Fishing for Tigers (7 page)

It turned out that ‘editing' meant rewriting whole articles that had been written in Vietnamese and translated very badly into English. ‘It's hellishly frustrating, I'm afraid,' the Canadian girl sitting beside me said on the first day, and it was, but I found I was good at it. Each story loaded onto my screen was a puzzle to solve. The meaning was in there and if I was persistent and creative, I could unlock it.

And the stories were almost always worth unlocking. Of course there were the typical propaganda pieces about new housing developments and immunisation schemes and silver medal winning athletes, but most of the stories were about ordinary Vietnamese people, their lives and traditions. It wasn't hard news, but it was important, I thought. Stories about Agent Orange victims growing up to be doctors, or elderly village women learning to read, or elephant hunters being retrained to work as wildlife rangers. Feel-good stuff, we'd call it back home, but when your history is as desperately sad as Vietnam's, feel-good stuff is essential. People here believe in destiny and stories like the ones we published helped them to believe that theirs is not one of uninterrupted suffering.

Three years into the job I was made unofficial head of the editing department. Unofficial because only Vietnamese nationals were allowed to be managers. Still, I got a token pay rise and the authority to decide which of the four editors worked on any given story. I always chose the longest and most convoluted stories for myself. I loved the challenge and it saved me having to put up with too much bitching and moaning from the others.

I also got first pick of the ‘special projects' that came in from time to time. Special projects were books that would be sold or given away as magazine promotions.
Vietnamese Traditional Music
,
North Vietnamese Cuisine
,
:
A Brief History of the Imperial Capital
and so on. Most of them were slightly reworded Wikipedia articles spread out over fifty pages of glossy Vietnamese Tourism promotional photos, but the one I was working on around this time was different.

Women of Vietnam
was a pet project of the director's wife, Mrs Lam. She had spent years collecting historical and mythical accounts of heroic Vietnamese women and had then commissioned journalists to interview hundreds of female war veterans and party members and street vendors. The result was three thousand pages of Vietnam's history and culture as written and spoken by its women. Endless raw pages of Vietnamese to be turned into a few hundred publishable pages in English through the efforts of whatever translators Mrs Lam could bully into working on it, and me.

I did not need to be bullied. I would have dedicated all my waking hours to it, if I could have. The reluctance of the translators meant that I only received a dozen or so pages a week. The massive file of untranslated text taunted me every time I opened my PC. Over the years I'd become used to the glacial pace of the Vietnamese business world, but this project pushed me to the limit of my patience. Not that I would have expressed my frustration to Mrs Lam or my colleagues. Vietnamese history is full of tales of fierce women, but for a foreign lady in modern Hanoi, tongue-biting was mandatory.

Late-afternoon, one day in mid-September, having spent the day rewriting a magazine piece about two deaf-mute cousins who ran a
bun cha
restaurant in Ha Long City, I found a newly translated book chapter had landed in my work folder. I read it hungrily. The translated text was typically clunky, but the story itself was wonderful. In 1306, seventeen-year-old Princess
was given to the King of Champa in exchange for a couple of new territories for her brother to rule. She wasn't particularly pleased about this, but she became downright furious when, soon after their marriage, her husband died and she discovered that she was expected to immolate herself on his funeral pyre. Luckily, the Princess's brother sent a commando force to rescue her; even more luckily, the commando in charge was her former lover. What should have been a three-month return journey took a year and the still-teenaged widow Princess
arrived home smiling.

I had barely finished the first read-through when my screen went blank and the fan over my desk stopped whirring. A collective groan echoed through the office. Electricity cuts were not unusual, but it was the third of the day and the sixth or seventh this week.

I stared at the blank screen. It could be minutes or hours before it came back on. It was just past four pm. ‘Fuck it,' I said to Julian and Mario, the only other editors scheduled that afternoon. ‘Let's call it a day.'

‘Brilliant,' Julian said, packing up his desk. ‘Shall we go for a beer?'

‘Grog Hut?' Mario suggested.

I waved them off. ‘Not me. I'm taking the opportunity to make the bank before closing. I've needed a new cash card for months.'

‘Righto. If you feel like it later on, we'll be at the Hut until . . .' Julian looked to Mario who shrugged charmingly. ‘All fucking night, probably. Unless we pick up.'

‘At the Grog Hut? Yeah, good luck with that.'

Walking up towards the Old Quarter I had the thrilling sensation of wagging school. The tiny bonfires lining the streets added to the festive feeling. I thought that I might just nip back and meet the boys for drinks after all, once I was done with the bank. Or maybe I'd detour along Silk Street and treat myself to a dress.

As I rounded the southeast end of Hoàn
Lake, I saw ahead a crowd gathered in the centre of the road. Traffic was almost at a standstill; every few seconds a single bike mounted the footpath and bounced along until it hit the intersection, where normal madness resumed. I stayed lakeside, but the cluster on the road grew with every stopped bike and I soon found myself part of it.

Over the tops of thirty or so heads, I spotted the heart of the matter. A young woman was bent, her ponytail caught in the fist of a man who was tugging her towards his moto. He released his grip; she stood straight but did not look up. He barked something, pointing toward the bike. She shook her head and took a step back. He raised his hand and slapped her cheek.

Fast fingers of panic fluttered in my throat. I might have turned and run, if I hadn't heard the words, more confident than they had any right to be, ‘Back off!'

There was an angry wave of voices through the crowd, then he pushed forward, taller and broader than the men shouting around him, his eyes wide with outrage. The crowd moved back and fell silent, taking a collective breath. I took one too, then called his name.

He looked up, blinking, as I pushed my way through to him.

‘Cal! Come with me. Now, please.'

‘Hey, ah, can you tell him – tell him to – he hit—'

‘
,' I said to the man, making a prayer steeple with my hands. ‘
.'

The man nodded, his eyes murderous. The girl beside him continued to stare out at the lake. Around us the crowd murmured and heaved.

I nodded at the man, reached out and took Cal's arm. ‘We need to go, okay?'

‘But, the—'

‘No.' I stepped toward the lake and to my relief he followed. I didn't look back and hoped to hell he wouldn't either. I walked on, keeping hold of his forearm, until we'd rounded the corner and were heading west along the south end of the lake.