Single White Female in Hanoi (31 page)

In general, when I wake up on my birthday I like the following conditions to apply:

a)    A late hour, because I've slept in.

b)   A hangover, but not a nasty one, more the kind that makes me feel dreamy and lazy and carefree, because I had a magical evening the night before.

c)   Someone beside me. Someone warm and fragrant and smooth and lovely.

A frightful banging on my bedroom door wakes me at 8am. If this is someone delivering a birthday present, I don't want it. I stand in my nightdress and croak at the door, ‘
co ai day?
' ‘Who is it?' My head is pounding with a hangover. The voice that garbles back at me is that of Nguyet's live-in maid and my cleaner, Lien.

Less than a week ago she climbed onto my bed and shyly showed me fading colour photos of her son and daughter. Then she reached somewhere down the front of her pants and produced, for my inspection, the wad of money she was taking back to her village for them. She was flushed with excitement, happier than I'd seen her. Now she's back, early, and seems to have forgotten what day she was due to turn up.

I open the door, but I'm nowhere near awake yet so I rub her arm affectionately and clamber back into bed. But in a second she's on the bed too and she's making a lot of noise. I begin to wake up into a bad feeling. I open my eyes and look at Lien and the bad feeling intensifies. Her face is so close to mine that the only feature I can make out is her wild eyes. She looks crazed. She's shouting in a fast anguished Vietnamese that I can't follow a word of, and she's holding my shoulders. Then she backs off a little and her left hand flies out to grasp an imaginary stick with which she mimes hitting herself in the face.

I sit up in bed and focus on her for the first time. One eye is swollen and there's a vivid crimson stripe running up the left side of her face, into her hairline, darkest over her beautiful cheekbone. At her hairline, the skin is broken. I touch her cheek lightly with my finger.

‘Who?' I ask her in Vietnamese.

‘
Nguoi chong'
‘husband', she cries, over and over. This looks like the work of the legendary iron bar that wife-beating husbands often wield in Zac's tales.

Whatever happened at the village was so traumatic that the shock has survived the tortuously long road trip back from there, driven her half to madness. I encourage her to lie down beside me but she's charged with adrenaline and won't stay still. Eventually she runs out the door and is gone.

In the afternoon I cross
Nguyen Thai Hoc
to Nguyet's compound. Nguyet is out. Lien is sitting at the table with Nguyet's mother, drinking tea. Even in the gloom, the line of impact stands distinct across her forehead. She seems suddenly shy of me. The language barrier makes the situation more painful. While Nguyet's urbanised mother can often grasp my efforts, Lien speaks provincial Vietnamese and our verbal communication is close to negligible. I drink a cup of green tea with them in silence then I do what I came to do. I deliver an envelope with a month's wages in it and summon every word in my vocabulary in an effort to explain to Nguyet's mother the concept of paid sick leave. I hold Lien's hand, then leave before the translation begins to take effect.

There's a gang of friends already at the
Bia Hoi
when I arrive that evening.

‘Happy Birthday,' says Angela, a young American teacher from Global College. She hands me a gift-wrapped box and a beer. I unwrap the box layer by layer to reveal a red silk lantern. ‘Seriously, I wanted one of these,' I tell her.

‘This town is a gift-buyer's paradise!' she laughs.

I agree wholeheartedly. Birthdays are fun in Hanoi, an excuse to go gift-shopping.

My Linh soon arrives, shouting ‘
chi oi
!' She pulls up a plastic stool and places a package in front of me.

I unwrap the package and find a beautiful gold lacquered jewellery box. The lid depicts a pastoral scene with water buffalo. Inside, the box is lined with mirrors and red velvet. There's a note inside too. It reads: ‘Happy Birthday Carolyn. Our friendship is unlimited.' This line will come to be a source of ironic reflection – a quotable statement on the problematic nature of Viet-Western friendships, since after tonight, I will never see My Linh again.

Now Nguyet turns up, her long hair tied back, wearing simple clothes. Despite being at her house earlier today, I've barely had any contact with her at all this year, and already it's March. We embrace, in the Vietnamese way – minimising body contact. She hands me a small package and I introduce her to the others. Inside the rice paper wrapping I find a crepe scarf, delicate as Nguyet herself, in shades of lilac and white. It smells of cedarwood and fresh cotton.

‘How are you? What's happening? How's Binh?

‘It is good with Binh, although sometime he … jealous. He don't like when I am with my friends,' she tells me.

‘That's not good,' I say, concerned. Binh has always struck me as a gentle, supportive kind of guy. What else is up his sleeve? He'd seemed like a sexually modern kind of guy too until Nguyet disappointed me with the details.

‘He don't like if I wear make-up, or the dress that is too … you know …
sanh dieu.
'

‘Trendy,' I translate.

‘Yes. Trendy dress.' She pauses and I jump in.

‘Nguyet,' I start. ‘What about Lien? I saw her today and it was terrible.'

‘Lien.' Nguyet looks down and shakes her head for ages. I can see the effort of translating her thoughts into English is too daunting. She just sighs. ‘Thank you for giving her the money. You know, she cannot come back to your house.'

‘Huh?' I say, stricken. ‘Why not?'

‘Because after the wedding, she will come with me to live at Binh family house.'

‘Ah! God! It's March – you're getting married!' I exclaim. Maybe I never believed it until this moment, and now it seems less prudent than ever. Nguyet smiles, reaches into her handbag and withdraws an envelope with my name on it. Then she kisses me on both cheeks and takes her leave.

I read the invitation. The wedding is next Sunday – a mere eight days away. I'll have to attend alone. I sigh and miss Natassia.

Nguyet's wedding celebrations, I'm surprised to learn, are a few blocks away, at Hanoi Towers, a twin-tower modern building that's been central Hanoi's tallest building for most of its life. I can't imagine how Nguyet's family could afford to hire a room there.

The tower on the right is an air-conditioned luxury shopping mall for tourists and expats, with offices, a child-care centre and an American-style restaurant on higher floors. The other tower has function rooms. This is the one I enter, treading the confetti-strewn red carpet laid out into the entrance and beyond, into the teeming marble reception area. Vietnamese, shrouded in gold, gemstones and freshly-pressed clothes, are crowding around a table handing in gifts and envelopes of money. I stare in astonishment at the décor. There are red and gold banners hanging from the forty-foot high walls, and draped everywhere possible. There's red carpet laid up the symmetrical twin staircases.

I head up the stairs to the mezzanine, which is completely laid out with tables and chairs. Towards the main hall, the crowd weaving around the furniture becomes denser and a man can be heard shouting into a microphone. I shoulder my way though the throngs spilling out into the mezzanine. Inside the hall are countless immaculately-laid tables, with immaculate people seated around them.

Everyone is watching the stage, on which at least twenty people are lined up behind a preposterously large wedding cake.

I manage to identify Nguyet and Binh in the middle of the line up. They've been waxed and polished almost beyond recognition. Binh is in a black tuxedo, his lips blood-red, his androgynous face pure Madame Tussauds. His eyes seem too big, too glassy. Beside him is a human doll. The skin is dusted porcelain, the hair has been set into shining coils and plastered into place with product and glittering accessories. The little-girl's body has been fastened into a blinding white wedding dress with the hip-to-waist proportions of a wasp. While Binh stares glass-eyed into the haze of camera flashes, Nguyet blinks myopically around her and executes an endless series of tiny nods in all directions. Whether she can see much at all without her glasses is doubtful. This is weird. I've been to a few local weddings now and this one's in a class of its own. Either Nguyet's family has sold a priceless heirloom I didn't know about, or Binh's mob are rolling in it. There's an overall impression of wealth the likes of which I haven't seen in Hanoi. This looks to be the wedding of the year, and I sense the presence of some significant party men.

On the stage, Binh is now pouring champagne from a magnum into a multi-tiered wall of empty champagne glasses. The glasses have been arranged so that the overflow from each row fills the layer of glasses beneath it. The liquid has a familiar orange colour. No foreign stuff for this crowd.

Eventually the man stops shouting into the microphone and the crowd clap while Nguyet and Binh, their arms entwined, are forced to drink a glass each. I fear for Nguyet, who can't keep alcohol down at all, but the horrid stuff seems to find shelter somewhere in her modified waist.

Then the ceremony's over and the couple leaves the stage. They parade though the room of tables, nodding and shaking hands every two metres. When they reach me, I kiss Nguyen with infinite care on her painted cheek and shake Binh's hand.

‘I take you to your table,' Nguyet announces, leading me to the ‘foreigner' table. The only other Westerner seated there is a corpulent Italian man with thinning black hair. He shuns me altogether, preferring to talk to the Vietnamese at the table.

‘The Consul-General is my friend,' he's telling them, patting his chest with both hands.

For the remainder of my time at the reception, I sit patiently at the table, biting down on the acid juices of my own hunger, as the food is brought out. This is food that screams of means. To demonstrate how ‘no expenses spared' this event is, even the rice has some kind of meat in it. It's the only dish in which the animal that died for it has remained anonymous. In the centre of the table is a roast chicken whose legs have been sawn off and fed into its own cloaca. It looks like the victim of a Mafia killing. Beside it, some large fish are reclining side by side with small fish in their mouths.

The duck soup arrives for everyone around me. From the centre of the bowl, the duck's eyeless head is lording over the soup, like a statue in the middle of a pond. When the soup is finished, the bowls are collected and new dishes are laid out. The Italian guy gormandises his way across the table with omnipresent fingers and flared nostrils. Eventually he turns to me and asks, ‘Why you don't eat anything?'

This is a moment I've been dreading. In most respects, while I regard my aversion to meat as a kind of disability, most people are tolerant of it. But for some reason, In Hanoi at least, I've found Italians less so. They seem to take vegetarianism as a personal insult.

‘I'm sick' I whisper back, placing my hand on my stomach.

He nods relieved. ‘I thought you were going to say you were vegetarian.'

As soon as the last dish has been consumed, guests begin to rise and head back downstairs to leave. The celebrations are over. This at least, is consistent with other Vietnamese weddings I've attended. The running order has been something like this:

Guests file in, wearing their best clothes. They hand over an envelope containing 50,000 dong. They sit at trestle tables and eat themselves torpid, they chuck lesser morsels of meat and toothpicks on the floor, smoke the free cigarettes, then leave in droves. The whole process doesn't take much more than an hour. A realisation hits me. This is the first real Hanoi wedding I've been to. And it's middle class. Almost everyone else I know here comes from a village.

Back downstairs in the foyer, the newly-weds are in a photo shoot. I watch Nguyet and Binh closely. They're concentrating on being good hosts, admittedly, but I can't see the spark I'd expect to see if two of my Western friends got married.
Are they really in love? Is she going to be okay with this guy?
The thick coat of Vietnamese culture has knocked all signifiers into another language so that I can't read anything reliably from their behaviour.

‘Carolyn!' Nguyet cries, grabbing me and yanking me into the frame. She squeezes my hand as we pose for a few shots with her family. When it's over she hugs me.

‘Thank you for coming,' she whispers in my ear. I glance at her mother standing behind her. Recently I went shopping with Nguyet to pick out a gold neck-chain and earrings for her. Despite her new gold jewellery, she looks small amid the splendour. But she's beaming. Even Nguyet's father is wearing a smile. I wonder how much sadness at losing their daughter lurks behind the smiles. And I wonder how torn up Nguyet's heart is at the thought of moving out of her family home.

Nguyet seems to read my mind. She turns to me and says, emphatically ‘Carolyn, I am so happy!' I look deeply into her face and a sense of calm and relief washes over me. For there, under the veil of unguents and pigments, I think I can see real joy.