Single White Female in Hanoi Read online

  In another reality, her pure inimitable voice, her grace and her beauty might have led her to a rewarding career as a singer. Instead, as a member of the uneducated underclass, she’s doomed to wander the streets in all weather for a pittance until exhaustion or disease claim her at an early age.

  The microclimate of Hanoi is hurtling its way into the high thirties as I set out on foot for the college where Richard’s friend, Owen, works. I find it easily – it’s directly on the other side of the block that lies across Nguyen Thai Hoc. There’s an enormous garish banner hanging over the entrance that proclaims: ‘Hanoi Global College’. Behind this is a gorgeous sand-coloured French colonial building.

  Heading up the steps to the front entrance, I’m smiling already. I enter a bright airy corridor. The walls are decorated with colourful children’s paintings, which have been thoughtfully framed. There are young women wandering the corridors in flowing powder-blue dresses. These are called ao dai and are the traditional costume of Vietnamese women – a long, high-necked dress over loose-fitting pants. The women smile when they see me. I hear the sound of kids laughing. Best of all, when I walk into the teacher’s area there’s a big, well-stocked salt-water aquarium. I used to keep one at home in Sydney, and the familiarity of this lovely thing is heartening.

  In the centre of the room is a huge, glass-topped wooden table. Sitting behind it, his features reflected below in the shining glass, is a big fellow with a trim grey beard and piercing blue eyes - the only Westerner in sight. This is Owen. He rises to greet me enthusiastically. I tell him a little bit about myself, avoiding mention of my disturbing experience with his friend yesterday.

  When I tell him I played in bands in Sydney and taught piano before coming to Hanoi, he becomes very animated.

  ‘A musician, hey? That’s fabulous. I think we should make use of your talents here. There’s a piano somewhere in the building’.

  ‘Really? Wow!’

  ‘Sure! Somewhere downstairs, I think. Yeah. I’m thinking maybe we could offer piano lessons here, too. Or maybe you could write a course that incorporates teaching English and music.’

  ‘Wow!’ I exclaim again. This sounds like my ideal vocation.

  I stand by proudly as Owen examines my teaching certificate. I wonder how many of the other teachers here can boast a ‘Distinction’ on their own TESOL certificates.

  ‘Do you mind if I make a photocopy of this?’ he finally asks. ‘I’ve never seen an actual TESOL certificate before’.

  ‘Be my guest,’ I say as nonchalantly as possible. When he’s gone, I sit down, blink a couple of times and stare into the fish tank. Owen’s only been here a couple of months, maybe he just hasn’t seen a TESOL certificate since he got here?

  Being a musician is no guarantee of a job, even in Sydney. Given a background in teaching and Linguistics, teaching English was an obvious choice for employment for me in Hanoi. Late last year I’d applied to take a dangerously compressed course in TESOL, an acronym for ‘Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages’, at the University of NSW.

  Once accepted, I received a large package in the mail. It contained a heavy volume with the startling title Systemic Functional Grammar and a tough written exam. I imagine this would have instantly deterred about half the applicants. I studied grammar as part of a Masters degree in Linguistics, and I couldn’t have been more mystified by the contents of this tome if it had been printed in Sanskrit. Without the patient tuition of a grammarian friend I would have foundered at the starting line.

  The course itself consisted of 148 contact hours, which were squeezed absurdly into less than four weeks in January. There was one very placid chap in the class who later said he’d enjoyed the course, but the rest of us figured he was lying. It had been a month-long onslaught with no respite.

  At the end of the contact hours, we had to complete a major work which involved designing a 60-hour curriculum. Mine came to 163 pages. It was a lot of work for a general malingerer, but it earned me that Distinction.

  When Owen returns he takes me on a tour of the building. The school has been open for less than a year and the premises are former Communist Party office space, fallen into disrepair. The ceilings are very high and ornate. Chandeliers hang in the corridors. Thirty or more workers are pounding away downstairs to make yet more classrooms. They’re uncovering long-buried floors laid with stunning tiles and mosaics – and, with considerable disregard, mixing cement on them.

  Our peregrinations through the building don’t uncover a piano, though.

  On the way back to the teachers’ room, we come upon Mr Thinh, who owns the building and the college business. He’s a large and confident man in his forties with a pumpkin-sized head of well-combed shiny hair and a mouthful of perfect teeth. His eyes wander to my chest when we’re introduced.

  ‘Very pleased to meet you,’ he says and bows chivalrously.

  ‘Carolyn’s from Australia, and she’s got a very good qualification and she’s also a music teacher,’ Owen tells him in a slightly defiant tone.

  Mr Thinh smiles broadly. ‘I would very much like you to have this,’ he says, and hands me his business card, which describes his position as ‘rector’.

  Owen and I are invited upstairs to his air-conditioned office for tea and a chat. As we walk in, I’m hit in the face by a massive temperature change. The contrast is so extreme, I wonder how it is that tiny thunderstorms don’t form in the doorway. It’s my first contact with cool air since arriving in Hanoi.

  In the office we sink into big, soft sofas. Owen and Mr Thinh discuss the school in voices that barely veil their mutual enmity. The conversation excludes me entirely, but the comfort factor more than makes up for it. Sipping fragrant Vietnamese green tea in the cool air, I’m in heaven.

  Looking around, I see a framed photo of Mr Thinh in army fatigues – presumably his war days. He’s crouched down, rifle in hand. My attitude to him softens as I realise he was sent to war to fight people that look like Owen and me. Next, my gaze settles on a digital thermometer. The temperature in the chilled room is 29 degrees – as cold as a hot day in Sydney.

  ‘The wheels are turning quickly for you,’ Owen tells me back downstairs. ‘They want you to come in tomorrow night to observe your first class’.

  I nod solemnly. I want to turn cartwheels around the staffroom.

  ‘You should have a timetable within a week. Believe me, the wheels are turning very quickly for you,’ he repeats.

  On learning that I’m vegetarian, he’s delighted to tell me that tomorrow’s observation class will be taught by Natassia – a young German girl with flawless English, who’s also vegetarian. It’s all too perfect.

  Way too perfect, it turns out. Facts I’m yet to learn include: there’s no piano anywhere in the building; Mr Thinh never went to war – he spent the duration of the conflict safely cloistered in Moscow, growing fat on Russian stodge while his compatriots starved; the fish swimming around in the aquarium have a startling mortality rate; the women wandering around in floaty dresses are administration staff who are frantically trying to hold up a house of cards; and Natassia is Swiss, not German, and her English is far from flawless. But she is vegetarian.

  I’m really looking forward to teaching. I’ve already started teaching Nga, my landlady, some English. She turns up almost daily for chats and to observe my life, which fascinates her. Everything I pull out of my suitcase is of immense interest.

  ‘And, Carolyn, why do you bring this?’ she inquires, as she turns my things over in her hand. My ideas about life are solicited with earnestness. ‘And, Carolyn, this is your family?’ I find her absorbed in a small photo album friends presented to me on my departure.

  ‘No Nga, it’s my neighbours. We’re friends.’

  ‘Your neighbour?’ she tilts her head backwards slightly, squints and flicks through the rest of the album. She looks disturbed. ‘What about your family?’

  ‘My family? They’re not in there.’ I can sense Nga’s mind
at work. It is analysing, compiling, quantifying the strangeness of the foreigner.

  With Nga, the theme always returns to family and marriage. She’s sad I don’t have a husband. Without a family of my own, she tells me, my life is without … she doesn’t know the word. She writes it down in Vietnamese, y nghia, and I look it up. ‘Significance, meaning,’ I read dejectedly.

  But I enjoy Nga’s company. She has a deep, engaging voice and an intimate way of relating to me, as though we’ve known each other for a long time. Nga is pale but has a classic Vietnamese beauty, with flashing dark eyes, full, pouting lips, and strong cheekbones framing a small bridgeless nose. But her expressions reveal little. Later she’ll get to meet many of my visitors, and offer me her fairly perspicacious assessment of each of them. Funnily enough, a number of these people, most of them Vietnamese, will also volunteer their opinion of her after she’s left the building. ‘Don’t trust her,’ they say.

  It turns out I’ve underestimated her English skills. Her English is very slow and laboured, and her pronunciation, typical of Vietnamese people, is such that one could be forgiven for thinking she was speaking Vietnamese. But one day she takes me unawares:

  ‘English, errrr, very difficult’, she volunteers.

  I agree.

  ‘Yes, errrr, for me, errr, very difficult’.

  I nod further agreement, then –

  ‘Present perfect and present perfect continuous tense – these one very difficult for me’.

  This astonishing comment sets the stage for my experiences as an English teacher in Hanoi. The distinction between ‘I have eaten’ and ‘I have been eating’ would elude most learners of English. Yet, consistently, students who can barely ask ‘What is your name?’ will get every answer correct in a written grammar exam.

  The promise of a job has invigorated me, and in the evening I decide to walk to Hanoi’s hub – the ‘Old Quarter’ – looking for excitement. I study my city map and set out.

  The Old Quarter is flanked by the Red River, which forms Hanoi’s northern border. It’s barely more than a kilometre from my place, but the journey takes nearly an hour. The obstacle course on the sidewalk forces pedestrians to weave along at a geriatric pace, which is perversely tiring. I long for an invigorating walk at a cracking pace.

  Hanoi’s Old Quarter is about as old as a quarter can be, with a history spanning over 1,000 war-torn years. It began to come into its own as a CBD at the end of the tenth century, when Vietnam won independence after a millennium of Chinese domination. Hanoi was small citadel called Dai La, when King Ly Thai To made it his nation’s capital and established a walled palace there, among a few villages scattered around a muddy alluvial plain. He renamed his liberated city Thang Long – ‘Soaring Dragon’ Hanoi has had seven or eight name changes since then. The current name, Hanoi, means something like ‘Inside the Bend of the River’.

  Featuring the increasingly busy palace and the nearby Red River, which was used for transportation, the area had the three qualities that real estate agents rave about: location, location, and location.

  The Old Quarter also borders Hanoi’s most famous, most mythical lake – Hoan Kiem Lake (Lake of the Restored Sword). My first sight of Hoan Kiem Lake comes on this particular evening. I hit the end of a swarming street and it appears before me. I’m mesmerised. A rippling expanse of tranquillity amid the urban chaos, the lights around it reflect in a pointillist myriad of colours. Until this moment Hanoi has been a series of dilapidated streets. Immediately, I understand why people describe this as a beautiful city.

  I note the well-maintained parkland around the lake, with lots of big old trees. Weeping willows bow to the water. In the middle of the lake are two small islands, each with a pagoda on it. One is accessible by a little stone bridge. All of this is lit up like a scene from a fairytale. Local lore has it there’s a giant turtle, many hundreds of years old, living down there somewhere.

  At this time of night (about 9pm), the lake is ringed by young local couples romancing beneath the trees without ever leaving the motorcycle they arrived on. They’re enjoying one of the special privileges of the park.

  On beaches around Sydney, women often sunbake and swim topless. Wandering around topless in the streets, even one adjacent to the beach, would be socially unacceptable, but bare breasts on a beach are unremarkable. In the same mysterious way, the shores of Hanoi’s lakes are beyond the reach of normal social mores. Here, unmarried couples and lovestruck youngsters kiss and embrace with impunity. In the streets or at home in front of their families, this would be scandalous.

  The avenue that runs between Hanoi’s two other most famous lakes, West Lake and Chuc Bac Lake, is referred to as ‘Lover’s Lane’ – after sunset it’s crowded with amorous young couples. Silhouetted against the pink sky, they’re the picture of youthful romance. They shift on the saddle of the motorcycle for maximum intimacy and sit there in quiet agony. I imagine they’re beside themselves with arousal, but there’s not much they can do about it until they get married. Until that day, this anonymity is the closest thing they’ll get to privacy.

  At the top of Ly Thai To Street, named after the old King, I enter the Old Quarter and lose myself in the animated mayhem. It’s a whole new world. There are restaurants with English on the facades. They boast ‘Western-style food’. I’m almost shocked to see Westerners everywhere. Many of them are clutching a copy of the Lonely Planet guide to Vietnam, and a great number, being trailed by persistent postcard boys, look agitated. They also look a bit dishevelled. It takes me a couple of blinks to realise they’re backpackers wandering the blocks around their hotels in search of dinner or entertainment. In their brief transit through Hanoi, it’s possible they may never see much more of the place than these streets.

  I’ll be here long after they leave. I’m an expat now.

  Heat poisoning

  If sleep is a womb and consciousness the outside world, I’m trapped in the birth canal. I struggle against the warm suction of the womb behind me. Centuries pass before I manage to force my head out into the noisy glare of day, but my eyelids don’t want to open. I spend a millennium shaking off the siren song of sleep. It’s later than usual, and I have to drag myself into the upright position.

  It’s my fifth day, and the heat has hit me.

  I’m told this is the normal envelope – foreigners who turn up in the monsoon season tend to bounce around full of beans for five days, then collapse. Only yesterday, the heat was just another fascinating thing about Hanoi. I moved around in it with the detached interest of a scientist on a field trip. Now it has soaked into my bones and poisoned me.

  My face in the mirror looks like the face of someone being pulled backwards at 300 kilometres an hour. I take a long cold shower. The shower fitting in my bathroom is Korean, and the unnerving brand name engraved on the chrome tap, I now notice, is ‘Dae-Young’.

  I’m just finishing breakfast when I hear a motorcycle outside.

  ‘Allo? Allo? Caroleen, ees Yvette’. Her gentle voice drifts in through the living-room window. I grab the key and plod down the stairs to let her in. Yvette has the day off work and has arranged to take me for a wander. She’s dressed practically, in light-coloured cotton clothes and a hat. I’m dressed entirely in black. I wave to her husband Khai, who has dropped her off.

  ‘Enjoy your day,’ he calls back and takes off at an impressive speed, negotiating without difficulty the 30-centimetre-wide cement ramp at the gate.

  I show Yvette how I’ve set up her old apartment, and she becomes nostalgic.

  ‘I really enjoy when I live ’ere. One time my parents come and we were four ’ere with a little organisation,’ she tells me. I have a brief, amusing image of my parents trying to tolerate the conditions here.

  Looking relaxed in the humidity, Yvette leads me up past the Nam Bo supermarket and we cross an intersection where six roads meet, with results that resist scientific explanation. Natassia and I will come to refer to this intersection, when givin
g directions, as ‘Crazy Junction’. Unlike many other intersections, this one has some traffic lights, but motorists don’t pay much attention to them unless there are cops standing around, augmenting their meagre pay packets with ‘on-the-spot fines’ for traffic offenders.

  ‘I seem to have found a wormhole to a parallel universe,’ I write to my friends. ‘Don’t believe me? Watch an average intersection for five minutes. There are no ‘Give Way’ signs, and nobody gives way. This is because they’re able to pass through one another in Vietnam. Kind of like what happened in the Philadelphia Experiment, except no one gets hurt.’

  In the centre of the intersection is a triangular traffic island where an old man is crouched over a basket of hopping young bunnies. Presumably, he’s selling them. They leap in and out of the basket and swing perilously off the edges of the kerb towards certain death, but he always manages to grab them before they become rabbit pie. I expect this will be their ultimate fate anyway.

  We make the far side of the intersection undamaged. We’re now on famous Hang Bong Street, once home of the cotton guild. These days, the street mainly specialises in carbon monoxide. Because of the volume of traffic that passes along this narrow thoroughfare, it’s been made illegal to drive a four-wheeled vehicle here. But you’d be wasting your time pointing this out to the drivers of cars and vans that struggle up here, honking angrily at the pesky two-wheeled vehicles in their way.

  ‘On this street you can buy silk clothes and maybe find a good teller,’ Yvette tells me as we window-shop the length of Hang Bong. She’s right. There are a great number of fashion shops, and tailors. Silks of every imaginable colour shimmer alluringly. Some are two-toned, with colours pure as light. A prescient thought hits me: I’m going to be parting with a great deal of cash on this street in the near future.

  ‘Now, we ‘ave coffee, uh?’ Yvette says at the end of the long sticky walk.