Single White Female in Hanoi Page 7
Seeing my scathing expression, he shakes his head and flares his nostrils threateningly for a moment before elaborating. ‘The UN measures a country’s progress on three criteria,’ he begins. ‘The first one’s life expectancy, the second is infant mortality rate, and the third, I think it’s calories per day. And over the last hundred years, every country in the world, with the exception of about four, has improved on all three counts.’
If what he says is true, I have the perfect retort for students who tell me capitalism is evil because the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This seems to be a line they’ve all learnt.
‘And no prizes for guessing what those four countries have in common,’ he continues. ‘Yup! Communism.’
At the sound of the ‘C’ word, spoken at full volume, I almost flinch, and my eyes flick around the room. I’ve been in Vietnam two weeks today, and even that’s been long enough for me to observe the degree of paranoia in expat society. The word ‘communism’ is never mentioned, and political references are whispered. Any allusions I make to the government, however inoffensive, are quickly smothered, especially during phone calls. The implication is that the walls have ears, all foreigners’ phones are tapped, and the government is on the lookout for foreigners who are so brazen as to refer to it.
Zac is the only person I meet who’s either brave or foolhardy enough to disregard this code of conduct. Probably he’s just not the paranoid type.
For the duration of this orgiastic repast, which spreads itself from 11.30am to 3pm, when the kitchen closes, Zac is verbally indefatigable. Natassia and I enjoy his impersonations of some of our colleagues at Global, and he makes me laugh so much that my solar plexus aches the next day. But it’s his debating skills that make the biggest impression. I try to stay calm in the face of his lunatic fringe claims, and offer a considered rebuttal, but each time I discover I’ve played right into his hands. He feigns tired attention until I’ve finished, then, with a sigh and another flaring of the nostrils, demolishes whatever points I’ve made with a rapid-fire series of statistics and historical references. At the tender age of 24 he’s exceptionally well-read and has a degree in Asian History. I’m loath to contradict him. It will be some time before I learn that he confabulates about half his material.
My alarm clock wakes me at seven the next morning. It’s Monday and I have a new eight o’clock class at Global.
I rifle through my wardrobe, facing a now-common dilemma. I want to look well-presented in a climate that makes a Westerner look like a perambulating snot rag within thirty minutes. Locals, for some reason, stay immaculate. I settle on a long coral-coloured skirt made of thin taffeta, a sleeveless top and a long-sleeved white cotton shirt to protect me from the elements outside.
At the other end of my street I notice one of the xe om drivers. I don’t know his name yet. He seems to scowl a lot, and as I walk past he’s shouting at someone. Despite, or possibly because of, the edge of aggression in his husky voice, I notice two things: that there’s something about the Vietnamese language that bewitches me, makes me want to hear more; and that this is especially true when it’s his voice.
The morning’s class comprises about sixteen fourth-graders who seem to have been infected with a delinquency virus. When I make my grand first entrance into the classroom, I’m hit by a powerful urge to turn and run. The hot, wet air is whistling with paper planes, the blackboard boasts an anatomically suspect drawing of a penis, and there’s a chubby boy with glasses and a cowlick trying to simultaneously strangle an anaemic-looking boy and a large po-faced girl.
I growl ‘Good morning,’ and activity stops for a second while they stare at me. Then continues.
A runt of a boy with buckteeth and mischievous eyes screams, ‘Hello my teacher!’, turns red, and collapses into giggles. The rest of the class follow suit.
‘Be quiet,’ I bellow in my sternest voice, and for a miraculous moment, there’s decorum. I write my name on the board and a few of them have a go at screaming it unrecognisably. ‘Cah-zaw … Cazoleenuh’. In Northern Vietnamese pronunciation, the phoneme /z/ seems to be the default phoneme. The letter ‘d’, if uncrossed, is pronounced /z/, as are the combination ‘gi’ as in ‘gia’ (‘old’) and the letter ‘r’.
I sigh. Time for roll call. I whip out the list of student names and peer at the first name. Nguyen Dat Long. I have a crack at pronouncing it, and the class falls about again. I try just the last name ‘Long’ since I have some idea how to pronounce this, and the anaemic boy’s hand shoots into the air. Emboldened, I eyeball the next name. Vu Duc Hung. After a few goes, a hand rises uncertainly to a background hubbub of kids imitating me. I put a tick beside the name and squint, panic-stricken at the next name. Huynh Cao Phuong.
‘Hw … Hue … Hue-ing … Cow … Foo …’ wails of laughter fill the room.
‘Damn it,’ I cry. ‘You do it, ya little brat.’ I thrust the register into the hands of ‘The Strangler’, one of the main culprits, who gets my drift and takes over. I peer over his shoulder, mystified, as the vowels and consonants roll off his tongue. This language is going to break my heart, I think to myself.
After roll call I have to yell for silence again. It’s time to start the lesson. Glancing at the clock, I can see we’re already fifteen minutes in, which gives me some relief, since I’m struggling badly. I was handed the bootlegged textbook minutes before I walked in here and I haven’t had time to make head or tail out of it. Scanning the ‘follow-up book’ for comments and advice from the previous teacher about the last lesson, I find whoever it was hasn’t bothered to fill in the information in the space provided.
For the first forty or so minutes of the class I struggle through random pages. ‘Page five. Mary is in the bathroom. Where is Mary?’ Seems very easy – maybe they’ve done this chapter. I leaf frantically through the pages as projectiles being hurled around the room whoosh by. These kids just aren’t scared of me.
‘Okay. Page nine. Look at the picture. Page nine. Richard is playing in the garden. Who is he playing with? Are you listening? On page nine.’ This is hideous. Oh my god, is that really the time?
Time is crawling. Po-face, along with a couple of other quiet girls and a boy, seem genuinely interested in improving their English, but they don’t stand a chance. The rest of the class strike me as ineducable. I find a pointless drawing activity in the book and set them to work.
At the sixty-minute mark I begin to lose my patience. The kids have started to run around the room again, and worse, some have disappeared out the door, and I can’t see where they went. The buck-toothed kid is long gone and ‘The Strangler’ is kneeling on a boy nearly twice his size, who’s face down on the floor. The situation is desperate. Obviously the material I’ve been given is of no interest to them.
I wonder if the kids’ behaviour is largely caused by classroom conditions. The aircon isn’t working, so the classroom is airless, humid and about 33 degrees. Through the thin wall to my right comes the sound of the lesson taking place in the next room. The teacher has the cassette-player up full blast and the inane tape-script is spoken by characters with Texan accents. Worst of all, from the floor beneath us comes intermittent hammering and drilling noises, completely drowning out the lesson. It’s the sounds of progress from the building site below, as workers reconstruct the ruins to make new classrooms. Mr Thinh doesn’t want to lose money by cancelling classes or restricting labourer hours.
But the fact remains – the class has pretty much fallen to pieces. The situation calls for drastic action.
So I do something drastic, something desperate, something undignified. On the blackboard, I draw a brick wall, with ten bottles sitting on it, and I start singing:
‘…There were ten green bottles hanging on the wall …’ After the first bottle accidentally falls, I rub out one bottle. The Strangler has stopped whatever he was doing and is staring up at me, which is encouraging. His cowlick splays from his crown towards the ceiling like an Amerindian headdress.
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By ‘six green bottles’, a couple of tentative voices join mine.
By ‘there’ll be four green bottles hanging on the wall’ the participation process has peaked and settled at three or four kids, the Strangler surprisingly among them, but the melody eludes them. So do the words, mostly – so the sorry choir before me is mostly mouthing empty syllables while humming a series of wavering, random notes.
This has to be as bad as things can get. I’ll laugh about this some day.
Singing loudly, I back up towards the board to rub out the third bottle, but I make some kind of error of judgement. There’s a ripping noise and a stinging in my left buttock. I’ve backed up against the protruding metal shelf designed to hold chalk, and torn a gaping hole in my taffeta skirt just over my left bum cheek. Which, twisting discreetly, I look down and find, to my horror, is now plainly visible.
I finish the lesson off, keeping my back to the board at all times. When the bell rings, I make no effort to stop the students bolting out the door. Then I tie my cotton shirt around my waist so that it protects my modesty, and retire to the staffroom, where, to my immense relief, I find Zac.
‘Caz, you’re taking it all too seriously,’ he tells me. ‘You’re expecting them to learn stuff.’
Drop-dead gorgeous
Nga tells me her husband’s sister, Ly, works for another English school. They need teachers and want to meet me. When I ask about the school she tells me it’s ‘UNESCO school’ which sounds prestigious.
I tell her my minimum wage, a fairly unambitious sum.
‘OK. I tell your price to Miss Ly,’ she says, looking dubious. After that, I don’t hear anything more on the subject for a while. I presume I overshot my station.
But one day she tells me that Ly has agreed to my price.
I dial the number Nga has given me and I speak to Ly, whose English is more fluent than Nga’s. She tells me to come to the office on Wednesday morning.
So early on Wednesday, I head due north on foot to the school, which is in a part of town I haven’t seen. The walk turns out to be somewhat longer than the map suggested – about three quarters of an hour, but it’s straight up a relatively uncrowded historical avenue. The sidewalks are vendor-free so I can walk at a normal pace. The scenery is fascinating. The buildings along this street are enormous and sit in extensive grounds. Some are obviously embassies but most appear to have a military purpose. I’m struck by the architecture, which varies between French and Stalinist.
There are high walls, manicured gardens and green-uniformed soldiers hugging AK47s stationed along almost the entire length of the street. In some places there’s mown grass, something I haven’t seen elsewhere. But wherever there’s lawn, there’s a sign telling the public to keep off it.
For the duration of the walk, passing motorcyclists point to me and discuss me with their pillion. Xe om drivers pull up beside me calling out ‘woo-ooh, woo-ooh’. I seem to be a talking point for locals. As I walk I contemplate this. It dawns on me that in Hanoi only the poorest people travel by foot. Anyone here with any means at all travels by car, motorcycle or at the very least by bicycle. The sight of a Westerner walking must be greatly confusing.
By the time I find the school, I’m worn down by forty-five minutes of persistent ‘woo-oohs’.
It takes me a couple of passes before I realise I’m at the right place. The neon sign out on the street doesn’t read ‘UNESCO’. It reads ‘UNCO’.
There’s a Kung Fu class for kids going on in the quadrangle behind the guarded gate, with about thirty brown-robed children busting synchronised moves for their elderly teacher. Behind them is a salubrious-looking French colonial-era house.
In an office beside the guardhouse at the gate, I meet Ly. She’s the sister of Tuan, Nga’s husband, and she has his handsome features, but they’re marred by the sour expression into which her face seems to have congealed. She greets me politely, flashing a brief, tight-lipped smile.
I’ve brought my teaching certificate and a wad of other documentation, but she’s not interested. My employment is already assured – these bits and pieces are of little concern.
I raise the matter of my wage and find all is well. The school will pay me the lowly US$10 per hour I requested, although I should be aware that other foreign teachers are paid less than this.
‘The school have decide to give you this wage because Nga say you are very good teacher and you are friend of my family,’ she tells me.
She asks me which nights I can teach, then shows me the locked display cabinet of bootlegged textbooks behind her.
‘For your classes you will need this one, this one and this one,’ she tugs at the different coloured spines. ‘If you don’t want to pay now, we can deduct the price from your first wage. We will look after you because you are family friend’.
I stay quiet. I don’t know whether to be grateful or suspicious. Maybe making teachers pay for the textbooks is normal, but it doesn’t sound right. Nor does the fact that teachers, apparently, must teach two trial classes for free. I want to tell her one will be enough, but then wonder whether I’m being ungrateful. I’m a stranger in a strange land, and these people are offering me work.
Furthermore, being referred to as a family friend sounds like a good sign. In fact, in the North Vietnamese workplace, this is worth much, much more than any number of qualifications and references.
But when I tell Zac the good news, he snorts.
‘Global might be bad,’ he says, ‘but at least they pay you.’
‘I can’t see how a UN-owned institution is gonna get away with ripping off staff,’ I retort.
‘Caz,’ he sighs and shakes his head at me. ‘There’s “UNESCO” schools all over town, and none of them’s got any connection whatsoever to the UN. I know a girl that used to work at this place, and the school still owes her money.’
‘Who?’
‘You don’t know her, and she’s left town anyway’
‘How do you know it was this place?’
He clicks his tongue impatiently and sighs as if tired of such petty chit-chat.
I’m nervous, but not deterred. I figure my connections will spell protection. Two days later, as arranged, I travel to the school’s other, far more utilitarian, campus across town to take a class of advanced-level adults.
At the Kung Fu campus I was given the textbook for the class, and I’ve prepared a lesson from it, but now, on arrival at the second campus, I’m briefed differently.
‘This is advanced class’ a plump, too-friendly woman called Yen tells me. ‘You must make discussion on topic like drug or divorce.’
‘But what about this book?’ I wave the bootleg in front of her, perplexed. ‘When do I use this book?’
‘Yes.’ She smiles. The phone is ringing. ‘This book also advanced level.’ She answers the phone and smiles at me again. I’m dismissed.
I have half an hour before the class begins. I retire to the settee in the corner with pen and paper and prepare a debate on capital punishment, which exists in Vietnam. The death sentence, by firing squad, is handed down for murder, treason, counterfeiting, armed robbery, sex and drug offences and even for a number of economic crimes. Those convicted don’t get the right to appoint their own lawyer. Amnesty International has condemned the Vietnamese trial system, which sends more than a hundred people to the squad each year. I make two columns and I jot down a few hoary arguments ‘for’ and ‘against’. I’m so involved I don’t notice the people swarming around me or the passage of time.
My concentration is broken by Yen. ‘Miss Carolyn – your class wetting now, please go upstair to floor four – room number … 403.’ She hands me two sticks of chalk.
I wander out in search of an elevator, and quickly discover there isn’t one. Since in Vietnam, the entrance floor is considered the first, the fourth floor is up only three flights of stairs. But this mathematical consolation counts for little, because each storey in this building is about six metres high.
This is not the weather for stairs. It’s not the weather for any kind of motion at all. My thigh muscles start to fight back by the top of the first flight. I focus my mind outside my body and climb slowly. My mind drifts back to a lunchtime xe om ride I took today. En route to the restaurant, I witnessed a very strange thing. I saw a man running.
By the second floor I feel like I’m on a planet with higher gravity than Earth. I reflect on the running man. How was he able to command his muscles to work like this? Nobody else on the street was moving, save for the economical flick of the wrist required to operate a paper fan.
By the third floor I’m feeling dizzy. All the oxygen seems to have boiled out of the air. Students are bounding past me on their way to classes. I stop for a breather during which it occurs to me that the running man must have just committed a crime punishable by death. Perhaps I can work the story into the debate.
At the top, I lean against the banister struggling for breath, and notice the number painted outside the classroom in front of me is 403. When I judge I’ll be able make vocal noises, rather than gasping ones, I stick my head in the doorway. And baulk at the vision. Luckily, I’ve stuck my head into a door at the back of the room, and the 25-odd students sitting at desks facing the other way haven’t noticed me.
The classroom is long and narrow and the teacher’s place is at the opposite end. I can see this without a doubt since it’s where the blackboard and stage are.
Fourteen years as a performing musician and this is the first time I’ve experienced stage fright. I take a deep breath and re-enter the room at the teachers’ entrance. I step up onto the stage, which creaks alarmingly, introduce myself, and the lesson begins.
Standing there in front of the blackboard, looking at the two neat, silent rows of desks going back beyond earshot, I feel like a 1950’s maths teacher. The chalk squeals aggressively with every stroke as I write my name, curling my spine and causing my knees to twitch, but the class doesn’t seem to notice.