Single White Female in Hanoi (11 page)

It's late afternoon, the following weekend. I get in the compound gate still panting and find Zac at my door.

‘Hi,' he says, perkily. ‘I was just passing by … ‘

He looks at me a little more closely. ‘Caz? Are you okay? You look a little unnerved.'

‘Peasants, with pitchforks,' I mumble, struggling to get my key in the door. ‘Baying for my blood'.

‘Ah!' he coos, victoriously. ‘Welcome to Hanoi.'

‘I think I'll be staying clear of the Old Quarter for a while,' I reflect, as we climb the stairs to my living room.

It started a couple of hours earlier, not long after noon, in the Old Quarter at ‘An's Place', my latest Internet haunt. The place is dirty, diabolically hot and fantastically cheap.

I bump into Alexa, a sweet-faced Kiwi girl I first met there a couple of weeks earlier. She arrived in Hanoi only two days after I did, also looking for work as an English teacher. Today she tells me she may have found work, at an English school east of Hoan Kiem Lake. She has an interview tomorrow. But she's still staying at a cheap hotel nearby and looking for share accommodation. I realise how lucky I am to have my apartment. This time we exchange phone numbers. A new friend perhaps.

There are a couple of routine emails in my inbox. My father has had some problems with Internet banking and some other problem to do with tax that's too complicated for me to follow.

In the doorway, an old man hoicks and spits. Behind him a shoeshine boy is hustling for business. He's threadbare and looks no older than nine. Unavoidably I think of Hien, homeless and fatally ill.

‘Sorry Dad,' I write back. ‘I am forget my English and no longer understand these word bank and tax.' He knows I've never understood these words.

Alexa has gone, and now I too settle the bill, and head out into the blistering air in search of a
xe om
.

The
xe om
drivers hang in gangs on street corners. Among members of any one gang, there seems to be no competition at all. While one driver negotiates a price with a customer, the others stand around and join in, pushing for higher fares. It's possible they pool all fares.

Catching a
xe om
in the Old Quarter is notoriously difficult. The drivers here make their living off tourists not locals. This means they expect any foreigner to pay six times the normal asking price. I stand my ground because I know my price for a trip home is fair. A local will bargain down lower. Usually the driver will accept this fare when he realises the customer knows the system.

But today the drivers I find are torpid with heat and beer, lying across their saddles in the shade. I persist, and eventually one strains to raise his head.

‘H
ai muoi nghin dong
(twenty thousand dong)' he offers.

I laugh and go to walk away, but I'm blocked by a new driver. He's young – perhaps nineteen, twenty – and very edgy. His hair is long and dull and there's a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, which is frozen in a sneer. In the style of street-toughs, he's folded his T-shirt up over his chest to show off his abs – which aren't bad, as it happens.

‘
Muoi lam nghin
(fifteen thousand)' he shouts in my face. I tell him ten thousand and go to walk away, but he blocks me again. I repeat my price, hoping he'll give up – I don't like him. But he persists, and eventually agrees. Problem is, the sneer has degenerated to something nastier – something without a name, and I feel nervous.

He fetches his bike, straddles it and removes his T-shirt entirely, tucking it into the back of his pants. His torso is decorated with tattoos, suggestive of a stint in prison.

‘
Xin di cham
(Please go slow),' I tell him as I jump on the back. The last syllable is cut off as he pulls hard on the throttle. We take off like a rocket, on the wrong side of the road, and nearly collide with an elderly vendor selling fruit. I drive my fist into the poorly tattooed outline of a woman on his back.

‘Go slow,' I say again.

No response. He's driving right down the middle of the road. It's a road I haven't seen before. It suddenly occurs to me that we're going in the wrong direction, heading north rather than southwest. Twenty metres later we swerve crazily, dodging oncoming traffic, and get forced by traffic to our right onto a collision path with a motorcycle carrying a family of four. The driver swerves sharply and almost loses control of his bike, but his manoeuvre has saved us. It's the nearest miss I've had yet in Hanoi. I'm now terrified, and start screaming at my driver in English, ‘Stop, you motherfucker, let me OFF!'

But there's more. By now he's slaloming around all the vehicles ahead of us and we have a third near-collision with a
cyclo
, a local-style bicycle rickshaw, carrying a large piece of sheet metal. This one is so close I can't understand how I'm still on the bike, unhurt. My left leg should be hanging on by a sinew. Commuters are yelling and shaking fists at him. I grab his hair and I growl ‘
dung lai!
(stop!)' in his ear. He slows down and I literally jump off.

We've come only two blocks and I'm standing outside a large, busy
com binh dan
(street-food stall) on an unfamiliar street. There's not another foreigner in sight.

With unfathomable speed, a crowd begins to accrete in front of me. Behind me, diners look up from their bowls and the proprietor, a feisty old woman, emerges from their midst holding a stick.

The
xe om
driver and I have a screaming exchange, in two languages. After a minute a man to my left pipes up, unexpectedly, in English. ‘He want you pay him money'.

I'm relieved to find an English-speaker here, because I can explain what's happened and turn the crowd around. I'm forming the distinct impression they're rooting for the other team.

‘This man drives crazy.' I mime his handlebar technique. ‘We come only two blocks. He's dangerous, very dangerous. I'm very afraid and I tell him stop'.

The man speaks to the silent crowd, which is by now several people deep in all directions. There are guys with their arms around each other staring slack-jawed at me, there are shopkeepers and their families, vendors, shoe-shine boys, quite a few stray children, and several angry-looking women, who are glaring at
me
. In every direction, at every height, is a pair of staring black eyes.

For a moment the whole scene becomes a tableau, as static as a snapshot. Even the usual din of the streets has faded. The only thing audible is the sound of the phrase ‘
di di
' being repeated in a crone's croak behind me.

Finally, the driver speaks to our interlocutor, without taking his eyes off me.

‘He want the money,' the man says again. His position seems non-partisan at best.

‘Tell him I'm not paying him,' I say angrily. ‘Tell him he should learn to drive'.

The phrase ‘
di di
' continues to emanate from the
com binh dan
behind me. It's the proprietor. I haven't been paying much attention, but have assumed she's on my side. Now she starts pushing at the back of my legs with the stick. I suddenly remember Khai telling me that ‘
di di
' means ‘go away'.

‘Fuck you' I say to the driver, to the proprietor and to the whole crowd. They're bullying me, and I won't cave in. The crowd parts for me as I storm off in the direction we came from. I'm looking for another driver, but for once there's not a driver to be seen.

About fifty metres along the road I look around and see I'm being shadowed by a mob. I stay calm. At a measured pace, I walk another half a block, then turn into a CD shop. The mob gets to the door, stops and disperses.

The shop is well-lit and friendly. The latest
Massive Attack
album is booming from the speakers. With my back to the doorway, I spend about twenty minutes in there, letting the thumping in my chest ease off. I sit on a stool and leaf through the bootlegged music catalogue. I ask to listen to a few tracks through the headphones. I chat to the owners, who are delighted to hear I'm an English teacher, and I buy a couple of jazz CDs.

Eventually, I bid them goodbye, and they tell me to come back soon. I reach the doorway and hear a whistle. Within seconds, the crowd is back. It forms a semicircle around the doorway. The tattooed kid is in the centre of it, and there's fury in his eyes. I realise he's as proud as I am, and neither of us is prepared to lose face. I fear I'm about to behave badly.

Through the translator, the kid once again demands the fare. There's muted gabbling from the crowd. I lean into the doorframe, shaking my head resolutely, and watch the proceedings. I say nothing. The crowd is starting to break up into factions, with heated debate going on all around me.

The kid looks like he wants to punch me. I'm counting on my knowledge that Vietnamese are non-violent by nature, resolving disputes with verbal jousts and payment rather than fists. Mostly.

There's an outbreak of shouting between the kid, the translator and a few of the mobsters. It goes on for several minutes. Eventually the translator turns to me. He has become negotiator as well. It has been decided that I should cough up a part-payment of five thousand dong.

I consider the proposal. It's a compromise for both parties. If I pay it I can walk away from here without losing face or any other body parts. I nod acceptance, but for some reason my anger has taken on a life of its own and I can't seem to tame it.

I pull out a pair of filthy two thousand dong notes from my wallet and hold the notes out at arm's length in front of him as though they're cakes of fresh steaming shit. He glares back and doesn't move.

‘Come on,' I say very quietly, waving the money in his face, ‘take your shitty money. It means nothing to me.' Although he understands no English, my tone is clear. The kid has frozen in a hate-stare.

I'm about to drop the money onto the street in front of him when, thankfully, he snatches it. The crowd makes a murmuring noise and begins to diffuse. The situation is resolved. The foreigner has paid.

But my adversary is fuming. He springs to life and addresses me in rapid, hissing Vietnamese that causes the hair on the back of my neck to rise. I feel fortunate that I haven't understood a word. He spits onto the ground in front of me, then he turns and stalks off. The CD shop owners, who were standing behind me throughout this exchange, turn on their heels and flee back into the shop.

‘Yeah – fuck you too,' I scream, and head in the other direction. I walk and walk, and find myself on the outskirts of the Old Quarter, up towards the Red River. It takes me an unusually long time to find a driver. I'm looking for an older one, with a friendly demeanour. On the way home I periodically check behind us to see if we're being followed. Anger turns to shame. Surely this wouldn't have happened to a seasoned expat.

But Zac's hoots with laughter as I tell him the story.

‘Yup – we'll have you voting for the ‘Shooters Party' by September,' he beams.

Four weeks in a new country and I already know the word for mould – ‘
moc
'. It sits incongruously in my vocabulary alongside ‘Turn right' ‘Turn left' and ‘How much is this?'

The mould problem is probably just the downside of a climate perfect for growing mushrooms, I reflect, as I sponge the white powder off my black pants. I've been reading about the explosive growth of the mushroom industry in Vietnam. The country is now one of the world's top mushroom exporters.

Hanoi in July – perfect conditions if you're a mushroom. Not so ideal for humans though. Humidity and pollution, both in extreme, do not form a sweet compound. Descending into Hanoi, I noticed the city is ringed by scenic mountains and for all I know, a languid breeze blows teasingly across them. But here, in the centre of the city, the languor is all mine. I've got the get-up-and-go of a bivalve.

Sponge in hand, I cast my eye around the room and groan to see a small black shoulder bag I bought in Indonesia has become carpeted in the stuff. It looks like an albino version of its former self.

I'm wondering what will happen when the monsoon breaks. Will there be a brief halcyon season of crisp dry breezes and lazy sunshine – the days warm, the nights cool and fragrant? – Or will we go directly to the nightmarish climes of winter?

I've heard enough now about the Hanoi winter to be afraid. When describing it, people tend to combine the words ‘cold' with ‘humid' – a combination I'm not familiar with and don't want to be. These same people talk of a frigid northerly wind that howls down from China to penetrate the thickest sweaters, through to the deepest bones. My flat, in local style, has tile floors and no heating whatsoever.

But for now – with August nigh– there should be plenty more monsoon behaviour to come. Students have told me August is a time of fierce rains and flooding.

Students are becoming a prime source of information now. It seems teaching English in a foreign country is the fastest way to learn the ropes.

My advanced adult class at UNCO gives me a window into the culture, although the glass can be very streaky. I take my questions and queries into the classroom – and sometimes they lead to grand discussions that occupy most of the lesson period.

Since the initial shyness receded, opinions have started to emerge. I catch the odd glimpse of an open mind, a thirst for knowledge. But other attitudes seem entrenched and intractable.

In last night's class we discussed the old chestnut ‘A woman's place is in the home'.

Today I'm still mulling that hour and a half. In particular, one highly educational segment. The education, of course, was mine. The short scene replaying in my mind runs like this:

I've asked the men how many of them would prefer to have been born female. There's an avalanche of chortling.

‘That is a ridiculous question,' a smirking, rather macho guy called Cong tells me. ‘Of course, no man would prefer this.'

I look to the other guys. They look away. The discussion is over.

So I pose the opposite question to the women.

‘How many of you would prefer to be a man?'

An outbreak of excited discussion in Vietnamese suggests this question has never been put to them before.

About half of them eventually raise a hand. A fair choice, I muse, considering the division of labour I've observed.

Life in Hanoi takes place on the street. Men loiter in small groups on busy corners with basic tools and an air-compressor, ready to repair, re-fuel or re-tread any troubled two-wheeled vehicles. Beside them are women washing clothes in big sudsy metal pails, men playing cards, women sweeping, one hand held behind their back, men drinking beer and smoking rough tobacco through large bamboo bongs, women selling fruit from 50 kilo baskets yoked across their shoulder, men sleeping in hammocks. It may look like a ‘Where's Wally' picture at first, but there's an underlying order that Martin Handford's eccentric illustrations lack. On average, the loungers, loiterers, beerers and bongers are all male.

‘So – you're happy to be a woman?' I ask one of the abstainers. She shrugs.

‘It is the woman duty serve her husband,' she replies. Other women nod in agreement.

‘Mmm … and you're … happy to do this?' I ask her in a tone that registers my bafflement. Apart from the jarring sentiment, like so many replies I've been hearing lately, hers didn't seem to address the question. I had presumed the canon of question-answering was universal, trans-cultural. Apparently it's not, because in Vietnam, a viable answer to the question: ‘Do you prefer frog porridge or fish porridge?' is ‘Yes.'

The other women giggle at my reaction. ‘Of course,' the abstainer says, smiling. The outspoken Pham, who's sitting over on the male side of the room, elucidates.

‘It is an honour for the woman to look after her husband,' she tells me. ‘ … To make the food for him and his parent and to have children. Children are our future. The wife feel happy when she do this.'

The semester of women's studies I undertook as a bright-eyed student in my early twenties comes crashing down about my feet. There I was learning about why the pronoun ‘I', as a phallic symbol, is a patriarchal affront to our language, when, more than a decade later, a member of Vietnam's educated elite tells me it's an honour to live life as a domestic drudge.

I ask myself – is this the result of brainwashing, or a pandemic of Stockholm syndrome – where the captive becomes willingly and perversely subservient to the needs of the captor? Or is this simply a viable opinion suffering harsh judgement at the hands of my own skewed and selective Western sense of morality? Is it wrong to want to be a good wife?

I'm not blessed with the capacity for certainty; it's not in my make-up. And now, with my previous convictions taking on water, I'm beginning to succumb to a deep philosophical confusion.

In fact, the duties that await a wife are more onerous than I know at this time.

After her wedding, a Vietnamese bride traditionally moves out of her parent's home, where she has spent every night since her birth, sharing a bed with her mother, where she has eaten each day of her life with her family, and she moves to the house of her husband's family. Although I never see any evidence of it, I imagine this must cause considerable trauma for both daughter and parents. But that's not all. At the new residence she becomes the property of her in-laws, and the burden of domestic duties now includes looking after them.

Once I understand this, many things become clear. Clearest of all is the relief and joy expressed by parents who have a baby boy. In a year, a Vietnamese friend of mine and his pregnant wife will learn from an ultra-sound test that their baby is male. My friend, who's a thoroughly modern and well-educated man, will celebrate, because, he says, a boy child has ‘higher status'.

Whereas once I would have taken umbrage at this, I come to sympathise. When you look at it their way, a girl is basically a waste of resources. You clothe her, feed her, educate her, and then lose her completely on her wedding day. A son, on the other hand, is a good solid investment and a virtual guarantee of home help later on down the track.

Last night's class has been timely, dovetailing dangerously with my growing disenchantment.

My ‘get-up-and-go' deficit is running towards weariness, owing as much to the social climate as to the meteorological one. I'm being incrementally worn down by a failure to connect with the locals. There's clearly more than just the language barrier in the way.

With the exception of Nga's mother, Xuyen, who enters the compound regularly to cook in the tiny dark kitchen next to my downstairs door, the women in my compound glare at me when I pass. Sometimes I return their glares with big friendly grins and a ‘hello', just for the sport of watching the glare turn several degrees sourer. It's a loser's game in the end though. In exchange for a freak-show, the entertaining sight of a hissing human gargoyle, I'm reminded of the unfortunate truth. For some of the population here at least, I'm not just a foreigner, I'm a foreign object.

Yet it's the reaction from the male of the species that can really dampen a girl's spirit. In general, I'm either invisible or the subject of leering fascination.

Time spent on the street is time spent in the unflattering gaze of groups of guys who point, snigger, call out words, and then snigger some more. Without knowing the language it's hard to be sure, but I can feel echoes of behaviour I witnessed at high school.

As a fat man, Zac is as much a target as a Western woman. Everywhere he goes, men point, stare and laugh openly, and inevitably he hears that word – ‘
beo
' – fat. This contributes to the permanent and sometimes unnerving racial antagonism he bears when outdoors, and which will eventually help drive him from Hanoi.

While I look sadly at these men and see good-looking idiots, Zac's appraisal is excoriating, although the fact is, his idea of a good-looking guy is Lou ‘The Hulk' Ferrigno. Where I see almond eyes, full lips, white teeth, smooth coffee-coloured skin covering taut muscular bodies, high cheekbones, thick shiny hair, lean hips, Zac sees diminutive, sallow-chested half-children, hirsute facial moles, filthy five centimetre-long fingernails, cretinous expressions and behaviour.

Zac worships all things Japanese, and has an unlikely cultural affinity with China, but he won't let Vietnamese men touch him.

He likes to draw his audience's attention particularly to those twin horrors: the cultivated hairy mole, and the talon-like fingernails. While it's true I've been baffled and bothered by the predominance of facial moles with long hairs growing out of them, I've seen long fingernails on men in other parts of Asia and been charmed.

But Zac's revulsion is contagious and eventually takes its toll on my enchantment.

More damning still is his assertion that wife-beating is common practice in Vietnam. He supplies numerous anecdotes to prove it, but I remain sceptical – until observation and stories from Vietnamese friends seem to confirm it.

In fact, during my time in Hanoi, a World Bank-supported survey will find up to 20 per cent of Vietnamese households to be affected by ‘gender-based violence'. Anecdotal evidence puts the figure much higher. Tu Giang, one of the country's top journalists described his as ‘a society where a man can bash his wife with virtual impunity.' Vietnam at this time is one of only five out of sixteen regional nations with no specific law against domestic violence.

Zac's disdain is beginning to infect Natassia too, and she's upset about this.

‘Why did I not see this stuff before?' she demands of him. We're in the Global staffroom. She's just suffered jeering and harassment and witnessed a guy hit his girlfriend, all while riding to Global on a recently acquired bicycle.

‘You didn't notice it because you didn't have a bicycle,' Zac explains patiently. He's been forced to use a bicycle here since he refuses to get on a
xe om
and doesn't ride a motorcycle. Zac's theory is that bicycle riders, as a result of their slower speed, are able to observe more. As far as he's concerned, this can only be a bad thing.

This afternoon, however, my own state of disillusionment is tempered with anticipation. The mould-sponging routine did not arise spontaneously. I discovered the creeping mildew while rummaging through my wardrobe for something stylish to wear tonight.

It's the last Saturday in July. I've been in Hanoi for one month, and there's a party to go to.

I'll be turning up with Cassie and Bryn – an Australian couple travelling through Vietnam. They arrived in Hanoi earlier today with my phone number, supplied by a mutual friend in Sydney. Natassia will be there. Zac was invited, but declined on the grounds that he dislikes parties.

‘What's in it for me?' was his reasonable reaction. As a non-drinking, non-smoking, non-dancing, offensive man, I appreciate that his presence would benefit nobody.

The party is at the house of a young Australian guy called Justin. He teaches English at Global and arrived in Vietnam about a fortnight before I did, with his sister and her boyfriend, which meant he had a ready-made social group that seemed to expand with alarming rapidity. Committed drinkers, they knew what I didn't – the thing to do in a new town is find out where people go to drink.

Anyone who stays in the Old Quarter quickly discovers the
Bia Hoi
(street beer stall) on the corner of
Ta Hien
and
Luong Ngoc Quyen
streets, where expats, backpackers and locals alike meet to drink local beer at about US12 cents a glass. From there it's only a short stagger to at least three Western-style bars where a person can drink on through the night.

My problem is that unlike most new arrivals, I didn't start out in a hotel in the Old Quarter, where all the action is. Instead, I went straight from the airport to my apartment, out of range, and was shown around by a French woman with her own, very separate social group. And I didn't even think to go looking for Westerners. With blinding naïveté, I expected to be socialising exclusively with locals while in Vietnam.

Before the party, Cassie, Bryn and I wander the neighbourhood to buy a bottle of alcohol to take along. Eventually we find an old shop selling dusty bottles of spirits with Vietnamese labels. There's nothing familiar. We select a bottle of locally-made vodka. It seems alarmingly cheap, but the other options look like rocket fuel.

We climb out of a taxi ten minutes later, and walk into a groovy-looking four-storey house. In the large downstairs area, music is pumping and groups of people are scattered around talking and smoking. There's a cool-looking guy DJ-ing behind what looks like a bar area. We hand over our bottle of Vietnamese Vodka to Justin, who's mixing drinks there.

‘Whoah! Cheapskate!' he exclaims when he sees the label. He opens a fridge and pulls out a bottle of Absolut.