Single White Female in Hanoi (28 page)

The only thing standing between me and my ten o clock class at Global is the last twenty five metres of my street.

I rinse the last smear of breakfast omelette from my plate and stare ruefully at the wall above the sink. Twenty five metres of lurching horror. Last night's indiscretion would feel a lot more like a dream if it hadn't left me with a case of galloping agoraphobia. I clean my teeth, don my coat. It all just seems like such poor luck.

But at the end of the street I find Oanh completely surrounded by customers as she ladles out
pho
. I wait flinchingly for one of her customers to spot me and grab her, finger pointed in my direction, screaming ‘there she is!' in Vietnamese. But no one even seems to notice me. There's no sign of Quan.

After the class I stop by Nguyet's place. Her wordless father greets me at the door with a warm smile and I hold his arm affectionately. Nguyet is just finishing with a young piano student.

I enter the music room and sit down. The little girl turns around on the stool and stares at me with undisguised shock. A foreigner in the room! I feel like a two-metre-tall golem. The student exclaims something and Nguyet reprimands her, turns and apologises to me. The back of my neck prickles again with paranoia.

When I tell Nguyet the Quan story she grips my wrist and shakes her head.

‘You must move from your house!' She gets up and paces the living room, thinking. ‘Ok,' she says finally. ‘Tomorrow I will buy
pho
and I will talk to Oanh. Try to learn her emotion. Maybe she don't know.' Nguyet has eaten
pho
at Oanh's stall several mornings a week for years, and I trust her not to act like a bumbling undercover agent. I nod gratefully.

But when I pass their room the next day, I know my time has come. Oanh is sitting out the front with the rat-faced hairdresser from next door. I concentrate on walking normally, breathing through my nose. Biting my lower lip, I glance at her and our eyes make contact. She waves at me, grinning.

‘
Xin Chao em
!'

I nod and scurry off, wracked with a new anxiety. It was the politest possible greeting.
What does this mean?

Night falls and it's the coldest night so far. I wear a hat and scarf even in the house. Nguyet comes to pick me up. I need to change piles of Vietnamese dong into dollars. Most of the people I've asked tell me it's illegal and risky, but Nguyet says she knows a place way across town where it's safe. I don't understand this, but I'm not complaining.

‘This morning I talk to Oanh. She normal, happy,' Nguyet smiles at me. ‘I think she don't know.'

‘Did you see Quan?' I ask her.

‘Yes. He was there also. Fine. I think everything okay.' A grin dimples her round cheeks. ‘Maybe he think he dream only!' She starts giggling. ‘He remember and think – too incredible! I must be dream!' I giggle too. Quan must be pondering the odds of his memory being plausible. It would be roughly on a par with being kidnapped by aliens. But the memory of his daughter sobers me again.

I'll never learn for sure what Oanh thinks. From now on, she'll not only be friendly – she'll be extra-friendly, although her girlfriends will glare at me. I'll be forced to consider Zac's unpalatable hypothesis.

‘I suspect she can't believe anyone in their right minds would want to fuck her husband for free, least of all a rich, attractive Westerner.'

For Oanh, I suspect I've become a badge of honour. But from this day, whenever possible, she'll be my
xe om
driver. Quan will begin to recede.

Nguyet and I head out into the night and from the bike, the cold air bites at us like a battalion of bulldog clips. It's the bone-numbing wind of legend. I put my frozen hands into Nguyet's pockets and press my face into her back for protection from the wind. Five more days till Sydney. My mind is a maelstrom of emotions – affection for Hanoi, excitement about seeing my friends and family, and unease about how it will feel to be back in the first world, which I can no longer imagine.

We arrive and I discover we're at a government bank. We're directed by an official down a small corridor into the back of the building. Money counting machines hammer away noisily around us. Nguyet gets me to wait three metres away while she hands my brick of Vietnamese Dong to a uniformed cashier who counts it and hands her a receipt. A small man directs us to a small room and we're told to wait. I find the wait a bit nerve-wracking. My experiences so far in Vietnam, particularly whenever trying to renew my three-month visa, have not disposed me to trust officials. Eventually we're called to a different cashier and collect the neatly bundled dollars. The exchange rate is surprisingly high.

Nguyet takes me home, and it's not until we're at the compound gate that she finally clears her throat, and makes the announcement.

‘Carolyn! Me and Binh, we get married in March.' I hug her delightedly. I have no idea her marriage will spell the decline of our friendship.

Shopping List 4 Oz

Ear plugs (lots)

Dental floss

Tampons

Tin opener

Potato peeler

Lip balm

Beroccas

Blue-tak

Hot water bottles (lots)

I add Violet Crumble and tea-tree oil, following requests from friends.

On my last night in Hanoi, Aussie Bill invites me to a massive
Bia Hoi
across town with Giang and his wife, Han. Giang and Han are journalists who work with Bill at his new job, and have become friends. I can see why immediately. They're light-hearted and well-educated, with that appreciation of irony that comes with having spent time overseas. I sense I'll be able to pick up new cultural knowledge tonight.

We battle the gut-churning stench of cooking dog on the way in. In his first revelation as cultural ambassador, Giang explains to me that it's the
Mam tom
sauce that goes on dog that's the main culprit.
Mam tom
is a creation cooked up from rotted shrimp. I've met many Westerners now who boast they've eaten dog, but not one who could say they enjoyed it. Yet it's fair to say that Hanoians, in general, are obsessed with it. Groups of young men ride in convoy to dog restaurant villages on the outskirts of the city at the start of each lunar month. It's a mateship ritual with quasi-religious dimensions. Even the delicate female reporters at the newspaper admit they like to eat dog meat. One reporter, although not one renowned for producing reliable information, has told me: ‘Dog meat is the favourite food of the Hanoi people.'

‘Do you eat dog?' I ask Giang. He shakes his head and screws up his nose. ‘I cannot tolerate the smell,' he tells me. Han agrees with him.

We sit at a long table in the beer hall and beer and peanuts arrive immediately. I peer around and see the place is rather up-market. There are several women sitting at tables among the men, and even a Western woman like me barely rates a stare. It's a sign of social changes taking place now in Hanoi, Giang explains.

But the only
ruou
available here is snake, gecko or goat's ball. I break my own beer-drinking record and down two beers. Giang sinks three and goes red in the face. He spends time writing down plenty of new vocabulary for me in my note book, then we start singing songs from our childhoods. Finally we decide he should teach me a traditional Vietnamese song. He chooses one and writes down the lyrics in my note book. It's sung by a woman to her man.

Bang long di anh

Ve voi que em

Mot cu lao xanh

Mot dong song xanh
.

Agree to go with me

Back to my village

An island of green

In a blue stream
.

We sing it over and over until it's engraved forever on my memory. A beautiful, haunting melody. After the beers I loosen up and order the gecko
ruou
. By the time we leave we're all a bit wobbly on the motorcycles. The melody and its meaning repeat over and over in my head; ‘An island of green in a blue stream.' As the icy, coal-soaked wind snaps at my ears I think of the cobalt blue of the Pacific, the clean air and the open spaces, the fresh smell of a rainforest. My island of green in a blue stream, that's how Australia feels to me right now.

The Vietnamese have a curiously familiar metaphor to express happiness. ‘
Bay tren chin tang may
' – ‘flying on nine floors of cloud.' It's especially apt as I descend into Hanoi, because I'm filled with a happy anticipation undampened by the nine storeys of dense, featureless cloud between the plane and the runway.

But the view from the airport bus window is not the lovable mayhem of my apparently embroidered recollections. I study the grey, teeming streets in dismay. I see thin people, I see poor people, above all, I see cold people.

Hanoi looks just like a third world country in the throes of winter.

I ring Zac as soon as I get home. He's been back from Canberra for a week and sounds relieved to hear from me.

‘How's the neighbourhood, no dramas?' I ask him.

‘Big drama,' he says.

‘What kind of drama?'

‘This kind,' he replies and takes a deep breath. Down the phone line comes a spine-chilling series of squeals followed by an awful gurgling, retching noise.

‘Poltergeist?' I suggest.

‘Try again.'

‘I give up,' I say, eventually.

‘That's the sound I now wake up to at six every morning,' he explains. ‘The sound of live, adult pigs being hung upside down and having their throats cut. The sound of fresh hot blood splashing into plastic buckets.' He lapses into a disgusted silence.

‘How come?'

‘The next door neighbours. They've opened an abattoir in the front of their house.'

I try to make a sympathetic noise but I fail and instead, a horrible snigger escapes me. ‘How could this happen to you, of all people?' I manage.

‘Yes,' Zac sighs drolly. ‘The irony isn't entirely lost on me.'

I ring Kiwi Alexa. She tells me about the New Year's Eve party I missed at Justin's new house and drills me on how it felt to be back in the first world.

‘Was it weird?'

I think about it for a while.

‘To be honest, no,' I tell her. ‘When I was in Sydney, everything just felt normal. Hanoi sort of … fell out the bottom of my mind. The two places are so different, they're … ' I reach for the right words, ‘mutually unimaginable. Like, when I was in Sydney and tried to imagine Hanoi, my mind just hit a blank wall.'

‘That sounds disappointing,' she says, with feeling. ‘I must remember to take more photos.'

Then I get a phone call from an expat wanting piano lessons for her daughter. Someone gave her my number and told her I teach. She has a friend too, who wants lessons. By the end of the day, I have two piano students.

The next day I start dispensing the hot water bottles. I fill the first one with boiling water and take it down to
Ba Gia
. She takes it gratefully, although it's clear she has no idea what it is.

‘Hot water. Can use many time,' I try in my foreigner Vietnamese. ‘From Australia.'

She flashes her black teeth at me benevolently and puts the hot water bottle on the shelf near the tea set. I fill the next one, wrap it in a small blanket, and take it down to the
Nam Bo
, praying to find Hien alive. My last efforts to save her, with help from the Hanoi Family Clinic, like the others, showed great promise, then melted away to nothing. This was just before my return to Sydney.

She is alive, but on the pavement again, asleep inside a pile of cardboard boxes. She looks sicker than ever, her skin dry and mottled. The
Nam Bo
's marble doorway is now a stall for
Banh Chung
, the traditional Tet cake. The blanket I gave her is nowhere to be seen. One of her homeless friends sees me and insists on waking her. She wakes up painfully, but when she sees me her eyes light up.

Hien takes the gift solemnly, holds it to her chest and grins in delight at the warmth. I try to explain the usage and she nods. As always, I slip her money. Guilt money.

When I ring UNCO for some teaching shifts, the usually friendly Yen sounds a little distant.

‘I'm sorry. This term there are no more class for you. Now Mr Zac teach many class. I'm sorry.'

I've been undercut. I hang up and reflect that it's my own stupid fault. I handed them Zac on a platter. I loyally sung his praises, testified to his fake qualifications, and added that he'd work for less money than me.

My first day back at NER, the enormous room is bitterly cold. Opposite me Kiwi Anthony is freshly returned from New Zealand and wearing a pink woollen beanie. Charlie is sporting a Russian-style fur hat, complete with pendulous earflaps. I'm wearing a vivid purple creation that combines a bonnet and a scarf into one jazzy knitted unit. The foreigner enclave must look like the mad hatter's tea party but no one's complained. As foreigners, we're expected to be peculiar. Intermittently I blow into my hands to warm them so I can type faster.

At the first coffee break I find Charlie.

‘Where's Frank? Shouldn't he still be here?'

‘Ahhh, er.' Charlie can't twirl his hair in the hat so he twists the earflaps. ‘Frank had some more, er, trouble … ' He sucks air through his teeth.

‘Did he go back to Saigon early?'

‘Well, actually, we had to … sort of … ship him back to the UK.'

‘Shit!'

‘Yeah. He was coming into work saying guys from the Ministry of Internal Affairs were tailing him. Then he got more and more paranoid until he wouldn't leave the hotel.'

‘Poor Frank.'

‘Yeah,' Charlie looks grave. He's a compassionate guy.

But there's a distinct holiday atmosphere in the office and not much copy in. Most of the Vietnamese staff are chatting on the phone or peeling fruit. One exception is the old scary guy with the Darth Vader voice who inhabits the other side of the vast room and never speaks to foreigners. He's settled himself in a comfortable chair and tuned the massive TV set to party broadcasts, which blare, at phenomenal volume, across the room.

Nam the patriotic stooge glances up approvingly. It's been confirmed by Kiwi Anthony that Nam will run as a candidate in the 11
^th
National Assembly election, in May.

Today, Nam's submitted a little piece on ‘land fever', detailing the recent explosion in real estate prices around Hanoi. Perhaps inspired, he's even suggested a headline for it.

‘You can try to keep my headline?' he asks me hopefully.

‘I'll do what I can,' I assure him, glancing at the story. It's headed
:
Hey Comes a land bubble!

About mid-morning the other side of the room explodes with a sudden round of cheering. I look behind me in time to see Khanh the photographer and another Vietnamese employee kicking a dying rat soccer-style down the aisle, towards the door.

‘Ah yes, back in Hanoi,' says Anthony crisply.

But it's a slightly different Hanoi. We're now on the final rundown to Tet and something potent is building up. Tet dwarfs all other events on the Vietnamese calendar, because it's like Christmas and New Year's Eve rolled into one; New Year's Eve because it is, literally, a New Year celebration, albeit a lunar one, and Christmas, because it's a kind of commercial festival too, and one with holy significance. Chickens are sacrificed; altars are cleaned and freshly stocked. This year Tet falls quite late on the Roman calendar, in February.

On the streets, under the low ceiling of cloud and the new red and gold banners, money is flying hand over fist as people spend, spend, spend. They're squandering their entire year's savings, putting an actual bulge in the Consumer Price Index. I sub a story revealing that the banks have run out of money. ‘Banks are nervously eyeing each others' dong … ' it begins.

The streets are almost impassable. Exhaust fumes from the mostly stationary bikes have turned the biting air blue. The horns are deafening. Most progress takes place with feet on the ground on either side of the bike,
a la
Flintstones. Every second bike has a stout cumquat tree, fully laden with fruit, tied onto the back, so that the misty streetscape seems to be studded with bright orange baubles. Aussie Bill tells me the trees cost a month's wages for most, but every home must have one.

Lunchtime, sitting at the canteen, I watch a woman saunter past carrying two clucking upside-down ducks. I follow with my eyes as she turns the corner, towards the NER building. I imagine the ducks are headed upstairs, where ‘Malcolm' and his closest cronies work.

Meanwhile, where round mooncakes filled the streets for the autumn moon festival, the square, banana-leaf-wrapped
banh chung
now reigns.
Banh Chung
has a famous history. According to legend, the recipe was given in a dream by a genie to a prince, and with it, he wooed his father into selecting him, above his twenty-one brothers, as heir to the throne.

It's very poetic, but I know better than to try one. And it's not just that I'm vegetarian. Like the
mam tom
sauce, made from rotted shrimp,
banh chung
appears to be a delicacy appreciated only by the Vietnamese. Described by Vietnamese friends, it sounds relatively inoffensive; a boiled rice cake filled with green bean paste and pork, but long-term expats give it the thumbs down. To my astonishment, even Zac won't eat
banh chung
.

‘It's like biting into a chunk of lard,' he grimaces. ‘The whole think is just solid pig fat, and it's not even flavoured or anything. I just don't get it.'

‘It
does
explain the recent proliferation of pigs,' I point out.

Halfway through the month, Anthony announces that a small village in Ha Tay province has just managed to get into the Guinness Book of Records by making the largest ever
Banh Chung
.

‘Check this out!' He summarises from the press release. ‘It weighs 1.4 tonnes and took 50 chefs eight hours to make. It took 100 kilograms of pork. And it's under armed guard.'

Cute, smart, likeable, Anthony is a mine of information. He's spent his twenties in Hanoi, and is admired and respected by expats and Vietnamese alike. But although the guy himself is scrupulously private to the point of mysterious, he seems to know everything before anyone else gets the faintest wind of it. He's put this partly to use by publishing a little ‘What's on' guide to Hanoi, complete with articles by expats, quizzes and competitions. Increasingly I know the people and places that get a mention. The guide makes me feel more connected to my new city, gives me hope that one day I can make Hanoi my town. When I tell Anthony this, he nods compassionately.

‘When Hanoi feels like your town, it's time to leave,' he replies.

‘You're still here,' I observe.

‘Yep,' he shoots back. ‘I guess I left it too late.'

With Tet looming, Anthony's got an excursion planned.

‘My liver's not up to another year of
tran pham tran
,' he explains. ‘I'm off to Laos.'

Tram phan tram
literally means ‘a hundred per cent', but its common usage is as an exhortation to scull a hundred per cent of whatever's in front of you. It's usually just a glass of sudsy beer, but around Tet this gets replaced by the more grievous local moonshine –
ruou
. It may or may not contain traces of snake, or bear foetus, but it's flammable, and liable to cause a gruesome hangover. When it comes to macho drinking feats, the Vietnamese have a proud tradition, and it's extra points if they can induct a foreigner. Over Tet, Anthony assures me, there's no escape from a week, at least, of constant biliousness.

Within a few days of this news, the chilling cry of ‘
tran pham tran
' can be heard from all corners of the NER office. The atmosphere becomes rowdier and productivity grinds to a halt. ‘Malcolm' himself appears from upstairs, with his grotesque toady, the sinister Mr. Loan, in tow. He plods the length of the room nodding and patting the Vietnamese reporters on the back. He looks like a Vietnamese version of Idi Amin.

I'm force fed a glass of mushroom
ruou
in the desktop publishing room, and repeatedly turn down invitations to
tram phan tram
with Khanh the photographer. This is because I haven't failed to notice the receding level of liquid in his jar of snake penises.

Next, Zac announces he's getting out for Tet. He intends to ride his Minsk to the Laos border. He offers to take me with him. I decline.

Then Alexa says she's heading to the mountains in the north for Tet, on the advice of long-term expat friends. Georgia, the young American teacher at Global informs me she's going overland to Laos too. Then Charlie and some of the crowd at the
Bia Hoi
announce a Tet expedition to Bangkok.

Finally, I crack. It's not the fear of
ruou
. It's the weather. And it's not just the bitter, relentless cold and rain, it's the accompanying nine storeys of cloud. I haven't seen sunlight since I returned. Tet's barely more than a week away, and for the locals, a nuclear winter couldn't dent the delirium of anticipation. But I don't have Tet to buoy me. Another week of this and I feel certain I'll develop SAD, the depressive condition caused by sun deprivation. It's the microclimate at work again. All around us, in every direction, even north, are patches of sun-drenched land.