Single White Female in Hanoi (21 page)

The Magic Faraway Tree's been hyperactive lately. I'm coming to see the streetscape as litmus paper, revolving though rainbow colours as it reveals the changes taking place in the solution below. These may be the predictable annual changes of the seasons, or the less predictable landmarks of the human life cycle. They may be the complicated, seemingly random events of the civic diary, or the dependable events of the cultural one.

The weather, too, has started free-wheeling through assorted climates. Grapes, apples, pomegranates and persimmons appear in the streets. The mid-Autumn festival has begun. It's a traditional celebration of harvest and full moon. Every child is playing with a colourful new toy and red paper lanterns decorate doorways. Family altars are cleaned and laid with new offerings of food and cakes. The cakes are round like the moon.

Mooncakes are to the Mid-Autumn festival what Easter eggs are to Easter. They're peddled from stalls every few metres along the streets. Packed flat in gold-trimmed red boxes, four to a box, their translucent whiteness is visible though the plastic window in the top of the box. Every man woman and child on the street seems to be munching on one. They look delicious, but I can't get any joy from eating them. In
my
mouth, the pastry is waxy and tasteless, the sweet fillings disappointing, at best.

The staffroom at Global, where I still work two days a week, is littered with mooncakes. The Vietnamese staff cram them down between classes and insist I join them. Sometimes, to my displeasure, I find a whole egg yolk inside. I'm offered a mooncake at Nguyet's place. The next day Nga brings me a box. I find several boxes of the things at Natassia's place.

‘What are you going to do with these?'

‘I don't know,' she tells me, looking concerned. ‘A student gave them to me. I don't like them.'

Mooncakes are probably not in Hien's good books either. They've put her on the sidewalk. The marble
Nam Bo
entrance, her former abode, is barricaded and under guard. It's become a temporary selling post for mooncakes, and she's been evicted, banished to the broken paving along the side of the supermarket.

I whiz past her on the back of a friend's bike late one night when the streets are quiet. She's a small bundle of rags. She's sitting with her head on her knees, possibly sleeping. For the first time, I wonder where she goes to the toilet. Under her knees is the torn plastic bag that is now her most precious possession. She acquired it recently from unknown sources.

The bag is not full of food, fresh water or blankets. It's full of cheap wool in garish shades. Hien's found a way to occupy her time during the day – she knits. Where once I would find Hien in a group, drinking tea with the other homeless people, now she sits apart, her brow lined with concentration, needles clicking like tap dancers. When I pass her by day she reaches around in the plastic bag and extracts a new item for me.

Already she's knitted me a bright orange scarf and a small fluoro-yellow handbag. For a button, she cleverly knitted a yellow flower, which holds down a yellow loop of wool. ‘Wash it
very
thoroughly,' she mimed, folding the bag, and scouring it between her knuckles. I took it home, washed it in the style demonstrated, and hung it on the wooden hat-rack that stands in the corner of my bedroom. I wondered hopefully whether there'll be any fancy dress parties while I'm in Hanoi. Lately, she's been working on something with both hot pink and lurid yellow.

During the Mid-Autumn festival I meet a friendly Indian woman at a small supermarket in the diplomatic area. Her European husband is a consular official. We drink coffee next door and she tells me about the Hanoi Women's Club. ‘The women are a little bit snobby, you know, but they do good work.'

‘Any charity work?' I ask her

‘Oh yes. Charity work.'

‘There's a woman with TB,' I blurt out. ‘I want to help her and I don't know how. I tried the Red Cross …'

‘No problem! You need to talk to Madeleine,' she tells me, and writes down the woman's number for me. I realise I've happened upon the right contact. I can save Hien.

I've been researching TB, and I've learnt that it's bacterial and curable. ‘Even people close to death can make a complete recovery' one site tells me. But the bacteria die slowly – the course of antibiotics takes at least six months to complete, several pills, taken several times a day. Start skipping pills and you risk encouraging antibiotic-resistant strains. Homeless people have to be observed to ensure they follow the prescription. I want to get Hien into a Directly Observed Therapy scheme. Apparently the DOT scheme exists somewhere in Vietnam.

I ring Madeleine, a long-term expat. She knows a woman who has set up a hospice for sick homeless people. She gives me the number and I call the woman.

‘Sure darling,' she says. ‘You bring her to me and we should be able to admit her. Do you know the nature of her sickness?'

‘Yeah – she's got TB.' There's a silence. My heart pounds. Surely this isn't a problem …

‘Oh. … Sorry darling. We can't help her. TB is contagious. She'll infect others on the ward.'

‘What about a private room?'

The woman laughs mirthlessly. ‘She needs a room with special air vents and protected staff. We don't have
that
kind of funding!'

I push her and she gives me the name of ‘the perfect woman to talk to'. A couple of days later I catch her. Her organisation is having funding difficulties. She can't help me. She gives me a third number, a clinic somewhere to the north. I ring. Same story. A medic there suggests I try the Hanoi Family Practice, a medical centre for expats run by a philanthropic Israeli guy.

I give it a rest. Perhaps I've been getting obsessive. Natassia tells me Zac's worried about me. He thinks I'm going to get hurt, that I need to learn to disengage.

When I next see Zac he gives me a comical lecture on the Importance of Being Selfish. ‘Let ‘what's in it for me?' be your motto,' he tells me, paternally. He draws on Darwin's natural selection, on Richard Dawkins' theory of the Selfish Gene. He quotes, misquotes, distorts and falsifies any number of respectable theories. It's impressive rhetoric. In conclusion, he explains that there's no point in worrying about people that aren't family or friends.

Substantially entertained, I contemplate his philosophy. It makes sense for him. Most of his gruffness is self-protection. I suspect he was bullied at school. Yet, true to his ideology, he's very loyal to his friends. And contrary to his doctrine of parsimony, he's also generous.

But he's a menace. Inspired by Natassia and her Angel 80, Zac's gone out and hired a motorcycle. I thought nothing of it at first, but now I live in fear of having to get on the back. When a group of us go out together I clamber for the back of Natassia's bike even before she's sitting on it, insurance against being left to ride with Zac.

It's not just that he occupies the entire saddle, forcing the pillion to hang by a mere pubic bone and two handfuls of Zac's sweat-soaked back. It's not just that in this heat he smells rancid. It's that he drives like a total arsehole. For a guy eaten up by road rage even when he's sitting on the sidewalk, he now has the ultimate means of expressing it. He revs hard at pushy motorists, playing chicken with them until they peel off horrified. He executes kung-fu style kicks out at teenagers who try to overtake him while he's turning, although he frequently makes the same selfish manoeuvre. He overtakes on the inside, rides aggressively into oncoming traffic if it enables him to cut corners, verbally abuses the motorists around him at regular intervals, revs the bike too high, kicks the gear pedal almost unconscious to change gears. In short, he rides rather in the fashion of an expat. But with an added factor that I'm slow to recognise. Incompetence. Eventually I ask Zac exactly how much motorbike-riding experience he has.

‘You want the truth?' he asks me.

‘I'm suddenly not sure,' I reply, nervously.

He tells it anyway. He's never ridden a motorbike. He's never driven a car either. He doesn't have a license. He pulled off a coup in bullshit at the hiring place, feigning a language barrier, giving the hire-guy obscure answers to questions, signing whatever needed signing and somehow managing to ride the bike out of the shop without revealing his complete lack of knowledge of gears or road rules.

The sighting of a cute little mouse in my living room makes me smile. She's made a nest in the styrofoam packing around the broken aircon unit. I see her when I come home at night. She eyes me curiously from the dangling electrical cord, rotates her little round ears in my direction, wrinkles her nose, then scurries cleverly up the wire, trailing her slender tail behind her. I name her Itchy.

But there's no hiding from the plain truth. My place has deteriorated badly since Nga and the 16-year-old Tam stopped coming round to clean it on a Saturday. I've brought down the full weight of my mediocre domestic skills on the kitchen floor and it still looks and smells like a drain. I've thrown bleach all over the bathroom, but it's no longer the white colour it was. I've pawed at the greasy black dust with a damp cloth but it only surrenders enough to put the cloth out of commission for good.

Nguyet is tactful. She says, ‘You know Lien? She like you very much. She can come to your house and clean for you.' I don't need any convincing. I'm quite in awe of Nguyet's live-in maid, of her beautiful angular face and the story of her brutal husband in the provinces. And I'm desperate. I double her absurdly cheap price and it's still absurdly cheap.

‘Lien very
very
happy,' Nguyet tells me.

Nguyet brings her over and tells her what needs to be done. By her behaviour it seems Lien's also in awe of me. She stares at me and won't sit in my presence except on the floor in front of me. I try to make her feel relaxed. On a sheet of foolscap paper, Nguyet writes down vocabulary for me to talk to Lien. ‘
Sach
– clean,
rua
– wash,
sach no di
– Clean it!
Vut rac
– throw away rubbish. I blu-tack the page to the wall in my bedroom and memorise as much as possible. It's of limited use. Lien's never met a foreigner before and hasn't learnt to decipher our mangled Vietnamese. While my pronunciation is now good enough to impress educated Vietnamese, it doesn't cut the mustard with the laity. I lead her to the lexicon on the foolscap paper and indicate the word, but Lien can barely read. We communicate by pointing and smiling. Whenever I get to breaking point with frustration I ring Nguyet at home and get her to translate.

I've learnt the word for mouse – ‘
Chuot'
. I decide I might need to expand on this, so I ask my students ‘what's the word for rat?'

‘
Chuot
,' comes the reply.

‘Mouse and rat are different,' I explain.

‘No,' they reply mysteriously.

Itchy seems to have invited a few friends over, since I've started finding rodent droppings around the living room. Zac tells me it's time I moved out. He thinks Nga is ripping me off. Lien, my new cleaner, wants to set a
chuot
trap, but I refuse to allow it. She wipes up the turds with the kitchen cleaning cloth, which bothers me slightly.

Lien has different standards of hygiene to me. One day she finds me chopping garlic in the kitchen and with a yell firmly takes over. She swipes the 3mm-thick plastic chopping board from the bench in front of me, steps through the doorway into the living room then squats down, puts the board on the floor, and continues chopping, violently splicing the garlic every which way. I watch amused. With the arrival of Lien, the street-culture of South-East Asia has now entered my house.

I have a memory of a story that went around my home suburb of Bondi many years ago. The rumour concerned a local Thai restaurant. The friend-of-a-friend concerned stepped out the back to use the toilet and saw the staff busy at work chopping vegetables in the yard. The work bench was a wooden board bridged between two garbage bins. The story was scandalous – some said it was just a racist urban myth. Now I realise that not only was it probably true, but that it was unremarkable. The Vietnamese point out, reasonably, that frying food kills germs.

Lien is a little slovenly too, she doesn't smell of soap and shampoo like Nguyet. It's possible she's never used either. But I grow ever fonder of her, and she, it seems, of me. She becomes so affectionate with me that Zac starts to refer to her as my lesbian housemaid. Some days, when she's very tired or has a bad headache, I let her nap on the bed with me. I have a mattress, which is a novelty for her. In her lifetime she's known only hard surfaces. Although she has a young face, Lien is in her forties and worn out. Her working life is almost over.

Outside my apartment, things are their unusual selves. A government official turns up one day and changes my address. The blue plate nailed to the wall outside the compound no longer says ‘6'. It now reads ‘16'. All the street numbers in
Pho Yen The
have been changed.

My crush on Quan rages on. My efforts to ignore him were short-lived. I feel like Homer Simpson who, food-poisoned, finally throws out the moldering foot-long sausage sandwich he's sworn to finish, then rescues it from the bin saying ‘how can I stay mad at you?' I snub the other
xe om
drivers, most of whom are at least as nice as Quan, whenever I can guarantee a ride with him. Sometimes these days he leans back into me. I arrive at work flushed with romance, barely able to concentrate through the shift.

Zac calls Natassia and me to a meeting at my place. He says it's very important. He won't divulge the topic. ‘Nats, Caz,' he announces once we're seated around my coffee table. ‘I've decided I've had enough of living in a flooding decaying bunker on the outskirts of Vietnam. I've decided I've had enough of living in a neighbourhood where men chase women through the street with iron bars and every woman under the age of thirty is a prostitute.' He rubs his chin authoritatively. I wonder whether he rehearsed this. ‘I've got a plan,' he says finally. ‘And it concerns all of us.'

It turns out he's found a large house for rent. It's next to an empty field in an equally unsavoury district just north of the dyke road, but only minutes from town. The house is still being built but already he's managed to screw the owner down into an unprecedentedly low rental price. He tells Natassia and me that the three of us must move in together as soon as possible.

He's just about convinced Natassia. She needs to save a whole lot of money before she goes travelling and the rent at her place is high. But I'm far from persuaded. Apart from a grave lack of lifestyle compatibility, there are his foul tempers, and worse, the fact that he's a voracious and fixated meat eater.

‘I'd need a separate kitchen.' I say, by way of excuse.

‘I reckon that'll be possible. I'll have a word with the builder guy,' Zac replies, unfazed. I look at him in amazement. He's a 24-year-old arts student without a bank balance. What power we foreigners wield.

‘I'm still pretty happy at my place,' I remind him.

But something is brewing back at 16
Pho Yen The
. I've started finding black
chuot
droppings in the kitchen each morning. I have to wipe them off the benches before I can cook. One day I'm preparing lunch in the kitchen and the phone rings. I take the call in the bedroom, chatting for about ten minutes. When I return to the kitchen, there's a fresh turd on my chopping board.

Another evening I come home and at the sound of my entry into the living room, a particularly large
chuot
explodes in terror from the non-stick interior of my rice cooker, jumps a metre to the ground and legs it across the floor to the fridge. With new eyes, I notice the hunch of its shoulders, the muscular neck, the stiff hairless tail trailing behind it as it runs.

The
chuot
is not what I thought it was. It's all whiskers and cute little mouse ears at the front, but from the neck back, it's pure rat.