Single White Female in Hanoi Read online

  She takes me into what looks like a normal souvenir shop but then leads me through the back and along a cement hallway. We pass what looks like a family’s living room, and then we’re out the back in a tiny courtyard. It’s a local secret that only switched-on Hanoians and long-term expats know about.

  We sit at a table beside an old stone fountain with tortoises swimming around in it. There’s a fan trained on us. Although we’re virtually in the centre of Hanoi, the air seems mysteriously clean and the roar of the street out the front is almost inaudible. Plants in big stone pots provide shade. Hens are running around the tables. I’m enchanted by the rustic ambience.

  ‘Ees good to ‘ave the day off work,’ says Yvette, handing me a menu. ‘I been so busy and we are going to France in a week. This afternoon I start to pack.’

  ‘Do you like it where you work?’ I ask. Yvette teaches French at Alliance Francais.

  ‘Ees okay,’ she tells me. ‘I meet some interesting people, like Khai’

  ‘Ahhhh!’ I’ve been wondering how on earth she found this guy. ‘He seems very, er, unusual for a Vietnamese man,’ I volunteer carefully. I’ve been slowly coming to the conclusion that Khai is a perfect, self-actualised being. By contrast, the other Vietnamese men I’ve met since I arrived seem crude and immature.

  ‘Yeah – ’e’s good, but I ’ave to teach ’im a few thing,’ she replies. My ears prick up.

  ‘What kinds of things?’

  ‘Well, you know, the sex.’ I lean forward subtly in my chair as she expands on this. ’I ’ave to teach him some thing. Vietnamese man don’t know nothing about woman. I ‘ave to do a lot of sex education.’

  ‘Uh? Like what?’ This sounds like bad news, but I stay hopeful. She’s probably referring to some Gallic notion of advanced love-making.

  ‘Well, like foreplay, you know. He don’t know to do this one, and also when I get my menstruation he’s very surprised, he don’t know about this one too.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ I say involuntarily. There’s a prolonged pause while I try to digest this.

  A loud crowing from above our heads breaks the silence and I look up at the wall opposite. About two metres up, a fat rooster is eyeing us from a wall-mounted branch. Someone has thoughtfully attached little plastic containers for food and drink to his perch. It’s nice to see animals being looked after. I’ve already seen some disturbing sights involving animal mistreatment.

  ‘Plea?’ says a little voice. A girl with notepad is standing by our table. Burnt by my last coffee experience, I order an iced lemon juice, but Yvette orders something that she describes to me as ‘a cup of coffee with a scrambled egg in it’. Among the many strange things I’ve seen and heard in the last few days, this strikes me as the strongest evidence yet that I’m not in the Third World so much as a parallel one.

  Even more unexpected, Yvette gives me a taste of it when it arrives, and it’s delicious.

  ‘Eeeeeow Eeeeeeow.’ A sudden high-pitched shrieking. I turn around. It’s a pitifully thin orange kitten on a short tether outside the kitchen. The newest member of the rat-catching team.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say to Yvette who doesn’t seem to have noticed. I walk across the courtyard, untie the kitten and carry it gently back to the table where I place it on my lap and comfort it. Slowly, the staff gather round to watch the Westerner fuss over a cat. It’s an endless source of amusement and disgust to a Hanoian. Before I reluctantly return the kitten to its life on a string, Yvette takes a photo of me slouched maternally over it. This immortalises the moment, so that later I can look at the picture and appreciate that in the throes of my day-five heat exhaustion and bleeding-heart concern, I look closer to death than the cat.

  Before we leave the little café the rooster belts out another almighty crow and looking up, I notice something I’d missed before. It’s the loop of string around his scaly red leg. He’s tied to the branch, unable to move more than about five centimetres. That’s why the seed and water containers were nailed so close to his feet.

  I haven’t yet cottoned onto the Vietnamese penchant for animals-as-decoration. This will only apply to animals that use few resources, essentially birds, fish and sometimes squirrels. Like the birds in tiny cages I’d seen everywhere, the rooster was there for aesthetic reasons. He was a handsome and proud fellow with a beautiful plumage. He looked so good sitting regally above it all on his perch.

  ‘Eh, ’ave you seen this before?’ We’re on the way back to my place and Yvette is pointing at a dusty little shop. It’s a snake-liquor retailer. Dozens of bottles of snake wine line the display cases. A snake is intact inside each one, suspended in an attitude of attack. There are lots of different varieties, including a cobra. One showy display features about five different-sized snakes nested like Russian dolls. Imagine a medium-sized snake. From its open mouth peers a smaller one enclosed within, its own mouth agape to reveal the gaping head of its still-smaller cousin.

  Cat, chicken, snake: rat-catcher, trophy, aphrodisiac. Animals here have to work for a living, or die for it. One evening, while I’m teaching an advanced English class, a female student will put up her hand to speak.

  ‘Excuse me teacher, is it true cats in the West do not have to work?’

  The whole class leans forward for my answer, which takes a moment to formulate.

  ‘Yes. It’s true. They don’t work,’ I tell her. ‘They’re pets and we care about them almost like family.’ There’s an exclamatory swell from the class. The girl who asked the question turns to her friends with an ‘I told you so’ look. The concept of keeping a cat as a pet baffles them.

  Actually, so does the concept of giving a cat a name. When I have enough Vietnamese to ask ‘Name is what?’ I ask it not only of people, with great success, but of cats. Owners look askance at me. There’s a pause that I can’t explain, then a polite answer: ‘Name of cat is Mieu Mieu’. Seems like a nice name. Strange thing is it’s the name of the first cat, the second, third and the fourth cat I ask it of. ‘Mieu Mieu’, it turns out, is the onomatopoeic Vietnamese equivalent of ‘puss’.

  I’m hoping to become inured to the sight of animal suffering while in Vietnam. It seems like a useful ability in life. I figure the more I see, the less I’ll react.

  Back home I say goodbye to Yvette and raid my fridge for something quick and familiar. Some Edam cheese and crackers I found at Nam Bo do the job perfectly. Then I spreadeagle under the fan in my bedroom and return to the welcoming bosom of Morpheus for a couple of hours.

  When I wake up, it’s raining and the furnace heat has again died down. With a sigh, I look up Ralph’s phone number in my little book, and reach for the phone. I said I’d ring him, but now I have an ulterior motive.

  On the way into Nam Bo on Monday, I noticed a woman. She was one of a number of homeless people that live in and around the entrance to the supermarket. When I first saw her, she was lying down between two others in the entrance – napping in the noonday heat. She lifted her head and smiled at me, and the smile exuded warmth and humanity. She wasn’t young, although her hair was still black and her face still beautiful. But she was thin. Terribly thin. While I was shopping I bought her a coconut milk drink. When I handed it to her, she seemed joyous. The next day, I bought her a vitamin drink – one with glucose and amino acids as well as vitamins and minerals. I decided to buy one every day for her.

  Yesterday, when I went out for groceries, she waved when she saw me. But as I handed her the vitamin drink, I realised I’d never seen her open the bottle. Maybe she didn’t drink the stuff. Maybe she didn’t trust it. I wasn’t sure, but I knew I needed some help to communicate with her. I presumed the drink was just what she needed, but maybe she was ill, and needed medicine instead.

  Ralph’s wife is Vietnamese, and a doctor.

  So I ring him, and listen patiently as he offers his grievances and lamentations of the day.

  ‘This town is nothing but trouble,’ he tells me. ‘These people are terrible, they only care about money
. And they are such thieves. You have to tie things down. Things are different in Singapore.’

  The bulk of today’s sermon, for some reason, is a dissertation on the dangers of older Western men marrying younger local women for their ‘beauty, not their true nature’. He ‘can’t stress strongly enough’ how these marriages will always come to a nasty end. I know, from our earlier communications, that Ralph is pushing fifty.

  ‘How old is your wife?’ I ask casually after he mentions he used to be married to a Zulu woman during a stint in South Africa.

  ‘Thirty-one,’ he replies without a trace of irony.

  Before he hands me over to his wife, I also learn that they spend Sundays in church. This is the surest sign yet that they’re not going to form the centrepiece of my social life in this town.

  His wife tells me I can call her Tina, although her real name is Thanh. She’s taciturn but kind. She agrees to turn up with her husband at my place tomorrow afternoon, so I can take her to meet the homeless woman.

  The rain continues through to the evening, but abates as I dash over to Global College, running a little late for my first class observation. It’s the last class of the day. It starts at 7.45 and goes for an hour and a half. Owen’s not around, but the staff at the front desk are friendly and I’m led upstairs to a classroom where Natassia has already begun teaching a lesson called ‘My Disastrous Day’.

  Natassia’s tall, lean and slim-hipped, in well-fitted clothes. Dark, straight hair, pale blue eyes. Horn-rimmed glasses and a severe fringe – she strikes me as humourless and rather prim, especially for such a young thing. Her mood is serious, and at no time during the lesson does she smile. But every time she says the words ‘disastrous day’ I nearly curl up in mirth. She has a strong Germanic accent with a slow low-pitched drawl and it comes out as a long, drawn-out ‘deezahsterrerss deyyy’. Her speaking voice is also very soft and scant on intonation, and I wonder whether any of the students understand her at all.

  Her first impression of me isn’t great either, I’ll find out. She thinks I’m arrogant. This initial, mutual lack of interest is the signature state from which most of my friendships evolve. This may be in part because any time I feel out of my depth, I seem to feel the need to feign invulnerability. It’s a grave character flaw since, besides alienating people, it also hampers my ability to absorb important information. Admitting vulnerability can be the first step in a learning curve. Like many teachers, I can be a bad student.

  But Natassia’s glad when, at her invitation, I stand up and relieve her of the last 30 minutes of class by giving the young students a lesson about Australia.

  After the class we have a quick chat, during which I discover her true nationality – Swiss – and mentally amend ‘prim’ to ‘demure’. She smokes two cigarettes back to back, and runs off, but by then Owen has arrived. He takes me to the teachers’ room and tells me I’m to observe another class tomorrow morning with a different teacher.

  The buzz of taking a class for a while and a dramatic decrease in temperature have enlivened me and I’m feeling sociable, but it’s nine-thirty and the school is being closed for the night.

  As I walk out of the staffroom, I pass a desk with an immense Australian guy half-reclined in a chair behind it.

  ‘No, really. This restaurant is amazing,’ he’s telling the small audience gathered around him. ‘They’ll bring you bear meat, or any other illegal meat you want. They don’t advertise. You have to know how to get there or you’ll never find it’.

  ‘You et bear meat?’ A small Ukrainian man chimes in. He’s an English teacher. The staff, unable to hear his deadpan, trilling accent, believe he’s American.

  ‘Sure, dude. It’s delicious. These guys’ve got any endangered animal you can think of. But here’s the best bit – ocelot meat! You order an ocelot, and the waiter goes out the back, returns with a live ocelot, and kills it right there in front of you. It’s fucking awesome.’

  The fat man’s patter is a train of the most offensive material imaginable. For his next topic, he boasts of how he can bargain the locals down below local rates for meals on the street. I examine him in disbelief. He’s a barbarian. How come anyone listens to him? I scowl and head home, disturbed.

  Outside, the rain has started with renewed vigour. I see a couple of passing motorcyclists carrying an umbrella in one hand. The rest are wearing plastic raincoats. But while commuters are big on protection from the elements, they don’t seem too fussed about road safety. Motorcycles often carry entire families of five – mum, dad, two kids and baby arranged in ingenious formations I would never have thought of. And no one is wearing a crash helmet.

  The month I arrive marks the beginning of a new law making helmets compulsory for motorcyclists across the country. But the new law is not enforced, and is almost universally ignored.

  My earlier observation about Vietnamese invincibility on the roads was optimistic. Over the course of this year, 10,500 people will die in motorbike accidents on Vietnam’s roads – nearly thirty people per day.

  Going global

  My enchanted days of waking up at 6.30am are coming to an end. It wasn’t a promising new lifestyle change, just jetlag.

  Unfortunately, the rest of Hanoi wakes at first light, so the first class of the day at most language schools starts at 8am. This morning I’m heading off to ‘Global’ for an 8am class observation.

  Showered and dressed, I open my bedroom door and head across the landing to the living room, which I keep locked while I’m asleep. Hanging from the door handle is a plastic bag full of baby eggplants. Xuyen strikes again.

  In her late fifties, visibly worn out from a lifetime of hard work, Nga’s mother works tirelessly for the benefit of others. She heads out at dawn every morning on a bicycle to work on a meat stall at a nearby market. The rest of the time she’s looking after Ba Gia (pronounced ‘bah-zah’) – her long-widowed, childless aunt, who’s 84.

  She’s estranged from Nga’s father, and lives with Ba Gia, which means ‘old grandma’, in a single-roomed cement dwelling just outside the gate to my compound. The room has a wooden loft, accessed by small metal rungs driven into the wall. Xuyen climbs up there every night to sleep on a hard wooden board, without a fan, which is the part that flabbergasts me. On the one occasion I stick my head up there, there seems to be no air at all. It’s hot, wet, and absolutely stifling.

  One rainy night soon after my arrival, I come home late, perhaps midnight. It’s long past Hanoi’s bedtime and the neighbourhood is utterly deserted. Every shopfront along Nguyen Thai Hoc and my little street has been sealed with a metal roller-door, rendering the streets unrecognisable – so unrecognisable that I briefly think the xe om driver has brought me to the wrong district, a nasty, more dangerous one.

  I climb off the motorcycle, pay the fare and find that the tall wooden gate to my compound has been locked. Nga told me the gate would be locked at night, and has given me a key that will open the padlock. But the technique eludes me. In order to release the padlock, which is on the inside of the gate, the person outside must squeeze their hands, one holding the key, through small holes in the wood on either side of the bolt, and blindly manoeuvre the key into the lock.

  Not having had any training in obstetrics, I find this impossible. I persist for about fifteen minutes, until my wrists are sore and I’m mad with frustration, then peer up gloomily at the barbed wire strung across the area above the gate. The rain is falling harder now. No choice but to wake Xuyen.

  My knock on the door sounds like cannon-fire in the dead of night.

  ‘Hello?’ is all I can think to call out. There’s a long silence, and, gritting my teeth, I knock again. This time I hear movement within.

  Ba Gia opens the door, her eyes gummed shut with sleep, and calls throatily up to the loft. I watch Xuyen stir and climb down the small metal rungs set into the wall. She’s wearing pyjamas rather than the cheap and unflattering clothes she wears by day, and she has taken her hair out for sleeping
. Her hair is thick, still black, and falls down to her waist. With a start I realise she’s beautiful. I’ll never see this vision of her again.

  Rather than irritated, she’s sympathetic towards the soaked and embarrassed foreigner pointing alternately to the key and the gate.

  ‘Khong sao’ (‘No worries’), she says. She has the gate open in less than 15 seconds, then nods and pats me on the back – very decent behaviour for a woman woken almost halfway through her night’s sleep. And this is where the story should end. But it doesn’t, because as she turns to head back to bed, we hear the sudden roar of an approaching vehicle. The alley is illuminated by headlights, and seconds later a moped appears. I recognise Philippe, an unfriendly Frenchman who lives in the apartment above mine; he’s coming home late too. Then a strange thing happens.

  Xuyen pushes open her front door completely and stands aside as Philippe rides his bike into the tiny room, passing Ba Gia’s bed by about 30 centimetres. He parks it somewhere in the back, dismounts, and wanders out, casually nodding to the two venerable women. He offers me a curt ‘Bonne nuit’ on his way through the unlocked gate, then marches across the compound, unlocks our shared downstairs door, and disappears through it. I stand gaping for a few seconds. There’s no one to explain what I’ve just seen. Not even Philippe speaks English. I wonder if I’ve just imagined it all as I head up the stairs, leaving Xuyen, at her insistence, to lock the gate behind me.

  Although Nga, Xuyen’s daughter, makes an unbelievable US$400 per month from renting out my flat and Philippe’s above it, the family still seems very poor. I remain at a loss to understand this. In a country where the average wage is US$20 per month, this should allow Nga and her family to live like royalty, but they don’t. Tuan works hard for a shipping company, and six months into my time in Hanoi, Nga will open an Internet café uptown, which she’ll turn into a thriving concern, working day and night.

  Still they’ll cry poor. Nga watches every penny. I pay my rent in Vietnamese dong, three million a month. When the exchange rate dips slightly against the US dollar, she asks me to pay a few extra thousand dong. Ba Gia, who’s her great aunt, has a chronic eye disease but they ‘can’t afford’ to take her to a doctor.