Single White Female in Hanoi (35 page)

My last night in Hanoi is warm and velvety. Alexa and I turn up together with two Vietnamese friends, Duc and Nhung, who are fellow choristers. We're all dressed in black for the occasion, Duc in a three-piece suit. We park our motorcycles near the Hilton Hanoi Opera Hotel and marvel at the edifice that is the Hanoi Opera House – a building of great political significance, having been the scene of a seminal 1945 Viet Minh insurrection against the French and the Japanese; a building US writer Ron Gluckman describes as ‘the undeniable architectural treasure of all French Indochine'.

The Opera House sits grandly at a large intersection, as though all roads lead to it, a couple of blocks southeast of Hoan Kiem Lake. It's an austere, neo-classical construction with a solid sand- and cream-coloured façade, lots of columns, and wedding-cake ornamentation around the top. It was built by the French colonialists a hundred years ago and is supposedly a copy of Paris's oldest opera house, the Palais Garnier.

It's unlikely that its Paris prototype was ever used as a factory for building bomb shelter casings, though, as the Hanoi Opera House was during the American War. Damage caused by mortar strikes to the building, which was boarded up for two decades until its reopening in 1997, has been left untouched – a sobering souvenir.

At the entrance, we weave through the milling crowds. The foyer is brightly lit and immaculately presented, with gilded mirrors and an ornate sweeping staircase. We grow increasingly nervous and excited as we climb the stairs.

In the gloom backstage of the concert hall, preparations are intense: the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra is tuning its instruments, the Hanoi International Choir its voices. The choir's numbers, which swell and shrink each week from 12 to about 30, have been augmented to 40 or more for the occasion with the addition of several new expats and a greater number of Vietnamese. The Vietnamese have been summoned to help with the latter part of the program, when we'll be singing some Soviet-inspired nationalistic songs. The arrangements of these often turgid tunes are surprisingly exciting, but mostly I have to mime my way through them. Trying to pull off the angular harmonies while singing in Vietnamese has defeated me.

Yet Vivaldi's
Gloria
has brought me to life. Each week at choir practice, as we opened the charts on a new movement and sang the dots into life, was a new sensory adventure. The harmonies pushed at the walls of my mind, opening new pathways. When we'd learnt all the movements, we finally rehearsed with the orchestra, and I wept, overwhelmed by the sound that was created. Ever since that day, I've been besotted with the piece.

Now our moment draws near. On cue, the orchestra heads out to take its position at the front of the stage. The footsteps across the wooden stage are drowned out by an immense hubbub.

Alexa and I peek through the curtains and gasp in unison. The 900-seat house, with its galleries and boxes, is full. Foreigners and Vietnamese are packed, side by side, in every direction.

Graham, our choirmaster, strides on to huge applause. Tonight he's conducting the performance. Finally, the choir files on, separated into Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass sections. Alexa, Nhung and I are Altos; Duc, despite his slight build, is a Bass. The applause fades, the orchestra begins its introductory piece.

As we stand there, I cast my eye in wonder over the auditorium and spot Natassia waving to me from the stalls. I grin back, brimming with emotion. Expats like to say anything can happen in Hanoi, and this moment is proof.

The second movement,
Et in Terra Pax
, is slow, dark, and mesmerisingly beautiful. The voices float hauntingly over the strings, winding upwards, as the melody is stated and restated in a kind of canon. The piece builds into a series of crescendos. Tonight it produces a lump in my throat so large that I'm barely able to sing. I'm experiencing what the Arabs call
Tarab
– a moment of ecstasy in music.

I look to the faces of Duc, Nhung and the other Vietnamese choir members, singing this 300-year-old Italian music with me, and I believe some of them are feeling it too.

My first choral performance on stage is a triumph. When
Cum Sancto Spirito
, Vivaldi's lively final movement, ends, the applause goes on for minutes.

Scanning the audience, I again catch Natassia's eye, and this time she's holding up a camera. Tonight's surreal occasion has been preserved. I'll be able to look at these images one day and reflect on the entanglement of East and West I experienced on-stage at the Hanoi Opera House. For some of the expat choir members, familiar with the piece from previous performances, this may be a case of the Vietnamese meeting them on their territory. But in a way I'm luckier. Like the Vietnamese, I'm a stranger to this genre. For me, as for them, this is a cultural exploration, and something we can both relate to – a celebration, through music, of all that is universal and beautiful.

I leave enough time for goodbyes on
Pho Yen The
before the airport taxi arrives. When I return I'll be moving to a large house, in a different neighbourhood, with Natassia. I bid an emotional farewell to my good friends in the compound, Dat and Phuong, who came to see me sing last night. I bow to
Ba Gia
, now sadly confined to her bed. I carefully hug Nga's generous mother, Xuyen, who, being an older Vietnamese, is unpracticed at this. I wave to the girls who play in the cul de sac and call out ‘hello?' with a rising tone. At the bottom of the street, I drink a last coffee with the
xe om
drivers – including Quan and his wife, who behave for all the world as though they're fond of me.

When I return, it will be to a new chapter.

It's been a year of discovery and adventure; of confusion, excitement, disappointment and mental disarray. My preconceived notions of other cultures have unravelled in stages, exposed for the crude and paternalistic constructs they were. My brain's been reshaped – as much by cognitive dissonance as by the moments of unprecedented joy and exhilaration that punctuated it.

But I've finally made my peace with this culture. Perhaps it's just taken me longer than most.

Our experiences in a new place dwindle in richness and in salience over time. The last six months of my time in Hanoi, enjoyable and enriching as they were, are not part of this narrative, but they're not light years away from it either …

On my return, Natassia and I moved into a newly built, ridiculously cheap mansion in a neighbourhood adjacent to mine. Over the next six months I began at last to adapt to life as a Westerner in Hanoi. Paradoxically, as I became more involved in local culture, I became more comfortable with my level of removal from it.

Natassia and I helped found a women's group. The group grew and shrank in numbers from meeting to meeting and comprised women from more than a dozen nationalities, including several simpatico young local women. Through it, I was able to meet other single white females living in Hanoi and compare experiences. The women's club sometimes gathered at our place to share food and stories from our differing cultures. Other times we met up at
Bia Hoi
or organised motorcycle and mini-bus trips around North Vietnam. We provided help and advice to a number of brave Vietnamese women who wanted to stretch their wings in the new, more open political climate.

By the time I left, many of the people I first came to know had undergone life changes. The porcelain-skinned young Lan from Global was married and pregnant. Yvette, the French girl who first showed me Hanoi, was also pregnant and about to drop when I saw her, at a French Embassy event, a week before my departure.

When I bumped into Nguyet on the street near her compound, she too was bursting and radiant with pregnancy. She was delighted to see me, but our friendship had sadly come adrift in the wake of her marriage.

Late in the year, Alexa had a beautiful baby girl and, soon after, a spectacular, arty wedding on the banks of the Red River. I was honoured to be asked to speak at the wedding, which took place on my very last night as an expat in Hanoi.

And me? No marriage, no baby. Not my style. Also, no serious illnesses, unlike kind ‘Aussie Bill', who survived a very serious chest infection but soon after succumbed to lung cancer.

But I gained a very great education.

Hanoi is, beyond doubt, strange and absorbing territory for a Westerner. The combined influences of Communism, Confucianism, Colonialism and Conflict have forged a unique culture.

I miss the unremitting crowds, which, on a good day, I was happy to be immersed in. As a devoted people-watcher, I was forever gratified in Hanoi. Every day there were thousands more people to gaze at from my pillion position on the motorcycle, each with a story they'd never be able to tell me, and that I'd never be able to grasp. Poor people, most of them traumatised by their legacy of war, famine and poverty, with lives that lay outside my ken.

I miss the edginess of knowing that at any moment, something unprecedented could happen – something probably involving wheeled transport.

I'll miss forever the evanescent smell of
Hoa Sua
(Milk Flowers) on mild November nights – a maddening, tantalising smell of high heaven.

The culture shock never stops. But the disillusionment that once plagued me is gone, and my primary feeling now is admiration. For all the endless invasions and intrusions they've suffered, the Vietnamese are largely grudgeless. Their sense of identity unites them and gives them the confidence to forge forward fearlessly. The Vietnamese are indomitable.

Glossary of Vietnamese terms used in this book

I came to write this book in much the same way I came to move to Vietnam. This is not the recommended approach to either, and I hope my next book, or emigration, will be hallmarked by an improvement in the method to madness ratio. In my defence I can only say that I had a lot of fun doing both, in the way a child has fun splashing around in a mud pit, completely unaware that there are dangerous creepy-crawlies in the mud, or that adults will have to clean up the mess later. In this metaphor, unfortunately, that adult was also me.

Thus I came to learn a great deal. For example, I learnt that starting a book is easy, but finishing one is another story – probably an unfinished one. For getting me started, my greatest thanks goes to my friend John Fink who shook his head, as though I was missing something obvious, and said ‘just do it'.

Others who read my book in its earlier stages and provided invaluable (if sometimes contradictory) feedback include Karen Penning, at Pan Macmillan, Steve Jones, Andrew Worboys, Lindsay Page, Nadine Helmi, Paul Chenard and Wednesday Kennedy. Heartfelt thanks to the unstoppable force that is Tara Winkler, who would have knocked on doors holding my manuscript until it got a publishing deal, if I hadn't been so lucky as to get one myself.

My greatest debt of thanks, however, goes to my dear friend Lynda Delacey, whose patient instruction, canny suggestions, and unwavering confidence in me enabled me to write, and to finish the book.

For seeing the book through to maturity, big thanks to Sean Doyle and to my editor Barry Scott, both of whom helped a great deal with the final shaping of my story, to Bernard Cohen for extending the unconditional support that has characterised our very long friendship, and to Emily Maguire, a self-described ‘Hanoi tragic', for insisting on reading the manuscript in its finished form and whose feedback was a tremendous morale boost.

Lastly thanks to my talented gang of friends, ‘The Party People Collective', who never gave up on me.