Single White Female in Hanoi Read online

  After introducing myself, I chalk up an indistinct map of Australia, minimising strokes. I elicit questions about topography and demography and we discuss the marvel that a country 23 times bigger than theirs could have less than a quarter the population. The students seem interested, so I ask them: ‘I’m sure you have many questions. Who would like to ask a question?’

  A timid girl in the front row raises her hand. I nod to her.

  ‘How old are you?’

  I stare at her and blink. Nothing in my teacher training prepared me for this.

  ‘Questions about Australia,’ I tell her, and notice that, all over the room, bottom lips have rolled forward in disappointment.

  Oh, what the hell? I tell myself. When in Rome …

  ‘I’m 36’ I inform twenty-five strangers.

  There’s a chorus from the females of ‘Ahhh – so young!’ which seems odd considering I’m nearly twice their age. (When my Vietnamese improves, I realise this is an idiom for ‘you look young!’)

  A hand shoots in the air a few rows back.

  ‘Yes?’ I ask the young man.

  ‘How much do you earn to teach this class?’

  Twenty-five sets of eyes focus on my mouth to make sure they catch the answer.

  This will be the only time this question catches me unawares. On this occasion my mouth fails me by working like a goldfish’s and I stammer stupidly, mumbling that I don’t know what my wage is yet. On all subsequent occasions, and there are many – since I’ll learn to give students the opportunity to commit this exact faux pas – I’m prepared.

  On these occasions, I’ll turn to the class smiling and ask them: ‘What are the three questions you should never ask a Westerner?’ Usually, there’s at least one classmate who has had some contact with a Westerner. When prompted, they will recite the answer.

  ‘How old are you? Are you married? How much do you earn?’

  The problem is that most of these students have had little or no contact with an actual native English speaker. Nor have the teachers who taught them English. Their knowledge of the language has been imparted in a cultural vacuum.

  I pick up the chalk and squeak the word ‘Punishment’ up in large letters.

  ‘What is the expression for when a country punishes criminals by killing them?’ I ask.

  I’m eliciting some vocabulary for the lesson. I successfully elicit ‘Capital Punishment’, ‘Death Penalty’, ‘Guilty’, ‘Innocent’ and ‘Execute’ – there’s no shortage of vocabulary in the room – then we begin.

  I run the discussion as a debate, splitting the class into two sides after running over a few basic pro and con arguments. But there’s a setback. All the students want to be on the pro side, since everybody in the room supports capital punishment, although nobody in the class has ever met a criminal.

  I have to keep explaining that the debate is not real life, it’s about discussion skills and learning English. Tan, the guy who asked me my wage, and an outspoken round-faced woman called Pham, dominate the class. I divide the class again, putting them on opposite teams, and try in vain to encourage some of the quieter members to speak out.

  This time, the ‘Against’ team gets the hang of it, and while most of them sit in silence, a handful of members are arguing for all they’re worth with the occasional personal insult thrown in.

  ‘Perhaps the criminal is innocent!’ they cry, to which somebody from the other team responds with: ‘No criminal can be innocent,’ only to be told: ‘You are stupid.’

  The ‘For’ team are relying mainly on the unusual tenet that capital punishment is good ‘because it show the government have control and power’.

  Although my own position on capital punishment is not clear-cut, I find myself unable to resist helping the ‘Against’ team in the hope that my arguments might open the minds of the students and improve their deductive skills. After a while, I sense hostility from the ‘For’ team, and I become paranoid that my political sensibilities are making me unpopular. At the hour and a half mark, I gladly wind down the lesson, hoping it won’t get me deported.

  After the lesson, I meet a man in the reception area. He forms such an improbable spectacle that I find myself staring at him as I queue up to return chalk and sign the teacher’s book. He’s short with a disproportionately large head set on an awkward body possibly stunted by childhood polio. He has dusky-coloured skin and stiff black hair. His teeth jut out of his generous mouth at improbable angles. Behind the carnival distortion of the lenses in his spectacles, are two glassy, swollen green eyes whose focal points diverge by about 45 degrees.

  He grins suddenly.

  ‘Aren’t these women lovely!’ he remarks. He says it in my direction, presumably to me, although neither of his eyes seems to be looking at me. He’s referring to the administration staff. I blink politely. He has sprayed me with saliva with each syllable.

  ‘I’m sure gonna miss them when I go to Taiwan,’ he continues. His accent is American-tinged. I notice he’s shifting his weight from foot to foot as he stands there. He’s addressing me as though he knows me. I wonder if he’s mistaken me for someone else.

  ‘You’re going to Taiwan.’ I say flatly.

  ‘Yeah’ he replies. ‘You can earn really good money there – two thousand dollars a month.’

  ‘How will you earn that?’

  ‘Same as here – teaching English.’

  I try not to register my astonishment. ‘You’re an English teacher?’

  ‘Yep. And my ambition is to go and work in Taiwan and save four thousand dollars.’

  ‘Really! What will you do with the money?’

  ‘I’m going to spend it on my wedding.’

  ‘Oh. That’s nice. You’ve got a girlfriend.’

  ‘Well, not yet, you know. But I’ve met a drop-dead gorgeous girl from Saigon, and I’m going to marry her.’

  ‘Does she know of your plan?’

  ‘Not yet – but she will. I’m sure she likes me. She told me I was just like her old boyfriend, and she still loves him.’

  I stand there staring at him. Perhaps I’m nodding. I don’t know what to say.

  ‘Hey – I’m Davey,’ he says suddenly, putting out his hand. I take it.

  ‘And I’m Carolyn. I just taught my first class here,’ I reply.

  His eyes remain unfocussed and he jiggles on the spot.

  ‘Hey, Davey,’ I say, ‘where you from?’

  ‘Atlanta, USA,’ he tells me.

  I’m curious to know what his first language is, since his English doesn’t sound native. I’m betting Spanish, since I fancy he looks Puerto Rican.

  ‘What other languages do you speak?’ I ask him. He chortles, flattered.

  ‘Oh no! Just English.’

  I’m at the front of the queue.

  ‘Nice to meet you Davey,’ I tell him. I return the remaining chalk and learn that the school will be paying me for this class. Ly has waived the unpaid trial classes for me.

  As I pick my way across the foyer from the office to the exit through the rows of parked bikes, the whole area comes alive with noise and fumes. The students are all heading home. I smile at the friendly attendant and he offers me a cigarette, which I take.

  But outside, wandering along the narrow street looking for a xe om, my mind’s not on the job. Davey has made a big impression on me. I’m asking myself ‘how did this man end up here?’

  Waylaid

  There’s an empty instant noodles packet in my living room. I ate the noodles a few days ago, but the packet has not outlived its usefulness. This is because one version of its cooking instructions is in English. It’s my breakfast reading.

  ‘Bring 400ml of water to boil, add noodles and simmer for 3 minutes,’ it begins, tantalisingly. ‘Remove noodles from water and drain well,’ it suggests, grippingly. ‘Stir noodles with seasonings and mix,’ it commands, fascinatingly. ‘Garnish with fried onion and your delicious noodles are ready to serve.’ My eyes drift lovingly over
the text.

  I’m a reading addict exhibiting the deviant, irrational behaviour of cold turkey. I’m completely starved of material. My efforts to locate an international English-language newspaper have failed, and, although I know it exists, because I’ve seen it, no outlet I’ve found stocks the local English-language daily – Viet Nam News – or anything whatsoever in English.

  Compared to the short, diacritic-laden words of written Vietnamese, the ridiculous brand name of my toilet paper, Pulppy, looks hearteningly familiar.

  The book I brought to Hanoi with me, Denise Chong’s excellent account of the life of napalm survivor Kim Phuc, The Girl in the Picture, has been read, re-read, and read again. Kim Phuc is the naked girl running, with other screaming children, along a burning road as the back half of her body fries at 1000°C, in one of the most famous photos from what the Vietnamese refer to as ‘The AmericanWar’. She now feels like a personal friend – a member of my social circle. Possibly this is also the deviant, irrational fancy of a person suffering the effects of social deprivation. The fact is, I no longer have a social circle, just a round hole where one used to be.

  Unknown to me, there’s a pool of like-minded expats in Hanoi enjoying dangerously rich social lives little more than a kilometre away, but I haven’t met them yet. And up until now, most of the expats I’ve met haven’t struck me as potential bosom buddies. The problem is that without a starting point, I don’t know how to meet more people. This is an aspect of turning up alone in a strange city that hadn’t occurred to me. If I hadn’t met Zac and Natassia, I’d be talking to myself by now, I say aloud, to no one in particular.

  I’ve got cabin fever. From my seat at the desk, I gaze out through the bars of my living room window onto the barbed wire enclosure a few metres away. It’s a neighbour’s rooftop laundry area – their washing hangs limp in the saturated air. I hear the sounds of someone struggling with a window latch, then a window overlooking the rooftop flies open and a pretty young woman sticks her head out.

  She turns her head in my direction, and for a second I’m sure our eyes will meet and we’ll enjoy a wordless moment of connection. I prepare a smile, but the woman’s eyes are closed.

  She takes a deep breath and executes a messy one-fingered nose-blow into the cement below. From my vantage point it’s horribly clear. I’m compelled to continue watching as she shakes her hand to clear it of the strings of snot trailing from it, and retreats back into the room. The old me would have found this hilarious, but today it leaves me with a melancholy awareness of the gulf that straddles the few metres between my window and hers.

  I head across the landing to my bedroom, and dress hurriedly. I’ve decided on a trip to the Old Quarter. Last week I found a popular café near the lake that caters to tourists. It’s listed in the Lonely Planet Guide, and offers mediocre Western-style food and disagreeable staff, although at a price. On the other hand, the place had a copy of the day’s Viet Nam News. I can read the newspaper, and perhaps meet some people. I’m out the door before I’ve finished buttoning my shirt. I stride across the compound and through the ungainly gate.

  Which is where I get waylaid.

  The waylayer is a piece of hobbling history; an octogenarian whose unmistakable gurgling voice always makes me smile fondly, even when she’s using it to shout abuse into the compound, which is often; a woman with mischief in her eye and a flair for physical humour. I get waylaid by Nga’s great aunt, the singular Ba Gia.

  The matriarch gets around on a stick, with her free hand holding her sore lower back, and an obligatory conical hat on her head. Her hair is immensely long, although its true length is a mystery to me because her grey plait disappears intriguingly into the hat after snaking around her head. She exists between her place and a low cement wall at the end of Pho Yen The, 100 metres away, where she sits for hours, often joking loudly, and, I suspect, profanely, with the men who loiter there.

  Ba Gia never lets me get past her without a ‘Chao’ ritual.

  ‘Chao!’ she rasps, often catching me unawares as I scurry along the street heading to a class. I turn to see her looking offended. ‘Chao Ba’ (‘greetings grandmother’) I respond respectfully. Her beautiful mobile face cracks into its signature smile and her eyes twinkle. She nods and completes the exchange with ‘Chao Co’ (‘greetings young lady’).

  For a moment we have perfect mutual comprehension. Then she spoils it by gargling three more words. ‘An Com Chua’. Her right hand leaves her lower back to mime imaginary chopsticks, with which she shovels imaginary food into her mouth. I know com means food, so I presume she’s inviting me back to her place for a feed. I panic, and invariably blurt out ‘no thank you’ in English, shaking my head and patting the air in front of me to clarify my point. There’s a brief hiatus, then the look of complete bafflement on her face breaks again into that wonderful smile.

  Her teeth are stained black as obsidian, and decades of betelnut addiction have left her lips tattooed orange in a permanent and sloppy parody of lipstick.

  It’s not until late August that I work out ‘An Com Chua?’ means ‘have you eaten yet?’ after which, still presuming she wants to whisk me off for some chow, I reply with a fervent ‘an roi!’ – ‘I’ve eaten already’. Then I pat my stomach, lean backwards and grimace, to illustrate the fearful extent of my fullness.

  The reason for the exaggerated gesture is my terror of finding myself sitting on the floor with Ba Gia, being exhorted to eat the delicacies in front of me. This follows Nga’s revelation, after I tell her I’d like to buy an edible gift for Ba Gia, that the old woman’s favourite victual is fertilised duck eggs. I’ve seen the barbequed embryos piled up at market stalls. They look like caramelised versions of the floppy unborn birds I used to pluck from the ruins of their shattered eggs as a kid and try to nurse back to health, waiting in vain for their sealed eyes to open.

  Every other day, Ba Gia tries to chat with me in Vietnamese. On each occasion I shake my head and repeat the eternal foreigner’s mantra: ‘Khong hieu’ – ‘don’t understand.’ On each occasion she nods understandingly, repeats ‘Khong Hieu’ sympathetically, and continues talking.

  But ‘An Com Chua?’ is not finished with me yet. Later, when I learn that ‘An Com Chua?’ is the Vietnamese equivalent of ‘How are you?’, the many months of pained grimaces and stomach clutching return to plague me. Ba Gia must have concluded I had a horrible digestive disorder.

  Today, as I pass her door, it’s open and she’s sitting on her bed watching me.

  ‘Chao,’ she calls out.

  ‘Chao Ba.’

  ‘Chao Co,’ she says, emphatically. I go to walk on but I hear a burbling stream of Vietnamese and turn to her again. She’s beckoning, in the Asian style, palm facing downwards, fingers paddling, and she’s patting the bed beside her.

  Before I know it, I’m there next to her, sitting on the thin straw mattress in her cement cell. There’s an ancient fan behind me and she reaches over to switch it on. This, I realise, is purely for my benefit. The rest of the time she must sit here in the wet heat without any respite, presumably to save electricity. The wire guard is missing so the rusted blades chop nakedly at the air. Behind the fan is a table laden with junk, and through the gloom behind that, I make out a cupboard and a couple of parked motorcycles. One is the moped belonging to my upstairs neighbour, Philippe.

  Ba Gia is feeling loquacious today, and chatters away despite my obvious incomprehension. She points up at the stained concrete wall behind the bed, and I notice for the first time that it bears two framed photos. In the one closer to me, which is an oddly macabre portrait taken from a spot about three metres in front of the subject, I can recognise the woman beside me, younger by about twenty years, and strikingly handsome. In the other photo, which is larger, she’s a young woman, sitting at a wooden desk near a window.

  The old woman then proceeds to regale me with undoubtedly hilarious tales about each of the photos. I know they’re funny because, while pointing to the
m, she apparently mimes being mummified – arms folded across chest, jaw loose, eyes in frozen upwards stare – and something to do with a colostomy bag. This strikes me as strange since they’re two concepts almost certainly unknown to an underprivileged Vietnamese octogenarian.

  I have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about, but while three weeks ago I might have panicked, today I just relax and enjoy the show.

  Ba Gia speaks in a deep throaty series of short noises that even locals strain to follow, burps loudly, smiles often and periodically drags the bedpan out from under the bed to spit into.

  After the anecdotes have been told and enacted, there’s a moment’s silence, then the old woman’s attention seems to go elsewhere. She reaches under the bed and pulls out a large dinner plate. The plate is laid with an array of unfamiliar paraphernalia – a sharp knife, a small wooden box, a paper bag, a piece of woody root, a sort of pipe-bowl and a long metal tool.

  From the paper bag, she carefully removes what looks like a fresh betel leaf. I sit in riveted attention as she deftly tops, tails and halves the leaf with the knife. One half goes back into the paper bag, the other she places in the palm of her hand. Now she opens the little box, revealing some white powder. She removes a good pinch of this and wraps it tightly into the leaf, making a little parcel. Next she picks up the woody stuff, which looks to me like galangal, and she places this in the pipe-bowl with the leaf-parcel of powder. With the special metal tool, she begins to vigorously pound the two things together.

  The atmosphere has become subdued and intense, in the way it does when illicit drugs are being prepared. I’m motionless beside her, barely breathing, as she pounds away. After a battle, the contents of the bowl form a paste, which I’m expecting she’ll smoke. It occurs to me that I’m about to be offered drugs, which should excite me, but I’m not in the mood. The heat of the day has knocked my wits about enough and I have no desire to compound that feeling. Furthermore, I’m not sure what kind of drugs we’re dealing with. What was that white powder? I wonder whether it would be rude to refuse.