Single White Female in Hanoi (18 page)

‘
Co Hien o dau?
'

She looks at me with concern. ‘
Co Hien om
,' she says. I shake my head, not understanding, but she keeps repeating the same phrase over and over. ‘
Co Hien om
'. I don't know what
om
means. As the first syllable of ‘ominous' it seems to have some malevolent power even in another language. I fear the worst. I ask her to write the phrase in my pocket book so that I can ask someone later. She takes the pen awkwardly and forms the letters in a small shaky cursive. ‘
Co Hien om
'

Across the road I try again with a group of men who sell cigarettes at a stall. The first one, seeing a foreigner approach, panics and waves his palms at me like a film star trying to keep the paparazzi at bay. The second one follows suit. But the third seems to speak a word or two of English, or thinks he does. He points to the ground at his feet and says ‘she lie, she lie.'

This serves to reinforce my earlier fear. Hien has died over the weekend, it seems, only hours away from the possibility of help. My efforts, I reflect, were too few and too late.

I walk home dejected, in a haze of sadness and guilt. As I pass the little hairdressing salon halfway along
Pho Yen The
I'm distracted by the sound of something repeatedly hitting plastic. I look to its source at the kerb just in time to see a plucked chicken with a broken neck flip itself, with remarkable facility, out of the plastic basin it had been left to die in, and into the gutter beside it. There, it flails absurdly, theatrically, a
danse macabre
. Unable to squawk, it nonetheless makes something of a commotion and in no time a man – the would-be slaughterer – comes running out from the salon. He looks irate – later I come to understand it was a likely case of
fellatio interruptus
. He scoops the unfortunate bird back into the bucket, wrings its neck some more then runs back into the shop.

But this is a tough old bird. The sounds of renewed flapping against the plastic and the laughter of bystanders follow me to my compound gate. In some metaphysical morse code, the doomed chicken is flapping out a message to me:
dying isn't that easy
.

The chicken was right.

Two days later I find Hien back in situ at the
Nam Bo
, smiling at my obvious relief.

‘
Di dau
?' I ask her. ‘Go where?'

She points to the inside of her elbow, which is sporting a band-aid and says ‘
thuoc
' a few times. I've know this is the word for medicine. It looks like she's been at a hospital for a couple of days. ‘
Om
', I've discovered, means ‘sick'.

As I squat there with Hien, a strange series of events is set in motion.

It starts when I feel someone tug at the material of my shirt. Looking up, I see a little girl – no more than six or seven. I haven't seen her at this intersection before. Her face and clothes are filthy and she's wearing no shoes. She alternately rubs her belly and points into her open mouth. Hearing a ‘pssst' noise from Hien's direction I turn back around and see the expression on Hien's face has changed to hostility. The girl ignores her completely.

‘Me hungry' she says. ‘Me no money'. She's very persistent. Her face and posture are an ironic study in abject despair – ironic because that would probably be her true outlook if she were old enough to understand her circumstances. I reach for my wallet, although Natassia has told to me not to give money to kids like her. She's a beggar of a particular type – particularly heart-breaking. Kids like her are specially trained by adults and work under supervision from a distance. There's something disturbing, almost grotesque, about the exaggerated routine and the loss of innocence.

But before I can dislodge any money, Hien half rises and shoos the girl away with apparent aggression, addressing her in stern Vietnamese. It has little effect. The girl is like a brushed away fly. She comes straight back and repeats her practised routine.

Finally Hien actually stands up, something I've never seen her do, and charges the girl, sweeping her away with her bamboo fan. There's a complete lack of genuine rancour in her frown. It's theatrical. She's even smiling a little, the way an aunt might smile at a mischievous niece. Hien's just being protective of me. Finally the girl sinks back and hovers in the wings, out of range.

I bid Hien ‘
xin chao
' at this point and head across the busy road, with the beggar girl in tow, half-heartedly plying her routine again for want of a worthier subject. I keep walking, heading in the direction of Hanoi's only train station.

But glancing back again at the beggar girl I notice she's found a new foreigner to harangue. The woman cuts a conspicuous figure in my neighbourhood. She's middle-aged, buxom and attractive, with bright red hair and an aura of self-confidence. I imagine she's European. After a few rounds of tummy-rubbing and tonsil-pointing, the girl's persistence pays off. Although clearly in a hurry, the woman stops and I watch her open her wallet and give the girl a generous sum of money.

Hanoi's sole train station, according to my map, is two blocks west of the
Nam Bo
and is a sprawling patchwork suburb unto itself. Originally French-built, a bomb in the American War demolished the middle part of the building, leaving the French outer wings still standing. Inspired by Stalin's aesthetic, the communists rebuilt just this part – a towering cement façade.

When I arrive, the grandiose front entrance is seething with people. Gaining admission means battling my way not only though the comers and goers, but also through the stayers – a contingent of hundreds of
xe om
drivers,
cyclo
drivers, fruit-sellers, money-changers and various other vendors and shysters who have positioned themselves for business around the entrance.

Once inside the vast, high-ceilinged vestibule I struggle toward the ticketing area, buffeted by hordes of Vietnamese. There isn't another foreigner in sight.

I attach myself to what appears to be a line for tickets and find myself shuffling intermittently toward a line of attendants behind a glass partition. While shuffling, I mumble to myself in Vietnamese, trying, with dubious results, to parse the phrase ‘Two soft class return tickets to Lao Cai please'. Lao Cai is the closest station to Sapa, in the mountains, where Natassia and I plan to spend the weekend.

But when I finally make it to the booth I become marooned there, pointedly ignored, as the attendant serves a series of Vietnamese who were behind me in the queue. Each time I lean forward to speak another shout comes from behind me, aimed at the sullen middle-aged attendant, ‘
chi oi
!' (‘oy you – older sister') and a new queue-jumper has usurped my position.

When the woman judges my humiliation is sufficient she notices me and says ‘Yes please?' in clear English. I breathe a sigh of relief and address her in polite tones.

‘Hello. I would like to buy two return tickets, soft class, to Lao Cai, leaving on Friday, returning on Monday.'

‘The trains are booked out this weekend,' she replies, without checking the computer in front of her.

‘Please, could you just check?' I beseech, indicating the computer. The woman jabs at the keyboard, glowers at the screen then looks back to me.

‘Yes, okay. There are two tickets to Lao Cai on Friday.'

It's a small victory and I'm amazed.

‘Soft class sleeper?' I'm adamant about travelling soft class after hearing Justin's tale of an overnight trip to Lao Cai in hard class. At twenty-one years of age, lithe and fit, he said he rolled off the train nine hours later, a hollow-boned eighty-year-old.

‘Yes. Soft class.' She looks impatient. ‘You pay money now please.'

‘Huh? … What about the trip back?' I shout through the screen.

‘You buy ticket Hanoi to Lao Cai first please.'

‘First, can you find out if we can come back on Monday morning,' I say slowly, imagining we've hit a communications snag. ‘We cannot go there if there is no seat to come back.'

‘You pay for this ticket first please, then I look for return seat.' She gives me a look that says: ‘Pay the money or piss off.' I take the latter option, shaking my head and wandering off muttering to myself.

I could take this personally, but I strongly suspect she's just following regulations. It's another case of that strange shortsightedness I've observed.

I contact Natassia with the news as soon as I get home. She thinks I should have paid the money, that it would have been okay. This is a setback, she makes it clear, but there must be another avenue.

‘Ah – wait a minute,' I say, suddenly remembering. ‘Yvette's husband Khai! He told me to call him if I'm going anywhere – he's got a friend who runs a tour business. Tulip.'

‘Tulip?'

‘Mmmm. That's the name of the business I think.'

‘Maybe you should call him. Immediately,' she suggests.

I do, and he's at home off work and happy to help. ‘If you buy from my friend maybe he can give you the Vietnamese price. Much,
much
cheaper,' he laughs.

Khai rides straight over to take me to his friend's business in the Old Quarter. As we turn out of my street, I nod at the staring
xe om
drivers, except for Quan, whom I now pointedly ignore. I sense Quan looking at me, but if he's aggravated by my recent behaviour, there's no sign of it.

The Tulip staff, in their dark, airless little shop are very friendly, although I'm a little surprised at the ‘special' price, which sounds rather more than the full price. But it's a good deal, they tell me. Tulip has its own ‘luxury' air-conditioned carriage for foreigners, which is attached to the train. There's some special arrangement with the railway authorities, they explain to me, and the carriage is managed exclusively by Tulip. I look to Khai who's nodding enthusiastically.

‘This way is very comfortable,' he tells me. I hand over the cash for two return tickets. Perhaps aware of my misgivings, he adds: ‘When you see Sapa, you will not believe your eyes.'

But when Zac gets wind of our trip he seems irritated.

‘You're gonna to be out of Hanoi for National Day,' he says.

‘Your point being?' I inquire, suspiciously.

‘You're going to miss the celebrations.' He sighs. I turn my head and squint at him from the corner of my eye. Then he adds: ‘Do you have any idea how jealous that makes me?'

‘Ahh!' That's more like it. ‘You'll be right,' I tell him. ‘It sounds like fun.'

‘Yeah, it's fascinating. I can't wait,' he replies. ‘The place fills up with drunken farmers who come in on their tractors. They go apeshit and choke the streets completely so that you can't go anywhere.'

I smile and say nothing. It sounds like the kind of event I would enjoy.

When I tell my students I'm spending a weekend up in Sapa, I find they too are pre-occupied by the fact I'll be out of town for National Day in Hanoi. ‘You will miss the celebrations,' they all say. ‘There is a parade in the day and fireworks at night.'

Worse still, I'm reminded, I won't be in the capital city to commemorate an important day in the nation's history. The outspoken Pham from my advanced class at UNCO stands and delivers a dissertation while the other students nod enthusiastically.

‘We celebrate our National Day on September two because on this day in 1945 my people win final victory in our fight against the French. And Ho Chi Minh make the Declaration of Independence in Ba Dinh Square.' She looks knowingly at me, then, seeing my expressionless face, adds, ‘It is near here.'

In the days before Natassia and I leave, I notice the city is indeed gearing up for something big. Banners and flags are proliferating in the streets and the trees around Hoan Kiem Lake are festooned with colourful electric lights. Nga tells me National Day is a public holiday and it's important to spend the day with your family. She too seems disappointed that I'll miss the occasion.

I begin to feel some regrets about the timing, but I'm eager to get up to Sapa this weekend.

Sapa is an old French hill station in the mountains above Lao Cai, on the Chinese border. Lao Cai is 294km north of Hanoi; the train trip takes nine hours.

Natassia and I jump on the train Friday night in high spirits. The Tulip carriage seems okay, nothing special. Each box has two bunk beds. We share ours with a friendly Vietnamese couple, putting the lie to the ‘just for foreigners' pitch. But they're asleep almost before the train has pulled out. I ask the Tulip representative why the aircon is not working.

‘Ah – sorry – we turn it off because the Vietnamese passenger don't like it,' he explains. He seems to be hiding a grin himself.

The rep's name is Thinh. He's a wiry guy with a hungry look, but very friendly. He takes a few swigs on our bottle of rice spirits then leaves it to us to drink ourselves into a happy sleep.

We're woken by a surly female attendant at Lao Cai. The sky is powdery with the beginnings of sunrise as we're bundled, hungover, onto a minibus and begin the two-kilometre climb up the mountain pass to Sapa. It's a spectacular trip. The road is badly pot-holed, rocky and perilously close to the precipices below. But precipice-gazing is also very rewarding, showing dizzying valleys terraced wall-to-wall with electric green rice paddies.

At one point we pass through a small, dilapidated town and I start at the surreal sight of a massive shining shopping mall about 500 metres ahead of us.

‘What the hell's that?' I say to Natassia, who points out the neon signs above it are in Chinese. Thinh overhears us.

‘That, over there, is China!' he says simply, as the bus make a sharp left turn in order to stay in Vietnam.

‘My god!' I say with awe, squinting at the concrete monstrosity. ‘Now I can say I've seen China.'

I look back to where we've come from. Mountains, mist, dazzling rice fields. The terracing that divides the paddies is impossibly complex, like a head of African hair, styled into corn-rows by a pedantic madwoman. The scenery is breathtaking. I feel almost patriotically glad to be on the Vietnam side of this border.

In Sapa, Natassia and I find a brand new hotel on the side of a mountain, yet only metres from the town centre. Our previously unused room features a balcony with a cutaway view of a yawning white abyss. The hotel's manager points emphatically into it and chants: ‘
Fancy Pants, Fancy Pants
', which inspires me to peer ever harder into the swirling cloud. Mount Fansipan, or ‘
Phan Si Pan
', is Vietnam's highest peak.

As soon as we've unpacked and showered we walk the thirty metres to the main drag and I laugh in disbelief. Khai was perfectly right. Looking around, I feel I've been transported to a mammoth film set for some overblown sci-fantasy flick. The air is misty, rendering the street in muted shades. The shop-fronts and buildings that line it look exactly as I imagine they would have looked several decades ago, and the sloping street is teeming with people, none of whom look like anyone I've ever seen before.

This is largely because they're wearing costumes and headdress, several types of costume in fact, which Natassia explains denotes which tribe they're from. The ones in blue-black costumes, which predominate, are short and look almost Tibetan, while the mainly red costumed-ones are tall and dark with lots of gold teeth. They congregate in the middle of the street or walk up the hill in twos and threes. They call out to each other in nasal singing tones. Some of the young girls have tiny babies strapped to their back with a strip of cloth. The older women look ancient – impossibly wrinkly, with earlobes stretched to their shoulders by heavy metal hoops. Laughter and silver jewellery abound. This is a place lifted from the pages of an anthropologist's textbook.

But our timing is priceless. Before I've had a chance to take in the extraordinary tableau before me, we hear a rising commotion, and look up to the top of the street just in time to see the vanguard of a parade appear over the crest of the hill.

By the time the parade draws level with us the atmosphere among the tribes-people has changed profoundly. The laughter and the shouting have stopped. They skulk, singly or in pairs, along one side of the road, staring off, occasionally, at the festivities that now occupy the other side. Clearly, they've just lost their stomping ground.

It's National Day today, and there's no mistaking it. The other side of the street is taken up by a line of chanting children, four or five abreast, that snakes as far as the eye can see up a hill and shows no sign of tailing off, and each child is waving a small Vietnamese flag.

It's an impressive display of patriotism and I would have liked to celebrate the defeat of the French colonialists too, but the warm glow eludes me – it's quite clear there's something amiss here. The town seems to be in the grips of some kind of apartheid.

And a couple of days talking to people in Sapa casts some light on it.

Marginalised at best and brutalised at worst, Vietnam's 53 ethnic minorities have managed to reap few if any benefits from the new Vietnam. They're poor beyond belief and almost universally uneducated.

Natassia and I befriend Zi, a fifteen-year-old H'mong girl. To my surprise she considers her English to be better than her Vietnamese. This doesn't auger well for her Vietnamese, since her English is a bizarre melodic cascade of tumbling words, many of which make no sense at all.

Zi's fifteen and as flawlessly beautiful as a China doll, but she's been ostracised by many of the other girls of her tribe for some reason, so she's something of a loner. When I ask Zi about her family she explains that her father died three years ago, leaving her fifty-year-old mother with a toddler. On my final day in Sapa, when we've spent more time together, I ask her about her father and she starts to cry. Zi lives in a one-room bamboo hut with her ailing mother and two sisters in a village two hours walk from Sapa. She's the sole bread-winner, selling hand-made H'mong relics to tourists. None-the-less, with an uncle who has five chickens, two pigs and a buffalo, she explains her family is ‘not so poor'.

We sneak Zi into our hotel room to show her the view, but she's more interested in MTV. Instead, Natassia and I stand on the balcony and marvel at the panorama. The mountains are permanently shrouded in endlessly shifting configurations of cloud, so that summits get revealed in random sequences. Only once during our stay do we look out in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of Mount Fansipan. I study the towering snowy cap and marvel at the number of tourists who insist on scaling it.

On Sunday Zi takes us on a trek down the side of the mountain to Cat Cat village. She leads us on short cuts along the narrow verges that separate the rice terraces, providing access for farmers. Natassia and I sway vertiginously towards the waterlogged fields below, finding it difficult to walk in a narrow straight line along muddy, uneven pieces of turf only a few centimetres wide, for 300 metre stretches. Ahead of us, Zi skips along as nimbly as a goat. This is her terrain.

Finally Zi announces we've reached Cat Cat village. I look around, grateful for this information. Without it, I wouldn't have known we were in a village. I count three bamboo huts and a small bridge. We sit down on the bridge and rest.
This is truly the middle of nowhere
, I think to myself. The air is cool and so fresh it almost burns our lungs. The environment around us seems pristine and the paddies are so verdant they look computer-generated.

Soon a number of other tourists come past us. Mostly groups of Vietnamese. Some continue down the mountain, others settle around the creek for a picnic. In no time at all they're throwing cigarette butts and coke bottles around them.

‘I guess they haven't quite caught up with the environmental movement,' I say to Natassia, who's disgusted.

As we sit there a couple of Westerners come up the hill towards us, a woman and a man.

‘Huh?' I say, catching sight of the woman's hair.

‘What is it?'

I watch them until they're close enough to be sure. Then I turn to Natassia again.

‘That's the woman with the red hair. The one I told you about.' She looks at me blankly. ‘The one who gave money to the beggar girl outside the
Nam Bo
on Tuesday.'

‘Are you sure?' she asks me dubiously. It does seem rather a coincidence.

‘Pretty sure. How's that! In the middle of nowhere!' I shake my head and rise. ‘I'm gonna go and say hello. Hopefully she speaks English.'

‘I saw you give money to a beggar girl on
Nguyen Thai Hoc
near my house last Tuesday,' I tell the redhead.

‘That sounds like Kath,' the man chimes in. I glance at him and like him immediately.

I extend my hand to Kath in introduction but it never finds its target. She grabs my ring finger and turns around the Valentine ring so that she can look at the setting.

‘It's tourmaline,' I tell her, pre-empting her next question.

‘Oh, I know,' she replies. ‘I made it'.

And it's true. I check and she's the owner of the jewellery shop where the ring was purchased in Sydney, six years earlier.

Kath introduces me to her friend Lee. He's somewhere in his fifties, I estimate, with dark lively eyes and greying hair. Within a minute we've established that we once lived within a couple of blocks of one another in Sydney. I tell him a little about myself and learn that he's a journalist. He asks if I'd be interested in working as a sub-editor for a national English-language financial review.

‘I'd love to do some subbing work, but believe me, finance isn't my strong subject,' I reply, laughing. But Lee laughs too.

‘I worked there for years. The office is full of arts graduates and musos.' I raise my eyebrows, interested now. ‘They need an extra sub a couple of days a week. You should ring them,' he says. I take down the phone number and we go our separate ways.

Pulling out of Sapa, I peer back into the mountainous mist and wonder if I'll ever return. Saying goodbye to Zi was tearful. I wonder how many Westerners she bonds with each year, how often she cries at separation, whether she holds any hopes of seeing them again.

We find the Tulip carriage near the back of the train and jump on. Standing in the corridor with his back against the wall is Thinh, the company rep, hemmed in by a stern middle-aged Scottish woman.

‘Well, what are you going to do about it? This is naught good enough. We've paid $50 for this trip, we expect better,' she's saying.

Thinh seems simultaneously cowed and amused. He catches my eye briefly. I wander up to the woman and ask her what the problem is. She wheels around to face me like a school teacher about to upbraid a naughty child. ‘Haven't you looked at your bed yet?' she snaps. They're filthy. Mine's full of ants.'

I head back into our box where Natassia is squealing ‘bugs! bugs!' as she picks though the sheets on her bed. I take a look at mine. Not so many ants, but shroud-of-Turin-like, I detect the faint impression of a body shaded in black grime on the sheet and of a head in the middle of the pillowcase. I sniff the pillow gingerly and nod. The sheets haven't been washed since the last passenger, at least.

A harrowing trip to the toilet confirms the problem. We've been given an uncleaned carriage. By now the Scottish woman has whipped up an insurrection, and several berth-loads of Westerners are demanding answers from a flustered Thinh.

Back in our box I find we're sharing again with the same young Vietnamese couple. They're finding the whole turn of events as gripping as we are. As the train pulls out, the drama swirls up into new levels and draws in railway employees who pile into the carriage corridor. Increasingly the yelling is in Vietnamese. Our cabin-mates have lived in Europe and speak excellent English and so we're privy to on-the-spot translations.

‘Thinh says it is not the fault of Tulip. He says it is the fault of the railway authority who is supposed to clean the carriage,' explains Hung, whose gorgeous wife, Bich is reclining in his arms, foreigner-style. They seem unruffled by the hygiene problem, but point out that they've paid less than a quarter of our price for their ticket.

Reaching up, I lay my sarong carefully over the sheet and the pillow as a foul-tempered woman comes in to check our tickets. She leaves and I hear her voice added into the continuing dispute outside our door. ‘
Tay
', the Vietnamese word for Westerner jumps intermittently out of the exchange.

‘She is shouting at Thinh!' explains Hung, cheerfully. ‘She say his company has cheated the foreigner because they only give them the Vietnamese-style carriage.'

After an hour or so the lights go out for sleeping, but periodic altercations in Vietnamese rattle through the carriage like gunfire. Natassia and I are still up and chatting with Hung and Bich when Thinh slouches into the carriage looking close to tears, holding a piece of Tulip letterhead paper. It's nearly a full page of neatly handwritten Vietnamese. He asks us to sign it. Dat summarises it for us.