Single White Female in Hanoi Page 9

  But she doesn’t offer me anything, she’s become oblivious to my presence. She doesn’t smoke the paste either. Instead, she lifts the bowl to her mouth, and in four rapid, ugly movements, she shovels the paste into her gullet with the metal pounder.

  As she reaches for a glass of water, I sniff the bowl, which smells of betel leaf and galangal, and then I take my leave.

  Standing in the brightness of the alley I realise that in my haste to dress and get out of my place, I left my wallet at home. I pop back across the compound, to my place to retrieve it, then head out again. But this time, passing Ba Gia’s room, I find her front door closed.

  I think of her lying on her bed in some kind of opium daze. Perhaps this is how she deals with her sore back, or the deeper pains that her life has dealt her. She had a husband once, but he died long ago. Worse yet, she has no children, which is something so unthinkable in Vietnamese culture, Nga speaks of it in hushed tones.

  But at the other end of the street, I find her in situ on her cement throne, stick resting beside her, orange lips curved into an amused smile.

  ‘Chao Ba!’

  ‘Chao Co!’

  Hanoians

  Yvette and Khai have gone to France for a long holiday. Their legacies to me have been threefold: the flat, the rice-cooker and the phone number of a pianist called Nguyet.

  ‘She’s your neighbour – she live just over there on Nguyen Thai Hoc,’ Khai gesticulates in the direction of the main street. ‘She used to live in Paris for a year, and she speak excellent French. She’s very kind, but her English, probably, is not so good. Maybe you can go to her house to play piano’. He gives me some basic coaching on how to pronounce her name.

  I’ve been in Hanoi for about three weeks when I make the phone call. It’s a complete failure. The woman on the other end chatters away in Vietnamese. I repeat Nguyet’s name, interspersed, pointlessly, with fragments of English, for about a minute. Then, since there’s no choice, and despite the painful rudeness of it, I hang up.

  On my third attempt, I manage to get hold of Nguyet. When I do, it takes me a minute to be sure, because her English really is patchy. I try French, but realise that in the twenty years since I was a Grade A High School French student, the neurones responsible have either died or been killed. In slow, halting language, we arrange to meet outside my place at ten o’ clock the next morning.

  Despite the many people that mill around outside my place each day, I spot Nguyet immediately. She’s young, spunky, and more than a head shorter than me. She has a chubby-cheeked face set with round glasses, and skin so flawless it seems to have been sprayed on. With her trendy, flattering clothes, and the full head of shining hair trailing freely behind her, she stands out easily.

  At her invitation, I jump on the back of her motorcycle and she takes me to a nearby café. We order cold fruit drinks and try to get to know each other.

  ‘My English – terrible!’ she keeps telling me, shaking her head in disgust. Her voice is lively and very expressive, swinging up into the high register on the first syllable of ‘terrible’. This is evidence of her time in France. Intonation like this eludes most Vietnamese, since their own language doesn’t use it. As the conversation struggles on, I realise she sounds more French than Vietnamese when she speaks English.

  ‘I must, er, practise my English, because … avant … ?’ She looks at me for help. An ancient bell rings in my head.

  ‘Before?’ I suggest.

  ‘Yes! Before, I can speak a little English, but now, long time I never speak, I remember,’ she tells me.

  ‘You mean, “forget”.’ She takes my hand and laughs, shaking her head again.

  ‘Yes! Forget’.

  We spend about half an hour at the café. Nguyet admires the ring on my right hand and I explain it was a Valentine gift from a boyfriend many years ago. She reacts calmly, almost knowingly, when I tell her I’m not married.

  ‘I also not yet marry,’ she explains, and for a moment her mood saddens.

  Our banter is painstakingly slow and by the end of the rendezvous I’m exhausted from the strain of it, but I like her a lot. I feel happy on the back of the bike as she rides me home.

  ‘Er…er…Demain…?’ she begins.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I translate, puffed with pride at my memory.

  ‘Yes! Tomorrow – I go to Hue City ten day. After, I phone to you,’ she says, turning her motorcycle around at my gate. She kisses me shyly on each cheek and I hope she’ll call.

  When the phone rings a few days later I know it can’t be Nguyet, but the person on the other end certainly shares with her a poor mastery of English. In fact, I wonder for the first part of the exchange whether this person has a wrong number, only the presence of English-like syllables alerts me to the possibility the call is truly for me.

  ‘Hello?’

  (Incomprehensible word salad)

  ‘I’m sorry? Who are you looking for?’

  (Incomprehensible word salad)

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Stee-oo din I stee-oodin you’

  ‘You’re my student?’

  ‘Are you free now?’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘OK! I come your how.’

  Click. I blink at the phone wondering how this person knows my address, then, with a sinking feeling, I think of the students who have accosted me at the blackboard after classes, wanting my phone number and address. During my first week as a teacher, I obliged them.

  The girl who turns up at my door with a friend an hour later, claiming she was once my student at Global, is not familiar. Chances are, she got my number and address from some other student. I learn her name is Van-Anh. Her friend Sam, whose English is better, is not a Global student. The girls inspect my house and converse in Vietnamese. Then with big beaming smiles they announce their agenda.

  ‘Today we go to Van Mieu – the Temple of Literature. It is very important place of Hanoi. The first university of Vietnam people. ‘

  Despite the unplanned and unsolicited nature of this outing, I’m touched that these locals have taken my historical and cultural education so to heart. Van-Anh and her friend each have a motorcycle and we duly set off on a trip that lasts about sixty seconds. Van Mieu is a block away.

  The streets and sidewalks are pumping to the usual chaos, but with more than the usual number of beggars, as we pull up at an engraved stone archway. Through it I can see well-kept lawns and a pond. The girls park their bikes then hang back while I buy our entrance tickets. In a spirited demonstration of the dual-pricing system still legal at this time in Vietnam, admission is 1,000 dong for Vietnamese, 12,000 dong for foreigners.

  This is my first real cultural excursion in Hanoi. While I find museums interesting in theory, they’re rarely absorbing enough to prevent the onset of achy ‘museum legs’ within twenty minutes of entry. I guess I just have a natural preference for taking in information while reclined, by book or at a stall on the street. But I did intend to see Van Mieu. I’ve passed the ancient stone walls that surround it and marvelled at the existence of something so old in a city full of young people.

  Beyond the ornate entrance gate is an elegant pathway leading through a series of courtyards towards the red and gold temple at the end. It’s very pretty and surprisingly quiet – impervious to the urban madness just outside. The pond is covered in flowering lotus and surrounded by banyan and frangipani trees. I see carvings and sculptures, including some severe topiary. In one corner are about eighty stone tortoises bearing stone slabs engraved with the names of distinguished former graduates.

  Engraved tablets give visitors some information.

  Van Mieu was built in 1070. This makes it just slightly older than Oxford University in the UK. Built to honour Confucius, Van Mieu turned out scholars for an extraordinary 700 years. I find myself wondering how this country might have evolved, had it not been colonised.

  There were thousands of graduates over that period. They consisted, for the mo
st part, of children of mandarins and aristocrats, but I’m glad to read that there was one other category too. Children of ‘commoners’, if they were really smart, were also allowed in.

  As I explore Van Mieu, the girls flank me like custodians, sometimes stopping me to enlighten me about some detail close at hand. Their pride in their country’s heritage is charming but as we hit the extensive merchandise area in the last courtyard it becomes as immoderate as the marketing around me.

  While French and American tourists swarm the display tables, fingering the common trinkets and baubles pumped up to about ten times the street price, I notice a disproportionate number of items bearing the likeness of Ho Chi Minh. Whatever Bac Ho may have done for his country, he didn’t build Van Mieu. But there are Ho Chi Minh postcards, Ho Chi Minh keyrings, various portraits of Ho Chi Minh, books about Ho Chi Minh, books by Ho Chi Minh. Sam chivvies me toward the tables, encouraging me to buy a portrait of her goateed hero. At each merchandise area we come to she leads me hopefully to another portrait and the patter repeats.

  ‘Ho Chi Minh was a great man.’

  ‘Yes, he certainly loved his country.’

  ‘He was a very great man.’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘Not just in Vietnam, but overseas too. Everybody know he a very great man, yes?’

  ‘Yeah! I … er … I think so.’ I answer politely.

  The girls seem disappointed when I fail to buy a souvenir, but leave me in no doubt the outing has been a success.

  ‘We are very happy when you come to see Van Mieu,’ Sam glows afterwards, when we’re seated at a nearby café. ‘Next time, we can visit Bac Ho Chi Minh,’ she adds, reminding me that the nation’s uncle, more than thirty years after his death and despite his request for cremation, is still receiving visitors. His mausoleum is not far from my place.

  Van Anh will visit me on several more occasions, each time unannounced, but never returns with Sam. She brings a different friend or group of friends each time, none of whom speak English. They come into my living room and I serve them green tea while they sit mute and staring around the glass coffee table. Afterwards they all shake my hand and file down the stairs. The routine has baffled me completely. I can’t work out what’s in it for them, until Natassia fills me in.

  ‘It is prestige to know a Westerner,’ she explains. ‘They like to show you off to their friends.’

  Please have peety

  It’s a crisp but sunny afternoon.

  I’ve just arrived back in Sydney. A girlfriend has picked me up from the airport and is driving me to Bondi. I’m exhilarated to think I’m in Australia and about to see all my friends and family.

  We’re chatting excitedly when I notice the small black and yellow-striped snake in a jar of fluid on the dashboard. It seems familiar but I can’t remember why. She tells me the liquid is formaldehyde.

  One suburb away from home we inexplicably lose momentum. My friend pulls up at the kerb, telling me my car is parked here somewhere, and I have to pick it up. I jump out with all my suitcases and she takes off.

  I start to look for my car. I remember now, I left it somewhere around here before I went to Vietnam. I become increasingly anxious – the sky has turned black, although it’s studded with a plump yellow moon, and I’ve got to get to Bondi. I realise I can hear my car – the alarm has been activated. The siren throbs tactlessly around the darkened neighbourhood. Weeeee-ow …

  I’ve picked up the phone before I know where I am.

  ‘Miss Carolyn? Hello, I am Miss Lan from Hanoi Global College.’ says a coquettish voice. I squint up at the spinning green ceiling fan. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I’m in my bedroom at 6 Pho Yen The, Hanoi.

  ‘Mmmmm,’ I manage. My alarm clock reads 7.49 and I know I don’t have a class scheduled. I suspect I’m suffering the effects of Lan’s discovery that I live only two minutes walk from Hanoi Global College.

  ‘Are you free now?’ she asks. Bingo.

  It must be completely obvious from the heavily aspirated croaking coming from my end that she’s woken me.

  ‘Not really,’ I say.

  ‘Oh really?’ tones of sincere distress. ‘What a peety.’

  There’s a pause before I ask the inevitable question.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ We’re playing out a script.

  ‘The eight o’ clock class have no teacher.’

  I glance at the clock again and sigh. The students will already be sitting in the classroom. In another ten minutes they’ll be getting restive – understandably. I’ve a car to find and I’ve left my suitcase somewhere. There’s some unresolved mystery about a snake in a jar. The answers to all these things lie within my beckoning pillow.

  ‘I see,’ I reply. ‘I’d prefer not to.’

  But there’s no point fighting. By picking up the phone, I forfeited my right to a private life. I bite my lip and wait for it. Then it comes – the lost little girl voice.

  ‘Please have peety.’

  Lan has Nga’s skills at working her way into my conscience. It’s a skill I encounter often among Vietnamese women. She has just delivered one of the two well-worn lines I hear whenever there’s persuasion afoot. The other is ‘please try to help me’. Unfortunately, I’m terribly susceptible to emotional blackmail, and for some reason Vietnamese women are exceptionally good at it.

  Less than eight minutes later I’m dressed and on my way out the door.

  On arrival at Global, I’m handed a familiar textbook and sent to Room 105. Hurrying through the main corridor of Global, I pass Room 101 – the room where I taught my memorable first class. It bears the same number as the torture room in George Orwell’s 1984. The glass in the door has been replaced, and through it I spy Natassia teaching a class of attentive adolescents. I pray for a similar assignment and walk on.

  But the glass door of Room 105 reveals an erect cowlick. The Strangler! A frisson of misery courses through me. After the first lesson I asked Lan to transfer me to another class, citing fears for my mental health and possible loss of professional self-respect, and she obligingly gave me a class of timid adolescents instead. Now she’s handed me this class of murderous miscreants again.

  But today something looks different. The cowlick is stationary, and so are the other students. They’re sitting at their desks waiting for the teacher.

  I walk into the room and notice a temperature drop. The air-conditioner is working today. The difference is incredible. The kids are pliable and the lesson goes well.

  Afterwards, Natassia and I smoke in the corridor, discussing a Friday night get-together with Zac. There’s a big television at her place with cable. Zac regularly goes over there just to watch CNN news broadcasts. There’s also a VCD player, forerunner to the DVD player, and Natassia’s obtained a bootleg disc of American Beauty.

  ‘I’ve seen it before but I’ll see it again,’ I tell her. Actually I’ve seen it twice, but I’d be happy to sit through an hour and a half of Teletubbies just to enjoy the sensation of having a social life.

  ‘Maybe we can have dinner first at this place near my apartment. Zac likes the food there, and the chef knows how to cook vegetarian,’ she suggests.

  ‘Sounds good,’ I say, distractedly. I’m looking over her shoulder watching Lan approach. She’s wringing her hands and seems to be looking at me.

  She comes closer and closer until her tiny body is pressed against mine, and she gazes searchingly up into my eyes. She’s arrestingly pretty, with wide clear eyes and a creamy complexion stretched across a tiny nose and crystalline cheekbones. She keeps her dead-straight hair in a sultry shoulder-length bob.

  I meet her gaze coolly, although my heartbeat has picked up slightly. In my culture her behaviour would read as heavy-handed flirting, and my Western nervous system has an auto-response mechanism.

  ‘Miss Carolyn,’ she sings in a desperate tone, breaking the spell instantly. ‘Can you teach another class now? Nine forty-five class also have no teacher.’

  ‘Act
ually Lan, I can.’ I say. ‘But tell me, is it the same teacher that could not teach the eight o clock class?’

  ‘Yes – it is true Miss Irene sick today.’ she responds obscurely, and beats a hasty retreat, her blue ao dais wafting behind her as she strides the corridor back to her desk. I’ve just been worked by a practised and ruthless operator.

  Natassia and I look at each other, pull simultaneously on our cigarettes and shake our heads. It would be logical to suppose Lan applied clever psychology by only telling me about the first class earlier, knowing that if she laid two classes on me at that hour in the morning I would surely refuse. But here, at Chaos College, it’s equally likely that nobody thought ahead. It’s probable that it was only minutes ago the ramifications of having an absent teacher occurred to anyone.

  This mind-boggling lack of foresight is a phenomenon I haven’t encountered outside Vietnam. It pervades day-to-day life on many levels.

  For example, heading north out of Hanoi, the already jammed road forms a tight bottleneck while motorists stop to purchase tickets for the tollway ahead. These flimsy pieces of paper are then driven less than a hundred metres to the next bottleneck – a checkpoint at which they’re collected by another employee of the state. In the West, we would consider this double-handling.

  Zac claims that if you ask a Vietnamese person ‘Which would you prefer – $10,000 now or $1,000,000 in a year?’ they would choose the $10,000. I try the question out on a colleague and to my utter astonishment he chooses the $10,000 now. It will be some time before I understand that this is a legacy of a people scarred by decades of fear and uncertainty.

  At Global no amount of advance warning of a period of absence will ensure a replacement teacher is arranged ahead of time. Lan will still be ringing around Hanoi less than an hour before each class starts, cajoling, flirting, begging, threatening tears, as she beseeches the unenthusiastic teacher in singsong tones: ‘Please have peety.’

  Today I’ve barely had time to collect the books and cassette-tape from harried Huong for the next class, before the corridor recoils with the shrill blast of the bell. It’s 9.45. I wink at Natassia, who’s running in the opposite direction, and head up the stairs to room 202.