Single White Female in Hanoi (23 page)

Meanwhile, something has happened at Global.

The staff, both Vietnamese and foreign, shoot me pregnant glances when I enter the staffroom. I ignore them and bury myself in reading the usual scant follow-up reports by the other teachers who share my classes.

Miss Ngoc is the first to approach.

‘Miss Carolyn! How are you? You look thinner today.' She waits a nanosecond, then cuts to the chase. ‘What happened to your friend?'

‘What friend?'

‘To Mr Zac! Why did Miss Lan sack him?'

‘Huh?'

I grab the phone on the accountant's desk beside the aquarium and call Zac at home.

‘Jesus! What've you gone and done?'

‘It's all there in the follow-up book,' he answers proudly.

I hang up and go through the follow-up books until I find it. I put the slim file under my arm and excuse myself, retreating to an empty classroom, where I read it in detail.

Zac has cracked. Something's sent him over the edge. He's filled out the entire page, including the margins.

Under ‘Resources Used' he has written ‘Bootlegged, mostly indecipherable cassette-tape, execrable textbook, dried-up white board marker. Under ‘Notes on Class' he has unkindly described a group of gormless nose-pickers with no capacity for independent thought. Then he has defended them with a vitriolic attack on management. ‘Owing to another prime case of maladministration this class was confused as to what it was supposed to be learning, although not as confused as I was. Perhaps Miss Lan could ascertain their level before selling them the textbooks. It's doubtful they could learn anything anyway given the constant hammering and drilling coming from downstairs …'

He concludes with a satirical reflection on the ‘tragic incompetence' of the college. It's high-level language but he makes sure Lan gets the gist. He singles her out repeatedly. When I go to show the page to Natassia later in the day I find it has been neatly excised, never to be seen again.

‘How are you going to survive?' I ask Zac over a coconut juice.

‘I'm fine. Got loads of privates at $15 an hour.' He chuckles. ‘God! I'm so glad to be out of that nest of corruption. Life's looking up. I moved all my stuff by taxi to the new house over the weekend. It'll be ready to move into the day after tomorrow. When are you gonna give your scamming landlady notice on your place?'

‘Zac – I don't know if I'm ready to move yet.'

‘Caz – you're paying too much rent and you've got rats.'

‘Firstly, I think my rent's reasonable, secondly, the rats aren't bothering me and thirdly, if I move out, I won't see Quan. I think our relationship is developing.'

‘That's another reason for you to move,' Zac points out. ‘We've got to wean you off that guy. Maybe we could introduce you to someone who's not a dog-eating, wife-bashing illiterate. Maybe even someone who speaks English.'

‘Fuck off Zac. You don't know anything about him,' I bristle, although his words have perturbed me. I'm still pretty sure Quan doesn't beat his wife, although I did recently see him take to his daughter with a stick in full view of everyone on the street. I reflect uneasily on the dog-eating charge. Could I kiss someone wearing dog-grease lip balm?

Zac gets up, pays for himself and leaves. It looks like another tiff.

But this one doesn't last long. The next day the skies open and a post-seasonal deluge tumbles out of it. The rain lasts for two days. When it stops, Zac heads over to the new house, ready to move in and finds everything he possesses, including a rented TV and DVD player, sitting in half a metre of water. The roof wasn't finished yet. He somehow convinces the new landowner to cover costs, but the house remains unfinished; the builders couldn't work in the rain.

‘Caz. Can I stay at your place for a few nights?'

‘Where?' I shoot back, alarmed. I'm fond of Zac, when he's not being an arsehole, but I'm not ready to share my bed with the guy, and I have no other bedding at all.

‘I'll make myself a bed in the living-room,' he says.

And he does. He collects whatever meagre blankets and cushions he can find and gathers himself into what strikes me as a singularly tortuous position, humped face-down over the stuffed pyramid of my Thai cushion-chair. When I say goodnight to him he's a giant soft mound on the floor tiles.

Yet miraculously he manages to deliver a late night sermon from this position. This one's on a new obsession – ‘The value of insincerity'.

‘Caz,' he croaks from his face down position. ‘I've decided that it's better to be insincere in life.'

‘I happen to value sincerity.'

‘I think that's an emotional choice, not a rational one. Wouldn't you rather people just treated you in a polite and friendly manner?'

‘Even if they felt like spitting on me?'

‘Especially if they felt like spitting on you.'

‘You don't find insincerity a bit jarring?'

‘Put it this way – who would you rather serve you in a restaurant – a scowling rude Vina chick with an undisguised hatred of foreigners, or a smiling reverential Japanese one? You know neither of them would piss on you if you were on fire.' He pauses to allow me to concur, then continues. ‘That's why I respect the Japanese. They've elevated insincerity to an art. I've started working on my fake smile. It's gonna form part of my get-rich plan. I think people respond better to you if you can master insincerity.'

Zac's voice is fading. He's almost asleep. I pat the top of the mound maternally and retire. I suspect anyone who has to actually work on their insincerity hasn't got what it takes.

When I wake up in the morning, he's gone, but he's left me a note. The note has a dead rat on top of it.

‘Morning Caz – I wasn't sure what to do with this. It ran over my arm in the night and I chased it onto the landing and down the stairs. I trapped it at the bottom and killed it by hitting it repeatedly with a rolled up
National Economic Review
. See you tonight, Z.'

Zac stays for three nights, then moves to his new place. He takes me to see it and I almost change my mind. It's a four-storey, five-bedroom terrace with a bathroom on each floor. The place is brand new, the tile job, immaculate. Every window and balcony is fully enclosed by steel bars. A ladder leads to the roof, which allows a cutaway view of Hanoi from the north. I climb up to the roof with Zac, where we chat as the sun sets over West Lake and the sky slowly fades to a dark sepia.

It's truly tempting. My
chuot
situation is starting to unnerve me. This afternoon I found a turd in the centre of my pillow, laid out there like guest soap at a hotel. I've started asking about humane ways of dealing with it.

‘Just don't get one of those sticky traps,' warns Georgia, the newish American teacher at Global. ‘They're the worst. We used one and this rat got stuck on it in the night and she put her head down and her whole face got stuck on it and she tried to pull away and she lost an eyeball. She was still alive when we found her. It was horrible.'

‘Those sticky traps are a bit grisly,' says Charlie at NER. ‘We used one and we found just a mouse's leg stuck to it in the morning,' he grimaces. ‘And nearby was the owner, dead from blood loss. It'd gnawed its own leg off to get away.'

‘I get for you mouse trap,' says Nga. ‘
Bay Dinh Chuot.
'

‘Not the sticky trap!' I know
Dinh
means sticky.

‘Yes! Trap like this,' she says, using her hands to mime a sticky surface.

‘No, please don't Nga.' I'm starting to feel alarmed. I have to stop her.

‘Yes. Sticky trap. You will see!'

‘No, please Nga. The sticky trap is not good!'

‘Sticky trap is
very
good.'

‘No, it's not good,'

‘Sticky trap, very good! It always catch the mouse!'

‘No!' I shout.

I've been pushed into a corner. We're speaking at cross-purposes and I'm forced to say it. I look deeply into her confounded face.

‘Not good … ' I stammer, ‘ … for the mouse.'

I watch in utter humiliation as the expression on Nga's face changes. It changes from the earnest, confused face of someone unable to convince another person of something plainly obvious, to the face of someone who's just learnt that everything they've heard about foreigners is true, that they're face to face with a specimen of humanity so wretched, so pathetic, it's incomprehensible they've survived history.

‘I see,' she says eventually. The look on her face is more than I can take, but luckily at this point she nods, turns and takes her leave.

Recently, teaching my advanced class at UNCO, I described a friend as a good person who loves animals. The response is what prepared me for Nga's reaction. Once again, the robust Pham stood up to turn my world on its head: ‘In our culture, we do not like the kind of person who love animal. We think this person is weak. They care too much about animal and they forget about people. There are four-generation family in the Old Quarter who live in only sixteen square metre. Sixteen square metre only! If people worry about animal, who will worry about these family?'

Without a guide to Vietnamese culture, I'm learning everything the hard way. I turned up here with excess baggage I didn't know I was carrying. It consisted of all the ideologies and philosophies I took for granted after an adulthood steeped in a liberal, leftish bohemian culture.

For example, cultural relativism – the idea that all cultures, with the possible exception of my own, are equally good and worthy of respect. Now I meet head-on with Zac's unashamed ‘West is Best' philosophy and I start to wonder whether the truth may lie somewhere in the middle.

Or the idea that on some level, morality is universal – not on details like drug use and sexuality, but the deeper essentials we call ‘ethics', like being kind to strangers and animals. I thought ‘human rights' was a term all humans could relate to. But no, because here in Hanoi my advanced UNCO students have told me that ‘human rights' is seen as yet another hypocritical piece of Western sermonising, used by people who leave their own parents to rot in old-age homes, in order to denounce countries they don't like.

My ideas about the universality of ‘givens' are going up in flames. Even the fact that I held these ideas marks me as a foreigner. Other things that mark me as a foreigner include: the way I walk, gesture, dress and eat, the expressions I allow to roam across my face, the volume and style of my laughter, the fact that I have now cried in public, and my displays of concern for animals. These things are above and beyond the unchangeable fact of my whiteness.

I thought I was making energetic progress with this new culture. I now know how to make students laugh, which wins them over immediately, and have a basic verbal exchange with a local. I feel close to Nguyet. I'm learning to cook the food, drink the drinks. I've learnt a little slang and a couple of idioms. But increasingly I realise every step forward has been accompanied by a slide backwards. And with every back-slide I feel again that I'm living among aliens, and I find myself wondering whether ‘Right' and ‘True' can survive travel; which features of humanity are truly universal.

And I wonder how much longer I can withstand the alienation of being here. I don't know it, but I'm smack bang in the middle of culture shock, as described in that book Natassia was reading.

The young woman at my door greets me with tentative familiarity. Her two friends hang back anonymously in the darkness of the compound. It's early evening.

Maybe it's the poor lighting but I can't say I recognise her. Luckily, she's not phased when I ask her name.

‘I am Van Anh, your student, I bring you to Van Mieu University.' she tells me.

‘Van Anh! Of course! I'm so sorry!' I exclaim unenthusiastically, remembering the long ago visit to Van Mieu, which preceded a series of seemingly pointless visits from Van Anh and her assorted non-English speaking friends. ‘I haven't seen you in a long time.'

‘Do you make some tea now?' she asks hopefully. I stand aside as the trio enters and climb the stairs.

In the living room, they plump some cushions and position themselves on the floor around the low glass table. I serve them tea and wonder guiltily whether it would be impolite to eject them afterwards.

‘I hope you can help me,' says Van Anh, finally. ‘My friend have not very much money and want to learn English,' she gestures to the couple beside her, who haven't spoken so far. ‘I tell them you are very good teacher.'

I turn to them. ‘What are your names?' There's an embarrassed silence as they look to Van Anh for a translation. She tells me their names.

‘They are beginners,' she adds, unnecessarily.

I nod and the culture chasm yawns wide across my living room. Van Anh has turned up unannounced and uninvited, with strangers, and is now asking me a favour. Am I being flattered or exploited? I'm sure Natassia would know. Zac would just snigger and play with them like a cat with a grasshopper. Either way, they'd be liberated into certainty by making some kind of value judgement – Zac's, predictable, or Natassia's, well-considered. Why has the simple act of making a value judgement come to elude me?

I regard Van Anh dispassionately. She's told me she's a law student. She's not much larger than a twelve-year-old Western girl. Not all that much older, either. As a single Western woman, in my thirties, living away from my family, I'm certain that I must be as enigmatic to her as she is to me. She looks delicate and surpassingly innocent, yet, by my standards, she's displayed admirable chutzpah in turning up repeatedly at the house of a barely-known foreigner.

Does she like me? Can her feelings for me even be reduced to like or dislike? As a Westerner, I'm made of gold – a walking bankroll, I'm virtually a supernatural being walking in the midst of mortals. But she doesn't seem to be cowed. As a Westerner, I'm someone who bombed six different shades of daylight out of her parents' family homes, yet she doesn't seem to be vengeful. As a Westerner, I have dangerous degenerate values, yet she doesn't seem to be afraid.

Just persistent.

Perhaps, as a Westerner, I owe her something, and she knows it.

But I'm overwhelmingly uninterested in teaching these strangers English as an act of charity. Maybe I'd teach them piano, if they showed promise. But teaching adult beginners anything is a labour of love.

‘Maybe your friends can enrol at the UNCO school,' I tell her, diplomatically. ‘I teach there, and it is very cheap.'

‘OK,' she says, her disappointment mild, ‘but maybe tonight you can tell them some easy vocabulary.'

‘Sure' I sigh. It's a good compromise. A gain for them, an expiation for me. ‘Just let me get a book for you.' I rise and cross the landing to fetch a beginner's book I have in my bedroom, but I'm interrupted by the distinctive sound of a cheery, if flat, voice singing ‘one is the loneliest number' followed by a perfunctory knock on the downstairs door. It's Zac. A surprise visit.

When he spies the three Vietnamese sitting cross-legged around my table he bows nobly.

‘
Xin Chao
!' he smiles. ‘Dja-wan-me-ta-ger-rid-of-em-for-ya?' he adds, out of the corner of his mouth. I smile in their general direction.

‘Tricky sitch,' I mumble back in the same impenetrable style. ‘I was just about to lay on a free English lesson. Maybe you could help me and it'll be over sooner.'

‘Watch this!' he smirks at me, and beams again at my visitors. ‘I've come to take Miss Carolyn for dinner,' he says in toneless Vietnamese. ‘We would very much like you to join us.'

And it's on. Van Anh was too polite to refuse. Now, although I've already eaten, we're heading to the nearest open food stall and I'm left to ponder which activity is less pleasurable: teaching English to beginners at home, or watching Zac eat.

Zac leaves first, on his motorcycle. I lock up the house, then squeeze onto Van Anh's motorcycle behind Van Anh and one of the friends, whose names I've already forgotten. The other rides beside on a bicycle.

We've barely made it onto Nguyen Thai Hoc, the main street, when we see the gathering crowd. I spot Zac's bike sitting unattended at the kerb. Clearly he's jumped off in a hurry.

And there, at the centre of the kafuffle, is the fat man. He's holding onto a small, screaming Vietnamese man. The Vietnamese man is screaming because Zac has him by the hand and is bending his wrist backwards with some force.

There's a lot of shouting, much of it coming from a young woman a couple of metres away, but nobody seems game to counter-attack. Van Anh pops out the bike stand and jumps off. She has a brief conversation with a couple of people in the crowd and returns to the bike to wait for Zac.

Moments later he joins us, saying nothing. He looks unamused. We ride behind, but instead of heading to the large
com binh dan
on the next corner, Zac leads us into
Ngo Yen The
, a nearby lane.
Ngo Yen The
is home to a fly-blown market and a small local fish sauce factory, around which the air is so malodorous that even my landlady, Nga, avoids it. But it's late now and all the usual stall-owners have packed up and gone home.

With the exception of one.

Halfway along the street, where night-bugs gather around a flickering fluorescent light, a piece of meat crouches malevolently on a plate. Grainy, iridescent, it looks to have made considerable progress toward decomposition. Zac speaks to the unfriendly woman sitting nearby. She nods and uncovers some herbs in a pot beside her.

‘No, Zac,' I urge.

Van Anh turns around to me looking genuinely worried.

‘Your friend should not eat that,' she begs.

‘Zac! We're unanimous,' I tell him. ‘That meat could be the last thing you ever consume.'

‘Caz, do I tell you what to eat?' he replies testily.

So we sit, the five of us, on low plastic stools beside the gutter. Zac cleans his chopsticks on his T-shirt while the woman reheats the rice. My Vietnamese guests stare at Zac and say nothing.

‘So, what was that about?' I ask, as his dinner arrives. He seems completely unaffected by whatever happened only a moment ago.

‘Just another guy bashing his girlfriend,' he sighs, tucking into the meal. ‘I'm sick of it.'

‘How badly did you hurt him?'

‘Hard to say,' he says, adding drolly, ‘but I think he got my message.' He chews at the meat with great vigour. I watch him for signs of distaste but he evinces none, just keeps on eating.

Van Anh says something to her friends. Zac picks up on it and explains what the drama was about, in Vietnamese. But she nods firmly. She knows already. She spoke to the crowd.

‘His girlfriend. He say his girlfriend she tell lie, so he hit her,' she explains to me.

‘Oh! Arsehole.' I'm impressed at how quickly she managed to extract the gossip from the crowd. ‘Is it common for a Vietnamese man to hit the woman?' I ask her, hoping to finally incite a conversation on an interesting topic.

‘You're not getting her, Caz,' Zac puts in.

I raise an eyebrow at him. Then Van Anh speaks again, more forcefully.

‘He hit her because she tell lie.' Her expression indeed tells me she's trying to explain something I'm not getting.

‘She's telling you the woman deserved it because she lied,' Zac says in carefully neutral tones. I turn back to Van Anh astonished.

‘There you have it,' adds Zac. ‘A member of Hanoi's educated elite telling you a man has a right to bash a woman if she lies to him.'

Zac eats the remainder of the meal in silence. It will cause him no greater harm than a looser-than-usual bowel movement tomorrow. Only decades of genetically engineering pigeons could produce a creature more resistant to food-poisoning than Zac.