Single White Female in Hanoi (29 page)

I get home and call Vietnam Airlines. All planes to and from Laos are completely booked out for the next three weeks. ‘Please have pity,' I try. After a great deal of friendly persistence and some outright begging I manage to score the last seat on a return flight to Vientiane, capital of Laos, leaving the day before Tet. I sit back, pleased with myself, and notice a potted cumquat tree in my living room. With the ceramic pot, it must weigh about thirty kilos. There's no sign of how it got there.

‘Where are we going?' I ask the back of My Linh's head, which is wrapped in a fetching velour hat. It's dinner time and I'm hoping wherever it is, there'll be something I can eat.

‘I take you now meet my friend Huong,' she says into the headwind. ‘I tell her you vegetarian. She cook special for you.'

Although less than a kilometre from my place, it's a strange destination - a military compound surrounded by high walls. Armed guards let us in and we wind our way through a sort of enclosed village with narrow lanes.

Huong greets us delightedly at the door of a very expensive house. She's not like any Hanoian I've met so far. At forty, she's petit and sleek, with blow-dried, shoulder length hair and tight but classy clothes. Unfortunately, she only has a smattering of English.

Through My Linh, I learn that Huong works for Vietnam Airlines, a fact I will come to bemoan, and is divorced, a rarity. Her ex was high up in the army, and she's still allowed to live in opulent government housing at the barracks. She welcomes us into her house and leads us through the living room to the grand wooden dining table.

The table is laid out with dishes. There are several plates of iridescent pressed meat. Another plate has slices of processed cheese, still wrapped in plastic. There's a pile of sliced white sandwich bread, something I haven't seen here before, and haven't missed, and – is it a horrible coincidence or a Zeitgeist? – there are two bowls of Russian salad, one with chunks of ham, one without – for me. Huong has spent a great deal of money on these exotic foods, to accommodate the foreigner. I thank her.

I watch My Linh do her best, making a pressed meat and cheese sandwich. I know it's new territory for her. The only time I've seen her eat a bread roll, she cut it into strips and stirred it into her noodles, to be eaten with chopsticks. I lean forward and encourage her to remove the plastic wrapping on the cheese. With as much dignity as I can muster, I work my way through half a plate of Russian salad.

After the meal, Huong makes a phone call. She's fired up and wants to go raging.

‘Huong take us go dancing!' My Linh smiles. We raid Huong's collection of make-up and perfume then wrap up again and wheel the bikes out of the lock-up in front of the house. Huong owns a brand new Italian Vespa. My Linh and I follow her into town, all the way to Hanoi's most ostentatious nightclub, the New Century Discotheque. I've been here a couple of times, but not with locals.

Once inside the vast club, Huong knows where to go. We cut our way through the tourists, expats, prostitutes and newly affluent, drunk young Hanoians, through to the VIP area. Within minutes of arriving we're at a table of four well-dressed, middle-aged men, two of them in suits. I introduce myself to two guys from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and another who describes himself as ‘a businessman'. Then Huong introduces me to the fourth, a good-looking fortyish guy who eyes me straight away.

‘My friend, Mr Cuong'.

My Linh plants her lips in my ear and exhales a hot breath. ‘Mr Cuong, he is a famous actor,' she whispers.

Cuong orders glasses for his new friends, and soon I'm guzzling Hennessy V.S.O.P. cognac. I'm hardly halfway through the glass when Cuong flashes me a boyish grin and fills it again for me. There are two empty cognac bottles on the table, left there by the otherwise over-zealous waiters as a status symbol. I look around at the sozzled party men. I'm impressed by their ability to hold their liquor. I pick carefully at a plate of spectacular cut fruit, into which one of the men has ashed a cigarette, and gesture to all that I'm taking a walk.

I wander around the club, upstairs and down. The New Century looks like any nightclub. The patrons upstairs look down over a balcony onto the action. The light show is high-budget and there are some scantily clad dancers gyrating on the stage. Rumours have it that this place is a haunt of corrupt party cadres. I'm baffled as to why senior-level government officials would want to spend an evening listening to pounding music in a nightclub filled with younger and lesser mortals.

I have a bit of a dance, chat to a DJ, and learn, at the bar, that the cognac costs a mind-numbing US$150 a bottle. That's a total of $450 on alcohol alone at my table. When I get back to the table I see Huong and My Linh have left their brandy untouched. Huong looks relaxed, but My Linh looks distinctly out of place. Cuong buys me some flashing nightclub gimmicks from a passing vendor, tips him too, and smiles charismatically at me. He looks like a guy who could outlast a fruitfly.

When we say goodbye, Cuong kisses me on the cheek and discreetly fondles my buttocks. So I'm not surprised when, outside the nightclub, my two friends are thrilled to tell me Mr Cuong would like to ‘meet' me again. He did have a certain something, I reflect, despite the shady company he seems to keep. And for once the chemistry felt mutual. As a musician, I'm used to hanging around actors, we share vaguely similar careers. But I'm busy right now and he looked like trouble.

‘I'm flying to Laos in only four more days,' I remind the women. But Huong takes the news badly.

‘You no Hanoi in Tet!' she admonishes.

‘That's right, I'll be in Laos for Tet.'

The two women talk for a minute. Then Huong musters up all her English.

‘My Linh want to take you go her village for Tet.'

‘I'm sorry. I'd love to, but I can't. I'm booked to fly to Laos.'

‘Ah! Chi Carolyn. I know already,' says My Linh sadly, holding my arm and resting her head on my shoulder. ‘But I wish you can come! Just for one day to my village.'

‘I've already paid for the flight, and I can't change it,' I explain, with what I hope sounds like regret. My Linh translates.

‘No!' says Huong. ‘I can change the flight.'

‘Not possible, I'm afraid,' I counter with barely disguised relief. ‘No other seats left.'

It's unbelievable. Within 24 hours, Huong has pulled strings that shouldn't have existed. A call to Vietnam Airlines confirms that my flight has been moved back. I'm off to meet My Linh's family in the provinces amid Zac-fuelled visions of the family stuffing me with pork lard cakes and exhorting me to
tram phan tram
dog-lung
ruou
.

Before we head off, Huong announces a dinner for the three of us and Mr Cuong at the Vietnamese vegetarian restaurant Nguyet once brought me to.

Cuong is late, so we start ordering without him. It isn't easy. The waiters are lurking sullen and open-mouthed in front of the TV set, ignoring us until we shout at them. We have to order several times, and most of the orders arrive messed up in ways that smack of wilfulness. The staff are perfect exponents of the work ethic fostered by the combination of communism and nepotism.

When the food has all been laid out, there's about twice as much as we ordered, which seems to happen often when there's foreigners involved in the eating, and paying. Again and again, we look politely towards the door. No Cuong. We start to serve ourselves.

‘Mr Cuong – he always come late,' Huong informs us with unconvincing levity. The anticipation seems to have tainted the evening. We're all nervous and uncommunicative. The language barrier is tiring me tonight and I'm starting to rue this ham-fisted piece of match-making. The evening is winding down before I come to the realisation we've been stood up.

But no. There's a sudden whoosh of excitement in the restaurant. Cuong is making his entrance. The staff stare in amazement and spring into gushing servility. Although clearly able to walk unassisted, Cuong is helped to our table and gently seated beside Huong. A waiter hands him a bowl and a cup and bows out backwards.

The star rises and kisses each of us on the cheek, grins guiltily at me, and starts serving himself from the dishes on the table.

‘Very hungry!' he exclaims to me, in Vietnamese. He talks to the women and they explain to me that he's rushed here from a job.

‘You're a busy man,' I observe dryly. But to my surprise he turns to Huong for help.

‘He cannot speak English,' My Linh explains.

‘Oh. Great,' I say dully. ‘Thanks for telling me.'

We sit in silence and watch Cuong eat. He's combined the steamed rice, tempura vegetables and soup into one bowl and is slurping it from a spoon, barely pausing to breathe. His head bows low to the table. In his other hand hangs a pair of chopsticks, ready to tackle any big bits. Cuong has the social conscience of a locust. He finishes up pretty much everything on the table.

And when he's finished, he apologises, and with grand charm kisses each of us again. Then he grabs his scarf from the waiter and tears out the door. Cuong has left the building. And the bill, as it happens. I look at Huong expectantly.

‘I think he must go to his wife now!' she whispers knowingly.

‘He's married. Great,' I say in the same tone. ‘Thanks for telling me'.

‘But he want to see you again.'

It's the last I see of Cuong. Except on the big screen. To my great amusement, there he is in a well-known Tran Anh Hung film, playing a philandering husband. It's uncanny how convincing he is.

Sunday morning arrives, brutally cold, and with it comes My Linh, an hour earlier than I expected. She watches me eat breakfast and get dressed. Twenty minutes later we're riding out of the compound.

‘So, My Linh,' I shout. ‘We come back tonight, yeah?' I feel the brakes go on slightly.

‘Oh,
chi
, please, we stay with my family tonight!' she says. ‘Come back tomorrow.'

I protest for a minute, but the truth is, I packed my toothbrush and a change of clothes as a precaution, so it's no big deal.

‘In the morning.' I say authoritatively. ‘I have two piano students tomorrow afternoon.'

‘Yes, okay. Don't worry.'

The traffic out of Hanoi is predictably wheel-to-wheel. It takes us about fifteen minutes just to get onto Kim Ma, which is barely a kilometre west of my place. As we turn into Kim Ma I notice a large pink carcass, soft and floppy, bouncing around up ahead. We gain on it. It's a particularly horrible carcass, fully skinned, tied to the back of a Chinese bicycle battling its way through the traffic. In a land where modesty prevails, I'd expect it to be covered up.

Finally we draw level and I observe that the pig has died in an emaciated state judging by the lack of fat under the ribcage. Then I see the tail, the unmistakeable tail.

‘My Linh!
Cho, cho
It's a dog!'

‘Yes,
con cho
,' she says. She nods round at me and her jaw is set in a firm line. Even she seems repulsed. We swerve a little to avoid physical contact with the overhanging cargo. By the look of it, the carcass belonged, only hours ago, to a live, fully-grown Alsatian.

As we pass the bicycle I check out the driver. A young guy in ragged clothing with a handsome, angular face. His expression is bland, uncomprehending, as I shout out: ‘
Da man qua!
(inhumane!). He's on his way home with his Tet surprise.

‘Couldn't he just get a cumquat tree?'

‘He is poor. Maybe the dog more cheap.'

But the gelatinous dog's body seems inauspicious to me. I'm being taken off for a priceless cultural experience, I should be steeped in gratitude. But the lop-sided line of my mouth reflects the twisted gratitude I suffer when someone does me a favour that I didn't ask for, and didn't really want.

It's nearly an hour before we make the city outskirts and hit the open road.

‘How far to your village?' I ask.

‘My village far from here only one hundred and fifty kilometre,' My Linh replies reassuringly. I nearly fall of the back of the bike.

‘What! You said your village was close to Hanoi.'

‘Yes. Travel only three hour.'

Uncomfortably cold, my trepidations deepening by the minute, I start to wonder whether I'll be able to speak English to anyone else when we get there. As if she can read my mind, My Linh pipes up again.

‘Don't worry! My family very kind, and my brother and sister can speak English.'

‘Really? That's good news My Linh.'

‘Don't worry
chi
! Soon we will arrive.'

I take this last remark with a grain of salt. With the possible exception of water buffalo-drawn carts, My Linh is the slowest thing on the road. I calculate that our ground speed of around thirty kilometres an hour will get us there in closer to five hours.

I pass time trying to get My Linh to tell me whether we're travelling north, south, east, or west. I ask her in English and in Vietnamese. I ask her in many different ways. I draw maps with my finger on her back. But the answer is the same. A pointing finger.

‘It is this way.'

It seems to me Vietnamese conceptualise geography differently to Westerners, because they rarely know the answer to this question.

Beyond the paddy belt, we pass though poor villages and poorer ones. My Linh teaches me to make the distinction based on how much green is visible. Paradoxically, the poorest villages have the most concrete – it's the grass and trees they can't afford. But in between villages, we pass verdant paddy fields with limestone karsts erupting out of them like jagged teeth. I marvel, as I always do outside Hanoi, at how unique, how fecund, and how staggeringly beautiful the northern Vietnamese landscape is.

At the four hour mark we sing karaoke favourites to take our minds off the freezing wind and cramping buttocks. At the five hour mark we lapse into silence.

Nearly six hours into the trip, we enter Thanh Hoa Province.

‘My Linh,' I say, finally. ‘Tell me, why do you drive so slow?'

‘Ah. I go slowly because I think you are tired,' she replies.

By the time we arrive at the house, I have to be helped off the back of the bike. The lower half of my body has fused into an excruciating ‘pillion posture', a yoga position with nothing whatsoever to offer. I give the friendliest salutations I can muster to the sea of excited faces dancing in front of me and then, completely disoriented and frozen rigid, I'm shown to the bed – a wooden board in one corner of the sole room in the house.

Someone covers me gently with a blanket, although there is no pillow. One of My Linh's sisters, who's a doctor, takes my pulse and brings me a hot sugary drink. But it's a lost cause – I shake like a chihuahua for about fifteen minutes, then I'm down for the count.

At some point in the afternoon I wake up long enough to meet the family and discover two things. They're really nice. They don't speak English. I notice it's dark outside and sink back into sleep.

Some time later, My Linh and a sister climb into the bed on either side of me. They each put an arm over me and fall asleep. I surface intermittently during the night, whenever truck horns doppler along the main road 30 metres away, or I need to turn over on the hard wood. Towards dawn there's an unbelievable cacophony of chickens. Half asleep I turn to My Linh.

‘The chickens. Will they stop? Will the chickens stop?' She smiles a bit in reply and keeps on sleeping. She looks extremely happy.

To my enormous relief, I wake later in the morning feeling human. It's time to properly meet the family.

The four children are all in their twenties. Three girls, then a boy, with My Linh the second-born. It's a rare family reunion, and the house is full of laughter and antics. I hear My Linh tell her family that I'm a teacher, a journalist and a musician and that I am very intelligent. She seems very proud to have brought me home.

The sisters are Doan, the doctor, and Lien – both lively and vivacious. I especially connect with My Linh's 21-year-old brother Thanh. He's playful, considerate and astonishingly affectionate, with a mischievous sense of humour that spans the culture gap. Of the siblings, Thanh has the most English – he's been learning for two years at university.

‘I … study … university – contraction,' he explains solemnly. I teach him to pronounce the very tricky ‘construction'. I know from My Linh that Thanh is studying construction engineering. We try to converse but it's very difficult, and we just end up laughing.

‘Your Vietnamese same my English,' he observes. ‘
Bang
– equal.' Sadly, it's true. We've both got maybe a couple of hundred words of vocabulary, and little knowledge of how to glue it together into sense.

My Linh's father, improbably, is sixty. He doesn't have a grey hair to show for it and has the energy and humour of a far younger man. But Mum, who does look sixty, doesn't make so many appearances. She's too tired from working at the market, where she sells sundry items, and keeping the house together. While everyone's running around laughing, she's working, tireless and uncomplaining, or lying down, exhausted.

Over the course of the next two hours there are five or six visitors, turning up singly or in groups. They seem to have been foretold there'd be a foreigner in the house. I hear My Linh tell them I'm a teacher, a journalist and a musician and that I'm very intelligent. They stare at me. By the third time through, the description has begun to make me feel lonely. I've been reduced and flattened into a kind of caricature.

The house is a brick hut with a pitched bamboo roof, set on old and uneven cement. The windows have fat steel bars but no glass. The doorway is enormous, and the door stays open while we're in the house. There's no heating of any kind. The floor is swept cement, no rugs. There are no soft surfaces anywhere – a phenomenon that seems to sum up the country and explain the people – just a few hardwood chairs and benches and two wooden beds.

Outside is a small concrete yard with a well from which all water is drawn, around which we clean our teeth in the morning. On the far side is a wooden shed where the father shares a bed with Thanh. Adjacent to this is an outdoor undercover kitchen. The toilet, out past the chickens, whose numbers will dwindle sharply over my time in the village, is mercifully a proper porcelain squat toilet. Other village dwellings simply have a cement space in the yard, no holes, no plumbing, with a partial brick wall for privacy. When finished, the user simply pours water over the area until whatever was there has been dispersed.

All up, it's basic, but mid-range – this is a village with grass, trees and electricity. Hence the omnipresent sound of the TV in the house.

At breakfast Doan unrolls a bamboo mat onto the cement floor beneath the TV. Humans and food go on it. Surreptitiously, I scan the room for a cushion. Fruitless. I sit with my legs crossed like the rest of the family and smile sweetly. My Linh has cooked me a special tofu and tomato dish. It's tasty and I'm grateful.

After breakfast I remind My Linh that we have to leave immediately. She stares back at me, her face a mask of sorrow.

‘But, tonight is Tet,' she whispers.

‘Yes, and you promised to take me home now. I have two piano students this afternoon.' My Linh looks grief-stricken. ‘Tet in Hanoi looks very interesting,' I add brightly. “Fireworks at Hoan Kiem Lake.' The truth is I'm now rather looking forward to joining in the lakeside celebrations.

There's a long, awful silence.

‘Ok,' she says finally. ‘I will take you home. But tonight I must stay with you because I will be very sad if I am not with my family at Tet. Never before this happen.' Her voice is breaking and I realise she's deeply upset. I have to let it go. I can call my students when I get home, if I ever get home, and apologise.

Once we've established that I'm staying, My Linh becomes voluble and excited again, she has a big day planned.

‘First, I give you a bath and wash your hair,' she announces. The idea of a hot bath cheers me, until I realise the house has no bath, indeed, no bathroom. Just some metal buckets that can be filled with water and heated on a fire, then taken to an area beside the well that has a low brick wall for privacy. It's about ten degrees, with a humidity that precludes dryness, and the fact is I'm just not evolved for crouching naked outdoors in these kinds of temperatures.

So Lien takes me by motorcycle into town, where a woman washes my hair with cheap shampoo by the side of the street in cold water. There's no conditioner. Even the hair-dryer seems set on ‘cold blast'. My nose runs, my eyes water. When it's all over, I put my warm hat back on, ungratefully squashing the lank hair back into a hat shape.

We jump back on the bike and pull out. My disposition, I fear, is a few shades short of the Tetly bonhomie it should be.

Fifty metres later I hear a crashing noise and watch a young girl go flying from her bicycle into the gutter, landing hard. The culprit is a young boy who has flown past and knocked her off. I watch his face as we overtake him. He looks back at the scene a couple of times, then grins and keeps riding. I ask Lien to stop the bike, and I jump off. I stand in the middle of the road, forcing him to stop, and I yell at him in a puree of Vietnamese and English. The swearwords are in English. I order him to turn around and apologise. Shocked into obedience, he does this. By now, the usual mob of staring villagers has gathered around the new scene. None of them showed much interest in the previous scene.

For the rest of the day, My Linh takes me visiting. She parades me from pillar to post, until I feel we've left no threshold uncrossed.

‘It's good luck to have foreigner in the house on the day before Tet,' My Linh reveals to me at one point.

At each house the routine is the same. I sit, unoccupied, under the watchful eye of Uncle Ho, who looks down from his obligatory altar, while endless cups of green tea are poured and rapid-fire Vietnamese is exchanged. At each abode, My Linh boastfully expounds my many forms of employment and virtues to the host. ‘She is a teacher, a journalist and a musician, and she is very intelligent.' Since the incident in the village main street this morning, the epithet of my wondrousness now includes how I'm a very kind person. The story of the foreigner who upbraided the naughty boy will be repeated endlessly in Vietnamese today, and possibly spread throughout the village, with unknown elaborations.

The singing of my praises out of the way, My Linh then seems to ask and answer the same series of mundane questions about the family, before we move on to the next hauntingly familiar scene. By the third or fourth house-call, my tolerance for being a lumbering good-luck charm is starting to wear thin. What bothers me most is the incuriousness. These villagers have possibly never met a foreigner before, least of all had one in their house drinking tea, accompanied by a translator. Yet any effort at communication will be the same pointless semi-rhetorical question each time:

‘You like Vietnam?'

My mood veers downhill. I begin to suspect these villagers have nothing more to teach me than a few new superstitions. The whole ritual strikes me as a joyless, obligation-driven chore. I can't understand how My Linh can be enthusiastic about riding hundreds of kilometres through skin-numbing cold to spend a day making small talk in a pitiable village full of people who wouldn't have anything to say if Confucius himself sat down with a translator.