Single White Female in Hanoi Read online

  In Hanoi, most of this initial information is traffic-related.

  The morning after my arrival, groggy after twelve hours’ sleep, I venture the 100 teeming metres to the business end of my cul-de-sac, where it meets Nguyen Thai Hoc Street.

  I stand for a while squinting at the traffic, a parade of motorbikes several lanes wide – a motorcade, I presume. Transfixed, I wait for the spectacle of the VIP, the dark car, the tinted windows. Minutes pass. Still no dignitary, and the unbroken stream of vehicles continues, honking wildly. Then it dawns on me: this is rush hour. Nguyen Thai Hoc is a one-way street and these people are on their way to work.

  My plan is to wander up to the supermarket, called the Nam Bo, to buy breakfast things. But this entails crossing the road. I stand at the shore of this heaving flow like King Canute. After a minute or so it dawns on me, firstly, that there are no road rules, and secondly, that there will never be a break in the traffic.

  I can’t see how a person could make it across alive, and yet there are locals doing just that – their pace relaxed and easy. The traffic parts around them. I study a few crossings, perform some mental calculations. Eventually I manage a coward’s crossing, using a street vendor carrying two yoked baskets across her shoulder as a human shield. I find the Nam Bo and buy rice and a tin of coconut milk.

  Heading home, I step onto Nguyen Thai Hoc and immediately cop a hard blow to the left side of my body. My field of vision dances a brief jig. I’ve been hit by an elderly man on a bicycle sailing the wrong way up the one-way street. The expression on his face after the impact is chilling. He gawps at me tremulously, his old, red-rimmed eyelids as wide as the beaks of baby birds. He seems to have gone into shock, horrified at having hit a foreigner. It’s probably his first close encounter with one of these exotic beasts, and he’s gone and crashed his bicycle into it.

  I place my hand on his shoulder to comfort him, although tears are starting to prick in my own eyes. It’s my first full day in Hanoi and I’ve already had a road accident. My left arm is hurting. I’ve still got the road to get across, and now people are staring at me, making me self-conscious. The fumes, the heat and the strangeness of the place feel overwhelming. I make the crossing, then trudge heavily up my little street, passing the hundreds of people crammed onto the pavement eating breakfast. They freeze, noodles careening from mid-air chopsticks back into the soup below, to watch me. Nobody smiles. I climb the stairs to my flat, strip, and collapse under the ceiling fan in my bedroom.

  The humidity’s so intense I can’t think. My attention is entirely focused on the turning of the fan’s green blades – on the sight, the sound and the sensation as they waft air over my skin.

  Time passes. My rotating life-support system begins to work its charms. After about twenty minutes I feel humanised again. I’m far enough away from Nguyen Thai Hoc that the horns and the fumes are only a memory. My flat has begun its distinguished career as refuge.

  I sit up and reach for the phone: it’s time to ring Flemish Ralph.

  I encountered Flemish Ralph little more than a month ago, while trawling message boards on the Internet looking for a teaching job or contact in Hanoi. Ralph had replied to a post, the only person to do so. He’d been living in Hanoi for about ten years and had taken a Vietnamese wife. He spoke pessimistically of the job market, but encouraged me to turn up anyway. He gave me some information on expat rental prices that surprised me. $US500 a month for accommodation would be a bargain, he claimed.

  Things were looking so grim that I immediately bought an open return ticket to Hanoi, as insurance against a sudden act of cowardice. Friends collared me with, ‘It’s not too late to change your mind’, but in fact it was – for reasons of pride alone. Pride had dwarfed all fear.

  Yet Ralph seemed of sound mind and was my only contact at the time, so I was careful to keep his phone number, even after Yvette materialised with my inner-city apartment for US$200 per month.

  A Vietnamese woman answers the phone, but understands me and calls for Ralph. Soon there’s a heavily accented, nasal voice on the other end of the phone. We exchange pleasantries, and he volunteers advice on criminal activity in Hanoi.

  ‘You have to look out for all sorts of thieving. The people here will steal anything,’ he warns me. ‘Nothing is safe.’

  He’s amazed to learn of my living arrangement. ‘You’re paying very low rent. It’s unbelievable you should find something like this in Hanoi. But perhaps there’s some kind of catch. You know foreigners must pay a very high price for electricity.’

  ‘But my landowners are covering the electricity bills,’ I tell him.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ he repeats. ‘Be careful. Don’t trust them. Perhaps you are in a dangerous area. Do you have bars on all your windows?’

  His voice is monotonous and I find it hard to concentrate on the cornucopia of cautions he’s meting out. He talks on for about half an hour. The call ends after I promise to call him in another couple of days to arrange a meeting.

  Midday passes. I feel ready to face the outside world again, and also desperate to send some email. Yvette has told me about an Internet café nearby. I walk back to the end of my street, where the ‘xe om’ drivers hang out, and I catch my first ride.

  Xe om translates as ‘motorbike taxi’, but literally it means ‘hug vehicle’. Passengers unused to Hanoi traffic tend to grasp the driver in a rigid bear hug, their face a staring rictus mask – a spectacle that will come to cause me as much delight as it causes the locals.

  I can’t ride, but I’m an experienced pillion. During the trip to the café I find myself gaping in dumb horror at the traffic hurtling towards us from every angle. Impact is seemingly inevitable each time, yet never occurs. As we pull up unscathed at the café, I’m truly ready to hug the driver. I’m high on Near-Death-Experience hormones.

  But the exhilaration soon dissolves into an hour-and-a-half-long battle with Vietnam’s stupefyingly slow Internet. For every email I send, I mysteriously lose two. My nerves strained, I cut my losses and pay the bill. Back on the street I spot a cartel of xe om drivers on the corner. They’re waving dramatically at me and making woo-ooh noises, but I hesitate, remembering my death-defying trip to the café.

  So I make an unwise decision. I decide to walk home.

  In most areas, Hanoi’s sidewalks are very poor, with obstacles every couple of metres. These include wandering vendors, stalls, pots of boiling water, smoking bricks of charcoal, shoe-shine boys, chickens in every stage of life and death, concrete pilings, large upended chunks of broken paving, kids playing badminton, and motorcyclists whizzing through the crowd.

  Now, at the start of the monsoon season, these sidewalks also become slippery, as rain combines with the patina of unspeakable substances that are spilled, poured and spat onto them hourly. A brown soup, slicked rainbow with petrol, flows along the gutters. Instead of croutons, its surface is dotted with cigarette butts.

  It’s into this brew that I slip, submerging my right leg almost to the knee. For the first time I see mouths crack into a smile, but it’s not the smile I’ve been wanting. People on the street are literally slapping their thighs with Schadenfreude. I limp to the nearby UNESCO headquarters, where surly AK47-toting guards supervise me as I wash off under an outdoor tap.

  Back home, the memory recedes under the shower. In the kitchen, I cook some rice in a small pot, receiving a small electric shock from my stove as I do so. When it’s ready, I pour coconut milk on top and eat the result under the ceiling fan in the living room. I study my Vietnamese phrasebook, still labouring under the vanity that I’ll master the language in a few months.

  The day reaches about 38 degrees, and the afternoon humidity surrounds me like a mandala. I shift rooms, to the comfort of the ceiling fan above my bed, and lie listening to the foreign sounds rising from the compound below. I fall into a surprisingly pleasant reverie. My first full day in Vietnam has certainly been eventful, and I look forward to sharing it with Yvette and Khai, who ar
e due to take me to dinner this evening. The repetitive whump of the ceiling fan becomes hypnotic, and within minutes I’m asleep.

  I awake at dusk to a power cut. People are shouting below. Without electricity, the overhead fans have ground to a halt, turning the air into an oppressive syrup. A middle-aged woman, the only neighbour to have returned my smiles since my arrival, appears in my apartment with a paper fan, which I take gratefully.

  It will take me a year to learn this woman’s name – Xuyen. She’s the mother of Nga, my landlady. She drops in on me regularly with gifts of food and green tea, and while I’ll eventually attain a level of Vietnamese that permits conversation in general, I can rarely make head or tail of anything she says. I just know that she’s a good woman. It’s clear the other scowling women are not happy about having a foreigner in their compound.

  The power cut feels lengthy. I’m going to need candles. In the faltering light, I leaf through the pages of my Vietnamese phrasebook looking for ‘candle’.

  ‘You’re joking!’ I say aloud.

  Camera … canary … capitalism. Whoever put the thing together forgot ‘candle’. I dash back to the supermarket and regale the indifferent staff with a series of attempts to mime one. Useless. They stand around staring at me. I pull out paper and pen and start to sketch one. Before I get to the wick there’s an outbreak of nervous giggling. The girl besides me tugs at my sleeve.

  ‘Madame, Madame’. With her other hand she points to the condoms on the shelf behind us. We share a chuckle then I hastily add a wick and fulminating flame. The flame throws light on the whole thing.

  I walk out with a packet of candles, and a puzzlement I can’t name. There was so much effort involved in communicating the idea of a candle. Gestures that I thought were universal had failed.

  Back in the compound I find Xuyen and give her some candles. Her gratitude embarrasses me as, wide-eyed, she bows and nods repeatedly.

  It starts raining, and the temperature mercifully drops. Yvette and Khai arrive, finding a ghost drifting from one patch of candlelight to the next.

  ‘This is the power-cut season,’ says Khai. He explains that the premonsoon dry period leaves Hanoi’s sole source of power, a hydroelectric plant up north, low on fuel for the monsoon. Power cuts will occur every couple of days over the month.

  The rain is heavy as we head out to dinner. Yvette and I climb onto the back of Khai’s scooter, and Yvette holds an opaque plastic sheet over us. Blind to the outside world in my plastic tent, I feel the bike veering around wet corners and aqua-planing across chaotic intersections. The cacophony of horns around us is oddly magnified.

  We arrive at the Nang Tam, a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant. Khai recommended this place after I confessed I don’t eat meat. These eating places can be found all over the country. Monks and nuns may be vegetarian, and some other Vietnamese Buddhists eschew meat for two days of each month, at the new and full moon, and on days of visiting an ancestor’s grave. On account of the self-denial involved, going a day without meat in Vietnam is seen as akin to fasting.

  Khai does the ordering, and dishes soon start to arrive. Lots and lots of dishes. Many of them, in the Buddhist tradition, feature ‘meat’, ‘chicken’ or ‘fish’ that aren’t. I’ve never been a fan of ‘facon’ or ‘notdogs’ or any of the other fake meat products designed for pining ex-meat enthusiasts, but to my relief tonight’s chicken and beef dishes are not trying so hard to resemble the real thing.

  ‘So Carolyn, you live in a great city,’ Khai begins. ‘We went to Sydney. I love it very much!’ I suspect I know what’s coming next. The question I’ve managed to avoid so far.

  ‘Why do you choose to come to Hanoi?’

  No amount of preparation can help me explain this to virtual strangers, least of all a Hanoian, without sounding like a feckless drifter. Having decided I wanted to try living in Asia for a bit, the rest was easy. A friend had suggested Hanoi and I’d acquiesced as easily as if he’d suggested a glass of wine.

  ‘Hmmmmm. Good question,’ I say, enthusiastically, as though I’m about to fire up a Power Point Presentation on the subject. I nod at the table for a minute, trying to gather some appropriate thoughts. The silence lengthens.

  ‘Maybe you’re thinking my life was not so good in Sydney,’ I say, finally. ‘But, in fact, it was very good. Maybe too good. When life is too good it can make a person feel … like it’s time to change it.’ More silence, then, to my relief, Yvette smiles a smile of recognition and sits forward to speak.

  ‘You are a leetle strange,’ she says.

  ‘I was living in a fantastic apartment,’ I continue. It’s too late to back out now. ‘The neighbours were also my friends. So we were always cooking and eating and drinking and laughing.’

  ‘What about your job?’ asks Yvette.

  ‘Well, I’m a musician. I played in bands, and during the week I taught piano – to very good students.’

  ‘Yes, it sounds like a very good life,’ Khai agrees.

  ‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘Too good. No struggle.’ I’m sounding like a tortured existentialist. I should have just confessed to a lifelong interest in Asia.

  The fact is, I was wearing a mantle of privilege that I didn’t want to abuse, but I was starting to feel trapped under it. I’d turned 35 and now my life path yawned ahead – a road along which generation after generation of young piano students assembled in echelons as I plodded into the future, shrinking, wrinkling, my keyboard knuckles swelling. I wanted a change of scenery, but moving would entail losing students, most of whom were local. I thought of trying another suburb, and the thought was appealing, but it would mean starting anew, away from my stomping ground of Bondi. I couldn’t muster the motivation.

  Finally I’d realised that if moving suburb meant starting again with new students, I might as well aim higher and move continents.

  I was single. I didn’t have kids or any other dependents. My cat had recently deserted me for the non-vegetarian neighbours upstairs, who fed him fresh meat and spoilt him rotten. I didn’t have a mortgage or any other debts. I was still young enough to socialise to the full meaning of the word, and old enough to have established firm friendships that could weather a period of absence.

  Yvette and Khai are still looking at me expectantly. ‘Well, I always wanted to live in Asia,’ I tell them. ‘And Hanoi is very interesting. I’m excited about being here. I want to learn Vietnamese, and I want to teach English and learn about the culture and the music.’ I feel disingenuous. None of this is untrue, but until a recent Internet crash course on Vietnam, fuelled by the hard fact that I’d just bought a plane ticket to the place, I barely knew more than that there’d been a recent war here. Khai offers me a warm smile. I’ve said the right thing.

  The tabletop continues to fill with new dishes for the duration of the meal. There’s a plate of grilled eggplant with chunks of crispy deep-fried garlic that I reminisce about for days afterwards, and I get my first taste of the ubiquitous rau muong or ‘Morning Glory’ – a hollow-stemmed river weed, also fried with garlic. I taste a delicate mushroom soup and a less appealing bamboo soup. I discover that fresh bamboo is the culprit responsible for the rank taste I’d often presumed to be the result of a rotten ingredient in Asian food.

  Over the in-house special, melt-in-your mouth vegetable croquettes, I ask Yvette about her diet in Hanoi.

  ‘Do you cook French food at home?’

  ‘I don’t know to cook. I never cook,’ she replies.

  ‘Who cooks?’ I ask in surprise, wondering if Khai’s mother lives with them.

  ‘Khai cooks,’ she replies. I look at Khai and he nods and smiles.

  ‘I like to cook.’

  ‘’E does the ’ousework also,’ she adds.

  I look back to Khai. He’s intelligent and blindingly handsome. I’ve now discovered that he speaks English well and can relate to Westerners. He earns good money in IT and cooks dinner every night. I have to bite my tongue to stop myself from asking him if
he has an unmarried brother. I hope there’s plenty more like him to be found in these parts.

  Appetite gratified, I’m taken to Hanoi’s eponymous Jazz Club. Yvette and Khai tell me we’re now in the city’s famous Old Quarter. I notice the streets are more compact, the shopfronts narrower, the crowds denser. I can’t wait to come back here and explore.

  There’s a jazz quintet in full swing as we walk into the club. By the time we take our seat, my gaze is riveted on the young pianist. It’s not just that he’s very good, it’s that while his right hand improvises lavishly, his left hand is holding a mobile phone to his ear and he’s having a good old chin-wag.

  During the next set he pulls out what appears to be an illustrated novel, props it up on the piano, and reads it as he plays. The band doesn’t seem perturbed.

  Even while talking and reading, this guy is so good that I form the mistaken impression that Hanoi is going to turn out to be one of the world’s unsung jazz capitals. Yvette and I discuss the idea that Vietnamese people are particularly adept at learning musical forms because of the tones of their language. Vietnamese has six tones, which means that local ears are highly trained to hear pitch accurately. This went a long way towards explaining how these people were able to learn to play jazz, we decided – a form of music so utterly different from traditional Vietnamese music.

  As I’m to discover, jazz is a relatively new arrival in Hanoi. Until recently it was all but outlawed by the government, who regarded it as cultural pollution from America. It was depicted in Vietnamese films about the war with the US as an obnoxious hullabaloo created by screeching and crashing instruments. Nowadays students at the Conservatorium of Music can study jazz, although the few very talented locals who can really play it have spent their lives clandestinely listening to and imitating recordings of their favourite players from the West.