Single White Female in Hanoi (14 page)

The sky finally runs out of juice later in the afternoon, and, in my neighbourhood at least, the flood recedes and things return temporarily to normal.

In the evening I head to a restaurant near Natassia's place to meet her and Zac for dinner. I last spoke to Zac early this morning. The line was crackly as he told me his neighbourhood had flooded and the lower floor of his house was several centimetres underwater.

Tonight I manage to score Quan as my
xe om
driver. We pass through town heading north towards Natassia's place at sunset. This is the furthest Quan's ever taken me and I become swept away by the romance of the trip. I look at the back of his beautiful brown hands on the rubber grips and sigh with longing. He has the broad, solid hands of a practical man and he keeps his fingernails short.

The horizon is an effulgence of pink and crimson as we pass between West Lake and Chuc Bac Lake – ‘Lover's Lane'. I survey the lovers lined up on their motorbikes, and throwing decorum to the wind, I wrap my arms around Quan. He doesn't show much reaction, but then, he's concentrating on the road. Snuggled behind him, I feel our connection is mutual. We're from two different worlds, but joined, I feel certain, by a powerful chemistry beyond culture and station, beyond our control, by a mutual empathy that can never be expressed in words. The ants are running wild across my heart as we pull up outside the restaurant. I dismount and turn to face him.

That's when I remember that I haven't set a fare. Since getting to know them, I've always given my local
xe om
drivers a flat five thousand dong for any ride, whether only a block, or across town to the UNCO school, but this trip is further than that. I should have agreed on the amount before we set off. I know Natassia pays her driver 6,000 for the trip, but she's a seasoned bargainer – I would have offered more. There's an awkward moment while I pull out my wallet. I wonder whether he'll charge me at all after what seemed such a romantic ride.

So when he looks me in the eye, licks his lips, and says ‘
Hai muoi nghin
' – ‘twenty thousand' – I feel like I've been slapped in the face. Only greenhorn tourists on their first trip would pay a sum like that for a
xe om
.

‘You greedy arsehole!' I say to him in astonishment. After a moment I reach for my wallet. ‘Here's your money, I hope you enjoy it. You've just lost a customer.' I shake my head slowly from side to side, hoping he'll understand that he has made a terrible mistake.

But whether he comprehends or even perceives my hurt, he shows no reaction. He takes the money, nods, and revs off.

‘Carolyn, what do you expect? He's just a
xe om
driver,' Natassia says by way of comfort, when I'm slumped at the dinner table. ‘How can he ever appreciate a person like you?'

I turn to Zac, certain of his support, and notice he's not paying attention. He sits quietly, and his face is dark.

‘Zac! What's up?' I ask him.

‘He had a bad weekend,' says Natassia. ‘A very bad weekend. He was telling me about it.'

I turn to Zac. ‘What happened? Did your place flood?'

Zac turns to me slowly, dramatically.

‘Tell her about the eeeels,' begs Natassia, two anecdotes later.

‘Hmm? Ah yes. The Water Pump Incident.' Zac has picked up greatly. An attentive audience always lifts his mood. Each anecdote has been more entertaining, yet more damning than its predecessor.

By Saturday afternoon Zac's staircase had become a vertical jetty. Where the stairs used to touch down, in the kitchen, was no less than a metre underwater. He eyed the fridge, which was now bobbing up and down a bit, and wondered if the water below could be capable of electrocuting him.

He spent the rest of the day and night in his room, polishing off a leftover barbequed duck, wanking over his collection of Japanese porn and watching DVDs. All perfectly enjoyable. But by this morning, a glance down the stairs showed him the water had risen to a metre and a half. His kitchen now looked like a Roman cistern. Zac had no intention of spending any more time within the crumbling cement walls of his room. Something had to be done.

Peering from the top floor down at the water he saw a ripple. Movement below. What could it be? He inched down the stairs towards the surface, strained to see deep into the murky water, and that's when he made out the outline of an eel. Wait! – two eels. No, a colony of eels. They'd obviously escaped from their breeding tank at someone's house nearby. The slimy grey-brown fish propelled themselves in formation around the sunken furniture – in and out between the legs of the kitchen table – round and round, behind the bobbing fridge …

It's the proof Zac needed. The water won't electrocute him. He ran upstairs and changed into a pair of shorts he pulled off the dirty washing pile. He grabbed his swimming goggles, and headed down. He half walked, half-paddled to his front door, which locks at two levels – one of them well underwater. Reaching down, he couldn't work the lower lock. There was only one solution. Securing his goggles, he took a deep breath and went under …

‘No way!' I cry out, horrified. This can't be right.

This detail of the story is new to Natassia too. ‘Since when do you have swimming goggles?' she asks.

‘Hey! I'll show you them next time you're at my place. And I'll show you the tide mark on the wall where the water came up to,' he shoots back, huffily. In fact, he will. This part of the story holds water, so to speak.

He unlocked the front door and the top metre of liquid gushed out through the padlocked metal grill beyond it. The water levels in his alley had receded dramatically and neighbours were out with their water pumps, trying to drain their homes.

Zac doesn't have a pump, so he fetched a bucket, and got to work, bucketing the water from his ground floor. This is hard labour in anyone's language, made worse by the fact that the Vietnamese love a spectacle, and Zac is one at any time of day. In no time, a crowd started to gather. Then a middle-aged woman approached Zac and started yelling at him.

That did it. He lost it and unleashed a hysterical torrent of verbal abuse upon the stunned woman, mercifully in English. He'd whipped himself into a frenzy when the woman's son came over. He spoke English.

‘My mother try to offer to you use her water pump,' he explained.

But Zac was not cowed. He simply declined the offer and got back to work. By now the Vietnamese audience was in the tens, and news of the event was being communicated outwards. A woman turned up and started selling hot green tea to the crowd, then Zac's next door neighbour, capitalising on the new market, started charging 1,000 dong for the privilege of sitting on her fence so that onlookers could view the event in comfort.

‘1,000 dong? Bullshit!' I cry out.

‘They wouldn't pay that much!' adds Natassia.

‘Dude!' says Zac, in the tone he uses when he's lying through his teeth. ‘You don't understand how dumb these people are.'

Of course, it's rarely the locals who come out of Zac's stories looking bad, and he knows it. Mostly, he manages to come out of even his own version of events looking twice as bad.

One day in the Global staffroom a pretty young Vietnamese woman approaches me. I haven't seen her before but she tells me, in broken English, that she's an English teacher at the college. She says her younger brother wants private English lessons, and she would especially like me to teach him.

Flattered, although mystified, I give her my phone number and my going rate, which I make up on the spot, based on the assumption that her family is poor. A week or so later the woman calls me.

‘Hello?'

‘Hello plea can I have your address?'

‘No. I don't know who you are.'

‘I see. Plea tok to mit Carolyn.'

‘This is Carolyn.'

‘Yes, plea' … Silence.

‘Hello?'

‘Yes. I wait for Mit Carolyn.'

‘This
is
Carolyn.' More silence. ‘I
am
Miss Carolyn.'

‘Ah!' Laughter. ‘Hello Mit Carolyn. How are you?'

‘Who is this?

‘Yes, I am Michael to you now. You give me your phone number.'

‘Sorry? What's your name?'

‘At the Global Collez'

‘What's your name?'

‘Yes! I am Mai. Call you.'

‘Mai?' I yell, with a rising tone, thus changing the meaning of her name from ‘apricot' to ‘roof'.

‘Please try to remember,' says Mai ‘I ask you teach my brother Englitch.'

‘Ah yes, of course. You didn't tell me his name.'

‘So I would like bring him your how and you can meet him. Plea what is your address?'

‘Number 6,
Pho Yen The
, near the college. And what is your brother's name?'

‘We come to your how this afternoon, okay?'

‘OK. But please Mai, you didn't tell me yet, what is his name?'

‘His name?' There's a prolonged silence, during which I hear some muted conversation, then ‘I'm sorry. I do not know.'

‘Huh? You don't know the name of your brother?'

‘Yes.'

‘That's impossible,' I tell her.

‘Well, in fack, he is my niece,' she explains.

I'm now committed to staying home all afternoon to wait for this nameless boy, I realise with a sinking feeling. I can't call Mai back to clarify the time, because I forgot to take her phone number. Also, I recently found out that when quoting my price I badly undercut the going rate for private lessons. My deduction that being Vietnamese, the family was poor, was a presumptuous error. I didn't know that poor Vietnamese families don't request private tuition, or that some Vietnamese families belong to a different world to the one I've been seeing on the streets. In fact this family is loaded. The boy's father owns one of the largest companies in Vietnam.

I'm halfway through a bowl of rice with fresh yoghurt, which I've discovered is made at a French-owned café up the road, when the doorbell rings. I swallow hastily and call down.

‘The door's open.'

Mai clops up the stairs in high wooden-heeled shoes with a wide-eyed boy of sixteen in tow.

‘His name is Minh!' she proclaims happily as she appears on the landing.

I invite them to sit on the sofa. Minh does this but Mai asks permission to look around my place. She peers into my bedroom, enters it and checks the en suite bathroom, then examines the living room, the kitchen. I loom behind her, bowl of rice still in hand, wondering if she's looking for something.

When she's finished, she sits down and asks if I can start teaching Minh at 3pm tomorrow. A trial lesson. I can. I look at Minh, who smiles shyly. I notice the vertical furrow that tracks down between his eyebrows, incongruous on a sixteen-year-old. I suspect this may be a kid who studies too hard.

‘This is my first time inside a foreigner how,' Mai confesses, as she stands to leave. ‘I think it is very interesting'.

Then my guests depart, leaving me wondering what level to prepare for since Minh didn't speak a word during the whole exchange.

The following day, Minh materialises punctually out of the steaming fug. He's wearing a crisp white shirt, clasping a folder to his chest. His furrowed brow is dry, his hair still shiny. It's hard to believe he's just ridden here on a bicycle. He shakes my hand and asks my age. I invite him to the living room.

I've decided I'll test his pronunciation and vocabulary by asking him to read aloud the blurb on the back of the paperback I'm reading.

I hand him the book and stand beside him. The cover trembles slightly in his hand and I realise he's very nervous. He clears his throat and begins.

‘Amid this chaos lives a remarkable group of foreign residents. Some are adventurers whose passion for life is given free rein in this unrestrained madhouse. Others are misfits who wallow in the decadent and inviting atmosphere.'

He reads beautifully and I'm impressed. He knows how to pronounce most of the words, although I can hear the incredible effort this entails. With every consonant cluster, with every ‘sh' sound, with every word ending in /s/ or /z/ or /d/ or /f/ sounds, I can hear the battle being waged with his Vietnamese tongue as he commands it into the alien contortions of English.

Minh is obviously at an advanced level in pronunciation, but I wonder how much of the text he understands.

‘Can you tell me,' I ask him optimistically, ‘what does ‘unrestrained' mean?'

‘It is the opposite of ‘restrained,' he responds deftly.

‘Yes. That's true.' I can't argue with that. ‘And what does ‘restrained' mean?' I'm in deep water now, because he'll probably want me to explain the word, and I haven't exactly prepared a potted definition. I'm wondering whether ‘held back' would be a verb he knows.

‘It means limited or controlled,' he says.

I frown at him, disbelieving. Has he memorised a dictionary or something?

‘I'm sorry … is that correct?' He says, concerned by my reaction.

After reassuring him he's bang on (and teaching him ‘bang on' for fun), I give him a pronunciation lesson anyway, since ‘pron' is my speciality, and he tells me this is an area he wants to work on. It's true that like most Vietnamese people, he can't pronounce the /dg/ sound in ‘bridge', or the /j/ in ‘measure', and needs help memorising which syllables are stressed in poly-syllabic words. He sits forward in his chair and listens to me as though his life depended on it. If I say anything he doesn't understand he politely asks me to repeat it. He never smiles.

I wonder whether this trial lesson is measuring up. It occurs to me that the humour and verbal jousting with which I like to inject lessons will be wasted on Minh. He's serious as hell. And it could be disapproval I'm picking up. Perhaps he's looking for a more conservative teacher.

Despite this, we spend the last half an hour chatting. Minh speaks slowly and hesitantly – afraid of making mistakes. I can almost hear his brain whirring as he struggles to parse phrases, select the most accurate words and idioms, form mouth positions for making the right noises. I'm beginning to realise the gruelling demands English makes on Vietnamese speakers, the invisible, unsung efforts that allow even the simplest grammatical sentence to be formed. And I know it cuts both ways.

From Minh, I learn that Mai is a distant in-law. The words ‘brother' and ‘sister' are used loosely in Vietnam, he explains.

More importantly, I find out why he's on a drive to improve his English. He's applying for a scholarship to study in Singapore. The scholarship hinges on a tough English examination. Minh's strong subjects, he tells me, are maths and physics. His weak subject is language. He feels he needs a lot of help to get his English up to scratch. I'm incredulous at this last claim, but not in a position to argue. I don't know anything about the assessment process for the scholarship.

At the end of the lesson, Minh stands and pulls an American $50 note out of his back pocket, and says: ‘My father gave me this to pay you for five lessons.' I'm hired. Obviously dad knows a bargain rate when he hears one. He's insuring himself against a fee rise.

I'm still holding the note after he's gone, looking at it and wondering how a Vietnamese family would have US currency to spend. Later, when I learn about the company Minh's father owns, I understand a little better. To own a major company in Vietnam means high-up communist party connections, which brings a slew of privileges.

For a sixteen-year-old, Minh strikes me as uncommonly focussed. He has an English vocabulary larger than some native English-speakers his age. He's had a small amount of previous contact with Westerners – his last English tutor was American. He's shy, yet certain of his place in the world – humble, yet driven. I can feel him absorbing information like a sponge.

Soon, Minh is coming twice weekly – the oral exam is less than a month away. By the fourth lesson, I realise the ice has broken. He now laughs in front of me, although with his hand over his mouth.

I remember reading some cultural notes for Westerners in a Vietnam guidebook. The Vietnamese are shy at first and won't laugh in front of you, the book warned, but when they feel comfortable with you, will laugh at a volume that may seem inappropriate. By the sixth lesson, Minh laughs with abandon, throwing back his head and guffawing so loudly I really am almost unnerved.

But he's perfectly serious when he tells me the following: ‘My father did not discipline me enough when I was younger.'

‘What kind of discipline?'

‘Hitting me of course! He did not punish me enough.'

‘You wish your father hit you more often?' In my previous reality this would be something told to the school psychologist, who would be scribbling ‘sado-masochistic fantasies' in the margins.

‘In Vietnam, the father uses a belt to teach his children good behaviour,' he sees my face expression and laughs. ‘This is normal! My father did this too, but not very often.'

‘Why do you deserve punishment?' I ask him.

‘Because I am lazy,' he says simply.

I study his young face anew. I imagine him in the olive uniform, two deep ruts vivid on his broad, intelligent forehead as he shouts orders to a line of men. Minh is gentle and compassionate, yet there's something martial about his drive to achieve. I fear it's this very gentleness that Minh wanted his father, a standard-bearer of the
Viet Cong
generation, to beat out of him.

In the staffroom the other day, Mai told me he's very gifted at maths. I don't know enough about his culture to know whether he's a budding twisted genius or a normal, bright North Vietnamese sixteen-year-old.

But Minh comes with an unexpected bonus. He's an avid reader of what little English literature he can obtain, and once he learns of my desperation for reading material, he lends me a book each week. Thus, I find myself going to bed with Agatha Christie and Jack London stories. It's not my usual fodder, but it's manna to my hungry eyes.

Unfortunately, Vietnam doesn't import Western literature so these books have been produced locally. This means they're printed on the kind of ultra-thin paper the Guardian Weekly comes on, and bound badly. The text is often blurred and often carries a Vietnamese commentary alongside. Sometimes government stamps to verify legitimacy bleed red ink into the print on every page, rendering the text below virtually unreadable. I point this out to Minh.

‘What's this red ink everywhere? It's ridiculous. How can you read a book like this?'

He looks at me quizzically. ‘I think it is acceptable,' he replies.

When Minh feels truly comfortable with me, he finally broaches that subject that has hung unspoken in the air between us. I've been telling him about Australia and the lifestyle there. Minh asks about the government in Australia and I start to gripe about the current elected government, fully aware that to do the same in Vietnam could be a jailable offence. A silence falls.

‘You know, before I first came here, my father told me I must not discuss politics with you,' he says quietly. It dawns on me his high-profile family must be faced with a thorny and paradoxical problem. Given Minh's situation, he needs a Western English teacher, but this carries the risk that he'll be exposed to the contamination of Western ideology, to ‘cultural pollution'. Yet I perceive, by the very fact of this confession, that he's curious.

‘I understand,' I tell him. ‘It's a difficult situation.'

‘You are from a capitalist society,' he adds, unnecessarily. ‘My country is communist.'

‘I am from a capitalist country,' I say carefully, ‘but that doesn't mean I'm a capitalist. There are things about capitalism I don't like.'

Minh nods, and seems to be very alert. In telling me of his father's instruction, he's already betrayed his confidence, already spoken out of turn, but will he go any further? He opens his mouth to speak. I'm tense, afraid he'll say something that can't be retracted, afraid he won't. But I watch as Minh hesitates, loses composure. He spouts the party line.

‘Under capitalism,' he informs me, ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.'

I grunt agreeably enough, and change the subject, wondering what Zac would have done.

Despite the embargo on politics, Minh and I relate well, enjoying chats, discussions and humour. In fact, the bond I form with him is similar to the one I've often formed with students his age when teaching piano in Sydney. This is partly why I fail to appreciate it.

It's not until I've taught a great many Vietnamese boys his age, privately and in classes, that I realise Minh was special – not only in his linguistic ability, which surpasses anything I'll see subsequently, but in his nature. Unlike the others, he has somehow found a way to reach across the chasm and talk to Westerners.

One day in September Minh runs up the stairs to my place. Breathlessly, euphorically, he tells me he has won the scholarship. He's leaving for Singapore in a week. Then his face drops and he stands there uncomfortably. This is goodbye.