sleeping Titania, causing her to fall in love with the first person she sees when she wakes up. Unfortunately this is a guy with the head of an ass.

  In real life, I fear love potions are not always necessary to produce this effect, that under the right conditions most people can make equally blunderous choices unaided. I contend we’re slaves to circumstance in choosing when and with whom lust begins. It begins in the quiet time after previous lusts and loves have waned away. It may begin immediately, or it may bide its time. Sooner or later, the brain gives the signal. Down in the engine room, unnoticed by anyone, the old mechanism creaks into action …

  That’s when the Capture Window opens – unaided by Oberon’s magic drops – and whomsoever chances along in that time, within reason, will be captured in the crosshair of love’s sights. It’s a prosaic view of love’s magic, I know, but that’s how it seems to work for me.

  If I’m Titania, I’ve just woken up and spotted a semi-literate, happily married xe om driver.

  An American woman teaching at Global, who also turned up in Hanoi alone, later coined the term ‘xe om syndrome’ to describe what may be an actual phenomenon. The single female expat doesn’t notice how long she’s been deprived of intimacy until one day she mounts a motorcycle and finds herself straddling a muscular guy with a smooth brown neck. Only yesterday the driver was faceless, irrelevant – but today he seems to be wearing one of those pheromone scents men buy over the Internet.

  It needs to be said that xe om drivers usually smell good – a warm, musk smell. Improbably, it’s the smell of dried sweat. An Australian friend of mine who’s happily married to a European man once commented on this.

  ‘I know this sounds weird, but sometimes I get on the back of a xe om and I practically swoon with pleasure from the smell of the driver,’ she said, horrifying two well-to-do female expats with whom we were sharing our dinner table at a classy Italian restaurant. If rickshaw drivers smelled fantastic in India, perhaps it would be put down to the ingestion of fragrant spices – cardamon, cinnamon, ginger, cloves. In Hanoi the keynote aroma of most meals is Nuoc Mam – Vietnamese fish sauce. The allure of eau de xe om is a complete mystery.

  I’m on my way to a class at the UNCO school across town late one afternoon, when I notice the smooth brown neck that spells the beginning of my misery.

  Another observer describing Quan might report a solid, roundheaded man, past his youth, with slightly buck-teeth, small eyes, and a face set in a scowl.

  But if I once saw that man, his image is dissolved in this instant, beyond the reach of recollection. What I see hereafter is a dignified man with an exotic beauty. A man with mystery about him, introverted yet strong-willed. I see intelligent eyes that miss nothing and promise passion, lips made for kissing.

  Over the last fortnight we’ve been getting to know each other a bit better. As my xe om driver, he knows all the places I go to. This unspoken shared knowledge feels like a bond between us. If I say ‘di lam’ (go work) he takes me to the UNCO campus. If I say ‘di nha beo’ ‘go house fat’, he’ll head across town to Zac’s house.

  Driving around town, he tries assiduously to teach me Vietnamese, patiently repeating words or street names over and over for me to imitate. When we sit at the end of the street drinking coffee or tea he looks me in the eye and models syllables carefully in his singsong, husky voice for me to practise. I’m assailed by the familiar feeling of ants crawling over the surface of my heart.

  But some of this sensation originates from a second growing infatuation. I’m besotted with the sound of spoken North Vietnamese.

  It makes me behave like a stalker. I wish for invisibility in the street so I can stand close by and wallow in its presence. I hang under windows as people inside go about their private business, my ears alive for the uncanny vowel sounds and sudden yodels, for those seemingly impossible feats of utterance. These sounds electrify me in the way powerful music can.

  If English and Vietnamese share a common linguistic ancestor, this language
couldn’t have consisted of much more than grunts and squeals. The two tongues are about as similar as whale noise is to birdsong.

  It’s been said that when women speak Vietnamese they sound like birds singing, yet when men use the tongue, it strikes the ear like dogs barking. There’s something to be said for this, but even when the language is being barked – and it often is, by either sex – I’m transfixed and thrilled by the sound. Much of this mystique is because of the tones.

  I lived the vast majority of my life unaware of the existence of tone languages. Even when someone explained the principle to me once, I remained sceptical. The concept sounded so unlikely to me that I put it in the ‘linguistic myth’ category, along with the eskimos’ putative hundred words for snow. I doubted a language could evolve where the speaker had to memorise a tone in order to memorise the meaning of a word. I found myself musing on the concept rather a lot, though, and eventually looked up ‘tone languages’.

  That was how I learnt that, by using the five tones for the syllable ‘ma’ in Mandarin, in the right order, a person could form the (admittedly unlikely) sentence: ‘Is mother scolding the horse’s hemp?’

  And so I became fascinated with tone languages.

  Vietnamese, with six tones, has more tones than most of its East Asian neighbours. Learning to replicate the tones poses immense difficulties for Westerners. Even the one flat tone, which starts, stays and finishes on the same mid-level note, can be a great challenge when, for example, it’s the last word in a question. And due to how the language works, it often is. It takes immense concentration to stay on the one pitch, and such vagaries as a hangover or exhaustion can render it impossible.

  The second tone is a high rising tone, the third, a low falling tone – nothing too strange. But the remaining three are truly foreign to a European ear. One is a very short low-pitched tone, culminating in a dramatic glottal stop, and is sometimes known as the ‘low creaky tone’. Another, sometimes referred to as the ‘high creaky’ tone, starts low, rises, forms a glottal stop, then flies up into the high register. The last is a long, low musical tone that dips then rises.

  It’s these last three tones that give the language much of its maddening beauty. As a person speaks, their voice dances between fluttering glottal stops and long singsong syllables. I can’t imagine a language sounding more alien to my ear. This strangeness holds me captive in much the same way as the back of Quan’s neck.

  Quan and his wife base their existence around a room they hire near the open end of Pho Yen The. The room opens fully onto the street and is usually filled with motorcycles, which Quan repairs, although there are also a bed and a television. At night Quan locks the room by dragging two metal grill-gates across the front, padlocking each one securely.

  His wife, whose name is Oanh, looks like one of Gauguin’s Tahitian beauties, although a few years older. She laughs a lot, and operates a Pho stall out the front every morning. ‘Pho’ is a noodle soup made with fresh herbs and chilli and some kind of meat. It’s breakfast if you’re Hanoian. If I leave my place before 9.30am, I pass Oanh’s patrons. They line one side of my street, sitting on low plastic stools at plastic tables, slurping pho, talking, watching the street. Invariably, they stare at me.

  After nightfall, during these hot months, Quan and his wife relax in banana chairs on the sidewalk in front of the room and chat warmly. Sometimes their young daughter or teenage son joins them. Their dogs play-fight in the road. Quan keeps two dogs, the youngest of which is a playful black puppy. He seems to have bonded with the dogs, which sets him apart in Hanoi, where dogs are generally regarded as livestock. He’s even given the dogs names.

  All up, it’s a picture of an uncommonly happy family. Not only is there no evidence that Quan beats his wife, but sometimes, further defying local protocol, they even display affection in public. My new crush is an anomaly – I’ve never been attracted to a married man before – and a curse, it’s obvious. But I predict it will be short-lived. Any morning now, I expect to wake and find the spell broken.

  As far as Zac’s concerned, I’ve fallen for a guy with the head of an ass.

  It has started to rain. Quan has set up a tarpaulin awning and is fixing a motorcycle outside his room. His black puppy is biting the tyres happily. Water trickles in thin rivulets from the corners and into the rank midden of the gutter. We make eye contact.

  ‘Di Dau? (Where are you going?)’ he calls to me over the din of the rain.

  ‘Di Choi Piano,’ I call back, pointing to the music folder in my hand. Nguyet is back from her trip to Hue, and I’m walking to her place to play piano.

  Nguyet lives directly across Nguyen Thai Hoc, less than 150 metres from my place. I cross the main street and find her waiting at the gate with an umbrella to navigate me into the compound. It’s my first visit to a Hanoi family home and if I expected the unfamiliar, I’m not disappointed.

  Nguyet escorts me through a narrow paved area between two buildings and we emerge in a large internal courtyard. In a recess at the far end of the courtyard, besides a reeking passage about a metre across, is an old wooden door. Fallen flakes tell me it was once painted green. This is where we stop. Nguyet calls out and from within we hear the sounds of someone descending stairs. There’s fumbling with a lock and the door is opened by a thin peasant woman dressed in rags. She greets us shyly. She has a severe, beautiful face with burning eyes.

  Nguyet speaks to her and they both turn to me, smiling.

  ‘Nguyet, who is this?’ I ask her. I’m wondering whether this could possibly be Nguyet’s mother.

  ‘Her name, Lien,’ she replies, simply.

  Behind Lien is a dark room. I step in, and as my eyes adjust I see two motorcycles and various buckets and mops. There’s a showerhead set into the wall and I notice a soap dish nearby.

  Ahead of us is the foot of the concrete staircase. An array of well-worn plastic sandals and shoes sit on the bottom steps. At Nguyet’s request, I remove my shoes and don a pair of ill-fitting sandals then we head up to the main part of the house. The top of the stairs feeds into a room where a well-dressed woman considerably older than Lien is waiting. The woman clasps my hand warmly, greets me in Vietnamese, and seems delighted to meet me.

  ‘Carolyn, here is my mother,’ says Nguyet.

  Standing in the middle of the room is a small, beautiful, sad-looking man. He looks at me and shakes my hand too. I find myself wanting to hug him. He says nothing.

  ‘This, my father,’ adds Nguyet.

  At one end of the room is a closed door which I presume leads into the rest of the house. The other end leads into a tiny room so low, occupants have to double over to enter, and kneel once inside. It’s the kitchen. The gas burner sits on the floor beside a rack of plates and utensils. There’s no running water. Opposite the entrance to the kitchen is a local style bed – a low wooden dais with a bamboo mat on it. The mat is partly obscured by a pile of blankets.

  We gather at the dining table and Nguyet’s mother brings green tea and three little cups. She sits down and we talk about my experiences in Hanoi. The conversation is painstaking. Nguyet’s mother speaks no English, Nguyet’s father doesn’t speak at all and Nguyet’s English, while it has improved markedly since our first meeting, is still confined to basics. But I feel very welcome here.

  Nguyet speaks of her brother. He’s not yet married, but because of his studies at a distant university, he no longer lives here.

  ‘How many people live here?’ I ask her.

  ‘Only me, my mother, my father and my grandmother,’ she replies gesturing towards the bed outside the kitchen. I look again at the mat and realise the pile of bedding covers an elderly woman. She’s sleeping.

  When the brew in the pot begins to turn sour, Nguyet invites me to the music room. She takes me through the closed door into the next room where a small upright piano cowers against a wall.

  ‘From Italy,’ she says, lifting the lid gently. The name on the fallboard reads ‘Excelsior’. In
smaller fancy letters to the left below is the legend: ‘Made for the Tropics’. Undeterred by the yellow, uneven row of keys beneath, I play a few chords. It becomes immediately apparent that the tropics have brought this thing to its knees. Some of the notes, swollen by humidity, are stuck fast to their neigbours. Others collapse listlessly at my touch, or howl, jarringly out of tune.

  I pull out some jazz charts and we sit together on the stool. I play the chords and bass while, at the top end of the piano, Nguyet reads the melody from the stave. Despite everything, her piano is playable.

  Classically trained, Nguyet has never played this style of music before, although some of her friends play in a jazz quartet at a local hotel. After a few goes at each piece, she gets the hang of it. We play through ‘All of Me’, ‘Over the Rainbow’, ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ and a few bossa nova tunes, enjoying ourselves until hunger begins to distract us.

  Nguyet makes a couple of phone calls and discovers there’s another, lesser-known Buddhist vegetarian restaurant near the Old Quarter. We bid farewell to her mother, and I nod warmly at the maid, Lien, who has been wandering in and out with a bucket and damp cloth and is now lying on the bed besides the sleeping old woman. Lien stares at me with curious eyes.

  Downstairs, Nguyet hands me one of the ubiquitous two thousand dong plastic raincoats that appear in street stalls at the first sign of rain, then I watch in awe as she manoeuvres her motorcycle backward through the front door, executing an incident-free six-point turn against the alley wall a metre beyond it in order to steer it freely into the courtyard.

  At the restaurant I ask Nguyet what kind of work her father does. She shakes her head.

  ‘No. He cannot work now. Finish.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘He have motorbike accident. Terrible.’