Single White Female in Hanoi (6 page)

Her first impression of me isn't great either, I'll find out. She thinks I'm arrogant. This initial, mutual lack of interest is the signature state from which most of my friendships evolve. This may be in part because any time I feel out of my depth, I seem to feel the need to feign invulnerability. It's a grave character flaw since, besides alienating people, it also hampers my ability to absorb important information. Admitting vulnerability can be the first step in a learning curve. Like many teachers, I can be a bad student.

But Natassia's glad when, at her invitation, I stand up and relieve her of the last 30 minutes of class by giving the young students a lesson about Australia.

After the class we have a quick chat, during which I discover her true nationality – Swiss – and mentally amend ‘prim' to ‘demure'. She smokes two cigarettes back to back, and runs off, but by then Owen has arrived. He takes me to the teachers' room and tells me I'm to observe another class tomorrow morning with a different teacher.

The buzz of taking a class for a while and a dramatic decrease in temperature have enlivened me and I'm feeling sociable, but it's nine-thirty and the school is being closed for the night.

As I walk out of the staffroom, I pass a desk with an immense Australian guy half-reclined in a chair behind it.

‘No, really. This restaurant is amazing,' he's telling the small audience gathered around him. ‘They'll bring you bear meat, or any other illegal meat you want. They don't advertise. You have to know how to get there or you'll never find it'.

‘You et bear meat?' A small Ukrainian man chimes in. He's an English teacher. The staff, unable to hear his deadpan, trilling accent, believe he's American.

‘Sure, dude. It's delicious. These guys've got any endangered animal you can think of. But here's the best bit – ocelot meat! You order an ocelot, and the waiter goes out the back, returns with a live ocelot, and kills it right there in front of you. It's fucking awesome.'

The fat man's patter is a train of the most offensive material imaginable. For his next topic, he boasts of how he can bargain the locals down below local rates for meals on the street. I examine him in disbelief. He's a barbarian. How come anyone listens to him? I scowl and head home, disturbed.

Outside, the rain has started with renewed vigour. I see a couple of passing motorcyclists carrying an umbrella in one hand. The rest are wearing plastic raincoats. But while commuters are big on protection from the elements, they don't seem too fussed about road safety. Motorcycles often carry entire families of five – mum, dad, two kids and baby arranged in ingenious formations I would never have thought of. And no one is wearing a crash helmet.

The month I arrive marks the beginning of a new law making helmets compulsory for motorcyclists across the country. But the new law is not enforced, and is almost universally ignored.

My earlier observation about Vietnamese invincibility on the roads was optimistic. Over the course of this year, 10,500 people will die in motorbike accidents on Vietnam's roads – nearly thirty people per day.

My enchanted days of waking up at 6.30am are coming to an end. It wasn't a promising new lifestyle change, just jetlag.

Unfortunately, the rest of Hanoi wakes at first light, so the first class of the day at most language schools starts at 8am. This morning I'm heading off to ‘Global' for an 8am class observation.

Showered and dressed, I open my bedroom door and head across the landing to the living room, which I keep locked while I'm asleep. Hanging from the door handle is a plastic bag full of baby eggplants. Xuyen strikes again.

In her late fifties, visibly worn out from a lifetime of hard work, Nga's mother works tirelessly for the benefit of others. She heads out at dawn every morning on a bicycle to work on a meat stall at a nearby market. The rest of the time she's looking after
Ba Gia
(pronounced ‘bah-zah') – her long-widowed, childless aunt, who's 84
.

She's estranged from Nga's father, and lives with
Ba Gia
, which means ‘old grandma', in a single-roomed cement dwelling just outside the gate to my compound. The room has a wooden loft, accessed by small metal rungs driven into the wall. Xuyen climbs up there every night to sleep on a hard wooden board, without a fan, which is the part that flabbergasts me. On the one occasion I stick my head up there, there seems to be no air at all. It's hot, wet, and absolutely stifling.

One rainy night soon after my arrival, I come home late, perhaps midnight. It's long past Hanoi's bedtime and the neighbourhood is utterly deserted. Every shopfront along
Nguyen Thai Hoc
and my little street has been sealed with a metal roller-door, rendering the streets unrecognisable – so unrecognisable that I briefly think the
xe om
driver has brought me to the wrong district, a nasty, more dangerous one.

I climb off the motorcycle, pay the fare and find that the tall wooden gate to my compound has been locked. Nga told me the gate would be locked at night, and has given me a key that will open the padlock. But the technique eludes me. In order to release the padlock, which is on the inside of the gate, the person outside must squeeze their hands, one holding the key, through small holes in the wood on either side of the bolt, and blindly manoeuvre the key into the lock.

Not having had any training in obstetrics, I find this impossible. I persist for about fifteen minutes, until my wrists are sore and I'm mad with frustration, then peer up gloomily at the barbed wire strung across the area above the gate. The rain is falling harder now. No choice but to wake Xuyen.

My knock on the door sounds like cannon-fire in the dead of night.

‘Hello?' is all I can think to call out. There's a long silence, and, gritting my teeth, I knock again. This time I hear movement within.

Ba Gia
opens the door, her eyes gummed shut with sleep, and calls throatily up to the loft. I watch Xuyen stir and climb down the small metal rungs set into the wall. She's wearing pyjamas rather than the cheap and unflattering clothes she wears by day, and she has taken her hair out for sleeping. Her hair is thick, still black, and falls down to her waist. With a start I realise she's beautiful. I'll never see this vision of her again.

Rather than irritated, she's sympathetic towards the soaked and embarrassed foreigner pointing alternately to the key and the gate.

‘
Khong sao
' (‘No worries'), she says. She has the gate open in less than 15 seconds, then nods and pats me on the back – very decent behaviour for a woman woken almost halfway through her night's sleep. And this is where the story should end. But it doesn't, because as she turns to head back to bed, we hear the sudden roar of an approaching vehicle. The alley is illuminated by headlights, and seconds later a moped appears. I recognise Philippe, an unfriendly Frenchman who lives in the apartment above mine; he's coming home late too. Then a strange thing happens.

Xuyen pushes open her front door completely and stands aside as Philippe rides his bike into the tiny room, passing
Ba Gia's
bed by about 30 centimetres. He parks it somewhere in the back, dismounts, and wanders out, casually nodding to the two venerable women. He offers me a curt ‘
Bonne nuit
' on his way through the unlocked gate, then marches across the compound, unlocks our shared downstairs door, and disappears through it. I stand gaping for a few seconds. There's no one to explain what I've just seen. Not even Philippe speaks English. I wonder if I've just imagined it all as I head up the stairs, leaving Xuyen, at her insistence, to lock the gate behind me.

Although Nga, Xuyen's daughter, makes an unbelievable US$400 per month from renting out my flat and Philippe's above it, the family still seems very poor. I remain at a loss to understand this. In a country where the average wage is US$20 per month, this should allow Nga and her family to live like royalty, but they don't. Tuan works hard for a shipping company, and six months into my time in Hanoi, Nga will open an Internet café uptown, which she'll turn into a thriving concern, working day and night.

Still they'll cry poor. Nga watches every penny. I pay my rent in Vietnamese dong, three million a month. When the exchange rate dips slightly against the US dollar, she asks me to pay a few extra thousand dong.
Ba Gia
, who's her great aunt, has a chronic eye disease but they ‘can't afford' to take her to a doctor.

It may be that Nga is a despicable person, but it's hard to prove. When speaking to anybody below her on the socio-economic scale, she screws up her face and barks harshly. But whenever we sit and chat, her voice and personality are warm and seductive, and I'm putty in her hands. Sometimes she tells me she feels close to me, and I want to concur, but at the back of my mind is that warning bell, set there by my Vietnamese friends. ‘She's only interested in money,' they say. I'll never figure Nga out.

I make a delicious breakfast with the eggplants, some garlic and herbs and two fresh brown hen eggs, fried into an omelette, and set out for my second class observation at Global.

This time when I walk into the classroom I immediately notice the air is cool. An old air-conditioner is gasping away in the corner, unaccustomed to the strain of being turned up full for long periods. Nonetheless, the teacher is glowing under a film of sweat. It's because of his weight problem, I suspect.

It's the barbarian ocelot-eater from the staffroom last night. He looks blankly at me for a second, then bellows ‘Hi!' in a long note that rises then falls. The effect is incongruously friendly.

I nod at him, unsmiling, and sit down. I'm expecting an hour and a half of bumbling incompetence, and I look forward to embarrassing him with my presence.

I fail.

I fail not only because this is a man who doesn't embarrass easily, but also because, although his teaching patter drips sarcasm and innuendo, he's actually a good teacher.

During the lesson he makes the best of a particularly tedious chapter in the textbook. He's loud and clear and appears to speak Vietnamese, although with a ridiculous Aussie drawl, so he can translate unknown words. He burps and sneezes loudly and often, horrifying the class, and strikes me as generally repulsive. But I detect a flair for comedy. In order to maintain what I hope is an intimidating façade for the barbarian, I keep having to suppress laughter.

When the bell signifies the end of class, I nod again, begrudgingly, and stride out of the classroom. But he catches up with me in the staffroom.

‘Are you that new teacher with the TESOL certificate?' he asks me. He's got the kind of impossibly strong Australian accent that flings around between head and chest voice, so that some words slide up into a falsetto, like a teenager with a breaking voice.

‘Maybe.' I watch a mischievous smile form on his face.

‘You'll be regretting all that effort in the fullness of time.'

‘Are you TESOL too?' I ask him. He leans in closer and lowers his voice.

‘Depends who's asking,' he whispers, and glances in the direction of Owen. ‘I think I said I was that other one – from Cambridge University.'

‘CELTA,' I supply, amused.

‘Yeah,' he says, dismissively. ‘Hey, I'm Zac.'

Zac's still at university in Australia. He's finishing an Asian Studies degree and has been learning Vietnamese and Chinese. Now he's studying Vietnamese at a university in Hanoi on an exchange program.

Within a few days, I'll be forced to admit the dawning possibility that this guy, who's a self-proclaimed racist, anti-environmentalist and former gun-nut, who can't live a day without meat, who has a volatile hatred of Vietnamese men, is a teetotaller who has made a career out of being as controversial, as belligerent and as provocative as possible, is going to become a part of my life.

Strangely, over the next year, as some of his female friends and his sister turn up in Hanoi to visit him, I'll come to discover that the women he surrounds himself with tend to be well-educated left-wingers.

On my way out of Hanoi Global College, I'm accosted by a petite young woman in a blue
ao dai.

‘Miss Carolyn, please can you come back here at seven forty-five this evening for observe another class?' she says, in a breathless little-girl voice.

The young woman's name is Lan. She's high up in the staff hierarchy, and is the main interface between the Vietnamese administration and the outside world. She's the perfect person for the job: captivatingly cute, patient and unfailingly polite, she conveys the impression that the college has everything under control.

I take the long way home, past
Nam Bo
. I want to make sure the homeless woman is there, because at four o'clock this afternoon, Ralph and his doctor wife are coming over and I'll be bringing them to meet her.

She's there, in her usual daytime position, observing the chaotic activity around her with lively amusement, fanning herself with a large, broken bamboo fan. She beckons me over, smiling broadly and reaches for my arm. I crouch next to her and she fans me too, then reaches deep into her plastic bag of possessions and offers me a small bag of chilli salt. I accept the gift gratefully. My Vietnamese is still virtually non-existent, so we're unable to communicate at all. I want to tell her that I'll be back later with a doctor.

For the next few hours I'm restless. I've now spoken twice to Ralph by phone, and had a month-long email relationship with him before my arrival. I've gathered he's a lugubrious, self-absorbed man, but I have absolutely no mental picture to go with the voice. I'm itching to know what the guy looks like.

Soon after four, on hearing a motorcycle, I look down into the compound from the Juliet balcony off my bedroom and I see a stunning, if austere, Vietnamese woman walk through the gate holding two crash helmets, followed by a vision on a motorcycle.

I get an aerial view of a smooth bald dome, shining with sweat, set on a rotund body. The sides of the dome, around the ears, are set with tufts of dark hair. The head is pear-shaped, giving the man the cranial dimensions of a gerbil. Coke-bottle spectacles complete one of the most remarkable views of a human being I've ever seen.

I call out and they look up.

‘Where can I put my bike?'

I point to all the other bikes lined up in the compound.

‘But this isn't safe – the gate is not locked'.

It takes me some time to assure Ralph that the formidable
Ba Gia
and the men from the shop next door guard the compound.

Upstairs, Ralph sits down heavily on the bamboo couch in my living room. He removes his glasses, pulls out a handkerchief and wipes the sweat from his face for a long time. Then he begins a long speech about the appalling standards of Vietnamese drivers.

His wife is seated beside him. She says nothing. Even with the stern expression she wears, she's show-stoppingly beautiful. Her jaw-length hair is thick and shiny, her skin is luminous. She has a strong face, with smooth-lidded Chinese eyes and large bow lips.

I pour them each a glass of my new home-delivered water, which comes with a label boasting ‘100 per cent foreign-owned!', then we head off on foot up to
Nam Bo
, where, among the huddle of homeless, we immediately find my friend, smiling and waving in my direction.

Tina talks to her for a while and looks at her arms, which are just sticks. I begin to feel awkward, out of place. Too white, too tall, too rich. I look away towards the roaring warp of the intersection. The humidity has knocked the air into a distorting lens on the strange reality around me. Motorcycle tyres seem to be spinning a centimetre above the road and the noise of the engines is ebbing and flowing in rhythmic waves. It occurs to me that I might be in danger of a sudden and humiliating outburst of tears. Eventually Tina turns to face me and confirms my rising suspicion. The woman has advanced tuberculosis.

‘You must be careful when you talk to her,' she warns me. ‘Do not breathe in, try to turn your head away.'

‘Can you ask her name? What's her name?' I say to Tina. My voice is thickening and a sensation of pepper is taking over my face. Tina and the woman exchange a few more words, then she tells me the woman's name is ‘Hien'.

Hien
means ‘good-natured'. Hien has been well-named.

Tina tells me Hien is unable to eat most food, as it gives her diarrhoea, but I could buy her a piece of fruit each day. I blink a few times, but the pepper is now moving in a subcutaneous stream – travelling downwards from the bridge of my nose and into my sinuses. It burns hard, and finally the first tear shoulders its way out. I swallow and clamp my teeth together, but the dam wall has ruptured. It's poor form to cry over someone that's still alive and smiling and in front of you, and furthermore, I have no desire to cry in front of Ralph.

So, as the floodgates open, I retreat into the supermarket, where I sob for a few minutes. I know that stories like Hien's abound in Hanoi, but it takes the one person with whom you foolishly forge a personal tie to tip you over.