Single White Female in Hanoi Read online

  Nguyet and I head over the road to her place and bash out a few tunes together on the piano, then I squeeze myself down the tiny, malodorous passage that leads from beside her front door to a point only a few metres away from Global. When I emerge onto the street, I’m singing out loud, attracting the attention of the young topless guys hosing motorbikes along the sidewalk. Uncowed, I stare back, eying their taut chests and small dark nipples, unsettling them. The heat of the day has subsided, the siesta and the music have energised me. As I climb the sand-coloured stairs to Global I’m tingling once again with that singular intoxication, like an anticipatory thrill, that I’ll always associate with Hanoi.

  ‘Ahh, Miss Carolyn! You look very young today!’ the administration girls coo in chorus when I walk, beaming, through the entrance. The edges of my smile sag a little. It’s the regularity of this remark that bothers me.

  Lan runs out from behind the reception desk to grab my hands in hers. She looks at me with clubbed harp-seal eyes.

  ‘Please, Miss Carolyn. Today you teach a different class. You teach Zac class.’

  I groan loudly and my spirits lose further altitude. Zac was right. He warned me a week ago this would happen but I didn’t believe him.

  ‘Lan!’ I whine. ‘I have my favourite class now. I’ve prepared a very interesting lesson.’

  ‘Oh! What a peety!’ she offers, handing me the follow-up register for Zac’s class. I glance at it and see the last teacher, also a substitute, hasn’t bothered to fill in any information about the last lesson. ‘You please teach Chapter Two,’ is her final utterance on the subject, before scurrying back to her place on the other side of the desk.

  I happen to know that Zac has told the college twice, once by phone and once in person, that he couldn’t take this class today. But, of course, they forgot to organise a replacement teacher.

  I groan again when I remember Zac’s description of the class he has gladly relinquished for a mysterious and lucrative new private student. ‘A particularly dumb-arse class. Only one cute chick’.

  Chang, a lively girl from my class, walks up to me at this moment, smiling broadly.

  ‘Hello Miss Carolyn! The class very excited when you come to teach us. You are favourite teacher of my class,’ she says. It’s perfect timing. I hope Lan is listening.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t teach you today, Chang. I must teach a different class,’ I look to see if Lan is paying attention, but she seems to be busy in a pile of papers.

  ‘Oh no! So who will teach our class today?’ If only Lan would look up. The girl’s eyes are practically filling up.

  ‘I don’t know, Chang, but I’m sure it will be a good teacher, right Lan?’ Lan smiles absently. I marvel at the strange logic of this arrangement, but I’ve learnt better than to demand logical explanations here. Lan will just talk me round in ever-decreasing circles until I tire and give up, confounded.

  I head down the corridor to the photocopy room, where harried Huong screams and lunges at me with her usual enthusiasm. She actually puts her hands on my shoulders and jumps up and down with excitement when she sees me. Huong has a low hairline and a nose like a potato, set in a veneer of sallow, troubled skin, but her smile shines out warm and true.

  ‘Mit Carolyn. How are you? You look so beautiful today! And your dret so beautiful,’ she marvels at my Thai silk skirt, running her fingers across the fabric.

  Zac and I adore Huong. She’s the friendliest and most reliable person around and treats the foreign staff with reverence. Natassia, who’s strangely immune to flattery, sees her as a gushing flapping duck. It’s true that Huong tends to flap around a lot, apologise excessively, and gush easily. And she herself will remind you that she is neither intelligent nor beautiful. But she seems to bear her lot with a stoicism befitting the untouchables of India. She’s made of different stuff to the porcelain-skinned beauties at the front desk, and she knows it, without bitterness or jealousy.

  Huong checks the name of the class I’m to teach – I16a, and scans the follow-up register, then hands me the book and the tape.

  ‘Chapter Two,’ she says. ‘I hope you will have good lesson.’

  In the classroom I walk down the aisle that separates the two halves of the small room. At desks on either side, the students are all sitting in perfect silence. There are twelve of them, six male, six female, but they don’t seem to have gelled as a group. Wherever possible they’ve spread out, taking a desk each. When I call the role they respond without laughing at my mispronunciations, which unsettles me.

  Miraculously, the tape is cued up properly. Chapter Two. I press play and the lesson begins. The students listen soundlessly as some American college students discuss their recent skiing holiday in Aspen, Colorado. The sound quality is poor. I play through it twice at full volume. Next, a voice asks some comprehension questions, to which students must write answers in the spaces provided in their textbooks.

  After this, I ask selected class members to read out their answers. They score very well. We move to the next exercise. The students are quiet as the grave, but the lesson, stultifyingly boring and thoroughly irrelevant, seems to be running smoothly.

  We’re half an hour into it when the first wheel falls off. I happen to check a student’s book to ensure he’s writing in the correct answers, and I notice he’s filled in not only the answers for this exercise, but for the next one too. And the next one.

  ‘Why do you have these answers here?’ I ask him, baffled.

  ‘We do this one already,’ he replies, sullenly.

  ‘We? I’m sorry? What do you mean?’

  ‘We already do Chapter Two,’ he says.

  I look at the other students. They stare back.

  ‘Have you all done this chapter before?’ I ask the class. Yes, they have.

  ‘Why didn’t somebody tell me?’ I say, irritated. Silence. ‘Which chapter are you up to?’

  ‘Chapter Three,’ says a girl with pencilled eyebrows, in a customs official voice. Her angular face is insolent. This is Zac’s ‘one cute chick’, I’m certain of it.

  It occurs to me that they would have sat through the entire lesson in silence, then queued to complain about me to the staff afterwards.

  I yank the cassette tape from the machine and run back to Huong. She apologises needlessly as I return the unlabelled tape, which is in a cover marked ‘Chapters 1 and 2’, and she hands me an identical one in a cover marked ‘Chapters 3 and 4’.

  I run back to the class, put the tape in the deck and hit play. ‘Why is Hiroyuki confused when Hank says ‘I hope you like turkey’?’ a voice asks.

  I can’t find this bit in the book, so I rewind a bit. There’s deadly silence coming from the classroom behind me. I hit play.

  We hear a Texan voice say: ‘You don’t have Thanksgiving in your country! Wow!’ Choking down my rising panic, I scour the bootlegged textbook in front of me. I can’t see anything on Thanksgiving in Chapter Three, or Chapter Four. The students sit mute.

  I hit rewind again, and hover over the deck. I can hear myself breathing slightly too fast. The little motor chugs and whirrs as it pulls the tape backward across the heads. Chug. Chug. The silence of the class behind me seems preternatural. I don’t know what to do with this dead time. It’s like the perilous ‘dead air’ on a radio show when something goes wrong. I wince as I peer into the plastic window and see the tape is only halfway back to the beginning. The noise of the spinning cogwheels is joined by the click, click, click of a student playing with a pen behind me. I freeze, perched over the machine, my back to the classroom. If it was a normal class I could tell them to discuss their weekend with the person next to them. I drum my fingernails on the wooden desk. A student clears her throat and murmurs something in Vietnamese. It’s pencilled-eyebrow-girl, I suspect.

  Finally, with a hissing noise, the cassette hits the leader-tape, and the machine stops.

  I hit play again, move to the chair and sit down. We hear the grandiose introductory music that
precedes each new chapter. It’s an overture with lots of brass and woodwind, about thirty seconds long. Then a jolly Texan voice booms:

  ‘Welcome to Chapter Ten.’

  Cursing aloud, I swipe the tape out of the deck and tear back down the aisle between the silent rows of desks and out the door. Huong apologises abjectly while frantically opening drawer after drawer of cassette tapes. The covers are marked, but the cassettes are not. Finally she gasps a relieved ‘Aaaahhh!’ and gives me another cassette in a cover marked ‘Chapters 3 and 4’.

  ‘This one, correct one,’ she explains.

  I run back to the class and repeat the last routine, whisking the tape backward and forward in a sick panic trying to find Chapter Three. I fail. It’s missing entirely. The tape only has Chapter Four.

  I teach them Chapter Four. The students are fuming, but I no longer care, and nor does anyone else who matters. The students were going to complain about me anyway. I just want to sign the book that means I get paid, and go home. The main thing, I reflect with nauseous relief, is that Nguyet was not here to witness this.

  The hottest chick in Hanoi

  ‘And which one’s supposed to be the ‘cute chick? – is it the bitch with the pencilled eyebrows?’ I demand of Zac, who’s seated directly opposite me at the table.

  He wipes his face with the napkin and catches his breath. He’s alarmed nearly everyone in the restaurant, my friends in particular, by thumping his fist down onto the table and stamping his foot in mirth the whole way through the miserable tale of my lesson with his class.

  ‘Caz. What’s your point?’

  ‘My point is, she’s horrible.’

  ‘Tell that to my erect cock.’

  ‘Zac!’ Natassia hisses, looking around at the other guests. It occurs to me that Natassia’s English vocabulary extends into areas I didn’t know about.

  ‘Sorry Nats, but Caz obviously didn’t notice her tits,’ Zac says, chastened.

  I glance nervously at Nguyet, who’s sitting beside me to my right, but she smiles back at me serenely. She obviously hasn’t understood a word. No doubt Kiwi Alexa, who arrived halfway through the story, has however. There are butterflies in my stomach. I suspect this is Zac on his best behaviour. He hasn’t disparaged the Vietnamese or the French, whom he holds in even lower regard, or mentioned politics all evening, and for this I’m eternally grateful, but by leaving his vile ideologies at the door he’s left himself with limited topics, and ‘tits’ is two of them.

  I’m off to meet a Sydney friend in Thailand tomorrow, so I’ve called a farewell dinner at the vegetarian Nang Tam with each and every one of my new friends. This yields a grand total of four – Natassia, Zac, Nguyet and Alexa. Neither Nguyet nor Alexa have met Natassia or Zac before.

  Natassia makes a rather intimidating first impression, her quietness appearing as iciness. She’s content to sit virtually in silence all evening. On the other hand, Zac, clever, provocative, and, on a good night, hysterically funny, takes centre stage in social situations.

  Luckily, Nguyet and Alexa are two of the politest people I’ve ever known. Alexa is one of a breed of well-educated New Zealanders who are painstakingly well-mannered and friendly at all times, but I fancy the smile on her elfin face as she watches Zac is a little frozen.

  Nguyet has brought along a very pretty male friend, Binh, who works in IT, speaks a fair amount of English and has also spent time in France. Natassia, who’s perched at the end of the table, to my left, leans into me at one point and says in my ear, ‘Is he wearing lipstick?’

  I respond with a questioning grunt, then a surprised grunt as I follow her gaze to Binh and notice how red his lips are.

  ‘I’m not sure … maybe.’

  Binh is sitting beside Zac and seems ill at ease, understandably. He smiles a little too often, a little too rigidly. The sight of the two of them side by side boggles the mind. They look like representative life forms from two different planets at an intergalactic convention.

  My concerns about introducing Zac to my other friends may have been well-founded, but any doubts I had about getting him to eat at a vegetarian restaurant have come to nothing. He’s devouring the fare with his usual gusto. In particular, he has discovered an item on the menu that I failed to notice. The menu calls them ‘corn cakes’, but Zac had a more accurate description of them, after gorging himself on several. ‘I can’t believe they invented fried custard.’

  Alexa is telling us about her new English-teaching job. She’s working at a reputable English language school. At this school, teachers are expected to put in extra time formulating lesson plans, and are allowed to teach reading, writing, and grammar, which at Global are off-limits to foreigners, being considered the job of the much cheaper Vietnamese teachers. In return for this, she’s paid $15 per hour, rather than the $10 we receive. I decide I might try to jump ship when I return from Thailand.

  We tell Alexa stories about Mr Thinh, the Global ‘rector’, describing him with relish.

  ‘How many minutes had you been in his office before he tried to crack onto you?’ Zac asks me.

  ‘He didn’t, thank Christ. Owen was up there too.’

  ‘Saved by Owen I suspect, then. Put it this way, I’d only been in his office about ten minutes before he tried to crack onto me,’ Zac tells us. I laugh loudly at this improbable image, and, I notice, so does Alexa.

  ‘Nats, tell Alexa about the scandal in June,’ he continues. Natassia, reserved by nature and lacking confidence in her English, is averse to being cast into the limelight, but none-theless tells the story I heard soon after arriving. A reception girl had confessed to one of the other reception girls that Thinh had sexually assaulted her. The news found its way back to Thinh’s wife, who had Thinh sack her immediately. She left a week before I arrived.

  Alexa seems impressed. She says ‘Oh my god,’ and throws her hands to her cheeks.

  ‘And what about this break-in?’ adds Natassia.

  Last week we were told somebody had broken into the college overnight, and stolen all the computers.

  ‘What about it?’ I ask her, curious. It hadn’t occurred to me there was anything more to it.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she replies. ‘How can somebody get all those computers past the watchman?’ She has a point. The college gates are locked and the grounds guarded by night.

  Zac thumps the table again and starts cackling.

  ‘Ah, the computer theft!’ he grins. ‘Didn’t you find it suspicious when all the computers were miraculously returned but with all the information on their hard drives missing? Information that may have been incriminating, given Thinh’s dubious business practices.’

  ‘Huh?’ I say, intrigued, I didn’t know about this. Come to think of it, all the computers were back. ‘How did you find out about the hard drives?’

  ‘Miss Thu told me,’ explains Zac. ‘But I can’t work out how much she really knows. The icing on the cake is, to make it look real, Thinh sacked old Mr Lam the night-watch guy.’

  ‘No!’ cries Natassia.

  ‘Is he that nice old smiling guy?’ I ask.

  ‘He was actually a nice guy. Even I thought he was okay. Yup. He’s gone now,’ says Zac.

  Natassia and I look dejectedly at each other. We’ve both noticed Lam. He has a sorrowful, heavily-lined face, with a cigarette permanently embedded in it, but he always smiles and waves when he sees me. He starts his shift late afternoon in the guardhouse outside the front entrance of the college. He speaks no English and his uniform, though well-looked after, is threadbare.

  ‘He’s been working at the college since it opened. Probably the only staff member that isn’t a friend or relative of Thinh.’ adds Zac, disingenuously. We both know this isn’t fully true. He’s started milking the story. ‘He’ll never find another job. Em oi!’ Zac calls out to the waitress, who comes running. ‘One more of these and two more of these please,’ he says, pointing to items on the menu and holding up first one finger then two.


  Nguyet suddenly pipes up, leaning across the table towards Zac. She’s pointing to the menu. ‘Do you know this one?’ she says to him ‘Traditional Vietnam food. Very delicious.’ Zac’s eyes flick helplessly to her exposed decolletage.

  ‘No! I don’t. But I’ll take your advice. And one of these,’ he calls, catching the waitress as she walks away. ‘Ruoc.’

  The ruoc arrives moments later, in a pile on a saucer, looking exactly like roll-your-own tobacco. It’s made from dried mushrooms and is designed to emulate the original version, which is made from cured, shredded meat. For a tobacco lookalike, it’s surprisingly delicious.

  With Nguyet and Binh at the table, Zac has an opportunity to display his skills in Vietnamese.

  Natassia, Alexa and I look on, fascinated, as he regales them with anecdotes in his strange toneless patois. He gestures throughout, and pauses for effect every few words. They laugh politely, if a little confusedly.

  We watch him tell a final anecdote with an air of great drama. He nudges Binh at the end and repeats the last phrase, chuckling. They all laugh, then there’s a moment’s silence. Nguyet and Binh shift in their seats and pile more Rau Muong onto their plates with chopsticks. The silence lengthens.

  ‘I dunno ‘fi shoulda toldemthat,’ Zac says to me suddenly in the frozen-lipped, rapid fire, sotto voce, Australian-English we use to communicate so that no one else, including Natassia, and probably even Alexa, can understand. He looks uncomfortable.

  ‘whathafuckja tellem?’ I shoot back.

  ‘Ah, s’probly fine,’ he replies after snatching a glance at them. He diverts his attention to the food in front of him.

  ‘You toldem a dirty joke, dinya.’

  ‘Mmm. But, tellya truth, I don’t think they goddit.’

  I shoot a glance at Nguyet and Binh, who are chatting across the table in Vietnamese. They seemed charmed, although a little perplexed. It’s clear they didn’t get it at all. I’m probably more relieved than Zac. My experience in Hanoi is limited, but I sense there’s a major cultural embargo, at least among educated Hanoians, on dirty jokes in mixed company. Sexual matters are rarely alluded to, and I’m beginning to wonder whether that’s purely politeness, or, in the light of Nguyet’s and Hoa’s revelations, evidence of a sweeping lack of knowledge. By contrast, in my social circles at least, an obsessive interest in the subject is mandatory.