Single White Female in Hanoi (7 page)

On the way home, Tina tries to comfort me. ‘I have seen people in this condition survive for up to six months,' she says without a trace of irony.

I'll speak to Ralph one more time on the phone, and again thank his wife. I'll never see them again.

Just before 7.30, I head out into the rush-hour traffic for my third class observation. I hope this one will actually prepare me in some way – I'm still at a loss to understand how the system works at this place. No one has shown me a curriculum. The only textbooks I've seen so far are bootlegged copies of a series published in Texas, written to help migrants assimilate in their new country – the U.S.

I'm waiting for a glimpse of something that relates to the extensive and expensive training I undertook in order to teach English. Where are the ‘integrated skills' lessons, the ‘Presentation Practice Production' routines, the ‘Jigsaw Activities'? Most importantly, where are the teaching resources?

There's one antiquated photocopy machine in the building. It lives in a tiny room full of shelves and filing cabinets containing the bootlegged cassette tapes that accompany the bootlegged books for the classes. The photocopier breaks down and is fixed on an hourly basis by harried Huong, the most valuable member of the Global team. Plagued by acne and by all the other staff members, she's responsible for all lesson materials, which also include a fleet of eleven cheap cassette players. At any given time, at least three of these are out of commission. Only Huong knows which ones.

While the other girls on the staff sit around filing their nails or watching abysmal Vietnamese soap operas on the TV in the reception area, Huong is quietly keeping the place operational. The judicious placement of an elastic band or an unfolded paper clip can coax another day's use from the most recalcitrant machinery. Whenever something really
has
to be done, her name is yelled along the length of the corridor. She's the scapegoat and the trouble-shooter. Nobody admits it, but without her the whole edifice would crumble into a heap of plastic parts, elastic bands and paper clips.

Whatever class I was supposed to observe tonight has been cancelled. Instead I'm told to head upstairs where I find myself in a class of teenagers being taught by Natassia. I apologise to her, sigh, and take a seat near the back of the room. This time, however, she laughs. Mentally, I amend ‘demure' to ‘cute'. It will be some time before I realise what every male expat in Hanoi already knows: she's the hottest European woman in town.

There's a very peaceful atmosphere in the room. Natassia comes over to my desk and suggests this class might enjoy a little session about Australia. ‘Maybe, if there's time at the end of the lesson,' I tell her.

It never happens. Ten minutes into the lesson, Lan appears in the doorway and beckons me into the corridor outside. A teacher hasn't turned up. I'm needed to teach a class.

Excitement. Natassia and some of the class members wish me good luck. Lan leads me downstairs.

Before I can say ‘could I see the lesson plan?' I've been shoehorned into a steaming hot classroom. Twenty or so small children are bouncing off the walls. Lan leaves me standing at the front of the room for a minute while she fetches a textbook. The book has no instructions in it, just pictures of things beginning with a certain letter with the word printed underneath. For example: ‘H' – Horse, House, Hat; ‘J' – Jam, Jelly, Jet.

I take them by force. I make them sit quiet as church mice, all attention on me. So far, so good. I say ‘hello'. They all yell ‘hello' back.

I write my name on the board. Making maximum use of gesture, I say, ‘This is my name. What is my name?'

Complete silence.

I try again. No one moves.

On the third effort, a student volunteers: ‘What is my name?'

‘No,' I say with a rising tone. I speak slowly, stressing every syllable. ‘A question.
I
ask
you
– what is my name?' I jab my finger towards my name on the board.

The class repeats in unison ‘What is my name?'

It dawns on me. These kids have learnt by repeating everything they hear. They don't understand a word. I feel my shoulders sag. I've got nearly an hour and a half to get through.

But with a little more patience, I turn the corner. After about fifteen minutes they can answer correctly: ‘What is my name?' (Carolyn) ‘Where am I from?' (Australia) ‘How many hands/feet do I have?'

It's all going well until about forty minutes in. The students are in rapt attention when one cheeky little kid has an ADHD attack. For absolutely no reason, he leaps out of his seat, yelping with excitement, and runs full tilt at the door. There's a loud
krink
and I watch in horror as the glass pane in the door explodes outwards into the corridor. Lan is there in a second, and the class falls to tatters.

I call the kids back to their seats, but no doubt it looks as though I'd completely lost control of the class.

By the end of the lesson, however, we've covered three new pages of the textbook and they can answer correctly:

‘How many legs does an octopus have?'

‘How many legs does a snail have?'

‘How many legs do I have?'

At first I get the impression Lan doesn't believe me when I tell her this, but I soon realise it's just that she doesn't care. No one cares, as long as the teacher, or anyone for that matter, has signed that the class has been taken and a few pages of the textbook covered.

I sign the teacher's book. In the space provided, I proudly note which pages of the textbook I've covered, and the additional language I've taught.

My career as an English teacher in Hanoi has begun. I was lucky, Zac tells me later. During his first class at Global, a kid vomited on him.

I'm sitting at a table laid with a starched white tablecloth, salt and pepper shakers and silver cutlery. Piped classical music emanates from invisible speakers. Several uniformed waiters hover nearby, ready to take more orders for tea, coffee and iced water.

It's likely they've been specially trained in the dos and don'ts of serving wealthy foreigners, but today their training has failed them. They want to look impassive, solicitous, but their mouths have fallen open and they're staring at the fat man.

Zac doesn't seem to notice. He's in the throes of supreme pleasure. The air-conditioning has dried the sweat on his forehead, and surrounding him at the table is an all-female captive audience to entertain, impress and shock. Best of all, the food, which is the work of a world-class chef, is unlimited.

We're at our first ‘all-you-can-eat' buffet lunch at Hanoi's five-star Daewoo Hotel. We met up in the lobby at 11.30 this morning.

Sitting opposite me, Natassia is immaculately dressed in straight-legged pants and a cream-coloured, embroidered sleeveless top. Her shoes and handbag match, and her full lips are glazed with red lipstick. Beside her, Zac is sporting a pair of pale green gym shorts and an over-sized, sweat-soaked maroon-coloured T-shirt.

We're now into our fifth or sixth helping. We alternate savoury dishes with small serves of desserts and cups of tea or coffee.

The aim of this game is to outsmart the management by eating more than US$9 worth of food. The decision to pay this amount, surprisingly, was Zac's. He read a newspaper ad for the half-price Sunday buffet lunch and rallied the troops. On his recommendation, we fasted for sixteen hours before arriving.

‘Normally, I'm really tight with cash. I like to spend as little as possible. But I reckon this is a worthwhile expense,' he tells me. ‘I think we should do it once a month'.

I'm not about to disagree. I thought nine dollars was a bit excessive, given the prices outside on the street, but I'm in gastronomic heaven. The buffet includes a whole range of gourmet vegetarian food, the likes of which I never expected to see in Vietnam.

At the Asian stand, I've piled my plate high with Singapore noodles, chilli tofu and eggplant, fried jasmine rice with lotus nuts and buttery broccoli. At the Japanese stand I've filched pickled ginger and wasabi. Over on the European side of the dining hall, I've helped myself to possibly a quarter of a kilo of French Brie and piles of exotic salads, over which I've poured whole cups of creamy salad dressing. Between platefuls, I linger over a few slices of mango with sorbet from the dessert table.

I think I've reached the break-even mark and, incredibly, I'm still in action.

Zac, on the other hand, has doubled or even trebled that mark. Later he'll say he reckons he ate over a kilo of meat alone, and I won't challenge the claim. It's owing to his show-stopping gluttony that there are now several staff members gawking at him from their post about two metres from our table. I can't tell whether they're impressed or disgusted.

In between dissertations on which Vietnamese staff members at Global have the best breasts, Zac is expounding the virtues of capitalism with the fervour of a recent convert.

‘I'm not proposing a better system,' I say, ‘but there's a hell of a lot of very poor people in America that don't seem to be reaping much benefit from capitalism.'

Zac fixes me with a withering stare and starts nodding. ‘You've fallen for a complete myth,' he says, feigning pity. ‘The beauty of capitalism is that everybody gets richer.'

Seeing my scathing expression, he shakes his head and flares his nostrils threateningly for a moment before elaborating. ‘The UN measures a country's progress on three criteria,' he begins. ‘The first one's life expectancy, the second is infant mortality rate, and the third, I think it's calories per day. And over the last hundred years, every country in the world, with the exception of about four, has improved on all three counts.'

If what he says is true, I have the perfect retort for students who tell me capitalism is evil because the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This seems to be a line they've all learnt.

‘And no prizes for guessing what those four countries have in common,' he continues. ‘Yup! Communism.'

At the sound of the ‘C' word, spoken at full volume, I almost flinch, and my eyes flick around the room. I've been in Vietnam two weeks today, and even that's been long enough for me to observe the degree of paranoia in expat society. The word ‘communism' is never mentioned, and political references are whispered. Any allusions I make to the government, however inoffensive, are quickly smothered, especially during phone calls. The implication is that the walls have ears, all foreigners' phones are tapped, and the government is on the lookout for foreigners who are so brazen as to refer to it.

Zac is the only person I meet who's either brave or foolhardy enough to disregard this code of conduct. Probably he's just not the paranoid type.

For the duration of this orgiastic repast, which spreads itself from 11.30am to 3pm, when the kitchen closes, Zac is verbally indefatigable. Natassia and I enjoy his impersonations of some of our colleagues at Global, and he makes me laugh so much that my solar plexus aches the next day. But it's his debating skills that make the biggest impression. I try to stay calm in the face of his lunatic fringe claims, and offer a considered rebuttal, but each time I discover I've played right into his hands. He feigns tired attention until I've finished, then, with a sigh and another flaring of the nostrils, demolishes whatever points I've made with a rapid-fire series of statistics and historical references. At the tender age of 24 he's exceptionally well-read and has a degree in Asian History. I'm loath to contradict him. It will be some time before I learn that he confabulates about half his material.

My alarm clock wakes me at seven the next morning. It's Monday and I have a new eight o'clock class at Global.

I rifle through my wardrobe, facing a now-common dilemma. I want to look well-presented in a climate that makes a Westerner look like a perambulating snot rag within thirty minutes. Locals, for some reason, stay immaculate. I settle on a long coral-coloured skirt made of thin taffeta, a sleeveless top and a long-sleeved white cotton shirt to protect me from the elements outside.

At the other end of my street I notice one of the
xe om
drivers. I don't know his name yet. He seems to scowl a lot, and as I walk past he's shouting at someone. Despite, or possibly because of, the edge of aggression in his husky voice, I notice two things: that there's something about the Vietnamese language that bewitches me, makes me want to hear more; and that this is especially true when it's his voice.

The morning's class comprises about sixteen fourth-graders who seem to have been infected with a delinquency virus. When I make my grand first entrance into the classroom, I'm hit by a powerful urge to turn and run. The hot, wet air is whistling with paper planes, the blackboard boasts an anatomically suspect drawing of a penis, and there's a chubby boy with glasses and a cowlick trying to simultaneously strangle an anaemic-looking boy and a large po-faced girl.

I growl ‘Good morning,' and activity stops for a second while they stare at me. Then continues.

A runt of a boy with buckteeth and mischievous eyes screams, ‘Hello my teacher!', turns red, and collapses into giggles. The rest of the class follow suit.

‘Be quiet,' I bellow in my sternest voice, and for a miraculous moment, there's decorum. I write my name on the board and a few of them have a go at screaming it unrecognisably. ‘Cah-zaw … Cazoleenuh'. In Northern Vietnamese pronunciation, the phoneme /z/ seems to be the default phoneme. The letter ‘d', if uncrossed, is pronounced /z/, as are the combination ‘gi' as in ‘
gia
' (‘old') and the letter ‘r'.

I sigh. Time for roll call. I whip out the list of student names and peer at the first name. Nguyen Dat Long. I have a crack at pronouncing it, and the class falls about again. I try just the last name ‘Long' since I have some idea how to pronounce this, and the anaemic boy's hand shoots into the air. Emboldened, I eyeball the next name. Vu Duc Hung. After a few goes, a hand rises uncertainly to a background hubbub of kids imitating me. I put a tick beside the name and squint, panic-stricken at the next name. Huynh Cao Phuong.

‘Hw … Hue … Hue-ing … Cow … Foo …' wails of laughter fill the room.

‘Damn it,' I cry. ‘You do it, ya little brat.' I thrust the register into the hands of ‘The Strangler', one of the main culprits, who gets my drift and takes over. I peer over his shoulder, mystified, as the vowels and consonants roll off his tongue.
This language is going to break my heart
, I think to myself.

After roll call I have to yell for silence again. It's time to start the lesson. Glancing at the clock, I can see we're already fifteen minutes in, which gives me some relief, since I'm struggling badly. I was handed the bootlegged textbook minutes before I walked in here and I haven't had time to make head or tail out of it. Scanning the ‘follow-up book' for comments and advice from the previous teacher about the last lesson, I find whoever it was hasn't bothered to fill in the information in the space provided.

For the first forty or so minutes of the class I struggle through random pages. ‘Page five. Mary is in the bathroom. Where is Mary?'
Seems very easy – maybe they've done this chapter.
I leaf frantically through the pages as projectiles being hurled around the room whoosh by. These kids just aren't scared of me.

‘Okay. Page nine. Look at the picture. Page nine. Richard is playing in the garden. Who is he playing with? Are you listening? On page nine.'
This is hideous. Oh my god, is that really the time?

Time is crawling. Po-face, along with a couple of other quiet girls and a boy, seem genuinely interested in improving their English, but they don't stand a chance. The rest of the class strike me as ineducable. I find a pointless drawing activity in the book and set them to work.

At the sixty-minute mark I begin to lose my patience. The kids have started to run around the room again, and worse, some have disappeared out the door, and I can't see where they went. The buck-toothed kid is long gone and ‘The Strangler' is kneeling on a boy nearly twice his size, who's face down on the floor. The situation is desperate. Obviously the material I've been given is of no interest to them.

I wonder if the kids' behaviour is largely caused by classroom conditions. The aircon isn't working, so the classroom is airless, humid and about 33 degrees. Through the thin wall to my right comes the sound of the lesson taking place in the next room. The teacher has the cassette-player up full blast and the inane tape-script is spoken by characters with Texan accents. Worst of all, from the floor beneath us comes intermittent hammering and drilling noises, completely drowning out the lesson. It's the sounds of progress from the building site below, as workers reconstruct the ruins to make new classrooms. Mr Thinh doesn't want to lose money by cancelling classes or restricting labourer hours.

But the fact remains – the class has pretty much fallen to pieces. The situation calls for drastic action.

So I do something drastic, something desperate, something undignified. On the blackboard, I draw a brick wall, with ten bottles sitting on it, and I start singing:

‘…There were ten green bottles hanging on the wall …' After the first bottle accidentally falls, I rub out one bottle. The Strangler has stopped whatever he was doing and is staring up at me, which is encouraging. His cowlick splays from his crown towards the ceiling like an Amerindian headdress.

By ‘six green bottles', a couple of tentative voices join mine.

By ‘there'll be four green bottles hanging on the wall' the participation process has peaked and settled at three or four kids, the Strangler surprisingly among them, but the melody eludes them. So do the words, mostly – so the sorry choir before me is mostly mouthing empty syllables while humming a series of wavering, random notes.

This has to be as bad as things can get. I'll laugh about this some day.

Singing loudly, I back up towards the board to rub out the third bottle, but I make some kind of error of judgement. There's a ripping noise and a stinging in my left buttock. I've backed up against the protruding metal shelf designed to hold chalk, and torn a gaping hole in my taffeta skirt just over my left bum cheek. Which, twisting discreetly, I look down and find, to my horror, is now plainly visible.

I finish the lesson off, keeping my back to the board at all times. When the bell rings, I make no effort to stop the students bolting out the door. Then I tie my cotton shirt around my waist so that it protects my modesty, and retire to the staffroom, where, to my immense relief, I find Zac.