Single White Female in Hanoi (24 page)

‘
Electrified rat traps have claimed five human lives in the northern province of Ha Tay in recent months
,' reports the article in
Vietnam News. ‘The hand-made electric traps are proliferating as cats become sought-after delicacies in restaurants and rats continue their path of destruction through farmers' crops. Farmers strap together a piece of fence wire and some bamboo struts, then they lay the wire in the waterlogged rice fields and plug it into a live electric socket … ‘

The article reveals so much in so few words. Farmers chucking an electrical appliance into their flooded paddy then forgetting to warn the neighbours – or, in one case, the wife. And then there's that little line, thrown in so nonchalantly …

‘Yes, it's true,' an UNCO student confirms. ‘You can buy cat meat here at restaurant. It is called ‘Little Tiger'.

‘Do you eat it?'

‘No, it is not legal,' he replies, as though only this fact stops him.

‘Cat meat is very strong medicine,' volunteers another student. There's a murmur of agreement from others around him.

I decide this is one of those moments – a moment where it's permissible to inflict my Western perspective on the locals. I lean forward towards the class, and in slow forceful tones I say to them.

‘It's not true.'

As I walk out of the class I'm struck with a thought. I've heard it said many times that chicken marrow has antibiotic properties, and I didn't have so much trouble accepting that. Is this just more cultural bias? I don't know. How can I be certain of anything? Maybe tiger penis soup
does
work.

I'm sitting at the NER canteen a day or two later when I see a chimera bound out of the kitchen area beside me and scuttle towards a drain about four metres away. The chimera has the body of a rodent but five legs. One of the legs doesn't touch the ground. My first thought is that it's actually two animals running in tandem. Then, in a flash, I've resolved the image. It's a rat with a stolen boiled chicken's leg in its mouth. The yellow foot is still attached, wobbling freely. Cat eats rat eats chicken. If this is the food chain here there could be an explanation for the antibiotic properties of cat.

Some Kiwi long-termers in Hanoi have banded together and opened a Western-style café for expats. It's become the new social hub. The Kiwis have somehow managed to uncover a Hanoi lad who spent a year in Sydney making coffees. He trains the other staff. The coffee is almost indistinguishable from coffee back home. The food is standard Western café food. Natassia can get real mayonnaise on her lunch. I didn't think I'd missed Western food until I tuck into a cheesy vegetarian lasagne. There's always good music playing and usually an art exhibition on the walls.

There's also a magnificent collection of old ‘New Yorker' magazines in one corner. Even Zac is intrigued. Best of all, whoever's hiring the male staff seems to have taken my visual cortex into consideration. I find myself gazing at them over my coffee, to Zac's utter disgust. Worse still, from his perspective, my gaze is often returned in a way that can't help but give me hope.

The café single-handedly changes the face of the expat scene. The clientele runs the gamut from the lowliest, most unqualified English teacher, through NGO workers, to the highest diplomat, and slowly but surely, I'm coming to know Hanoi's core expats by name.

Zac calls Natassia and me to a ‘house' meeting at the Kiwi Cafe. He still seems convinced I'm moving in. But he has certain concerns about living with two party-loving vegetarians. He hands over the carefully prepared riot act. It reads:

Caz + Nats

1)    Veggie Thing

2)    Smoking

3)    Punctuality with money

4)    Security

5)    Remind Caz about UNCO

6)    Music, Parties,
Drugs *
.

Natassia and I read it in silence. She kicks me under the table. When I glance at her her eyes are bulging and I have to choke back a guffaw. The three of us sit in silence for a moment.

‘UNCO?' I ask him.

‘Er, yeah. I was wondering if you could, er, get me a teaching job there,' he mumbles, obviously mindful of the lashing he gave me when I starting working there. ‘I've lost two private students and I need more cash.'

Then he does something surprising. Possibly it's peer pressure, or perhaps he's light-headed from the new environment or from the delicious fumes wafting out of the espresso machine. He orders a coffee. Natassia and I are so surprised we take photos of him as he drinks it.

By the end of the week he's on four cups a day. It's the fastest descent into addiction I've ever seen. It's become clear to me why Zac abstains from beer and all other drugs. The old early-to-bed, early-to-rise Zac is a hazy memory. He now goes to bed later than I do.

Next, he trades his step-through motorcycle in for the expat standard – a Minsk. The Minsk is an obsolete two-stroke Russian motorbike, technically a piece of agricultural equipment. In an ironic twist, only expats and farmers would be caught dead on one. The Minsk will smoke like the devil, tear the night asunder with its farting engine noise and break down daily, but always in such a way that it can be up and running again within the hour. The Minsk is indestructible.

By the end of the following week Zac has shaved his hair to the scalp so that he looks like a Chinese Buddha, except that politically he may be closer to the anti-Christ. He has become ‘The anti-Buddha'.

I have some reservations about going to sleep. Last night I slept uneasily. I fancy there were scurrying noises under my bed.

First I evict Zac, who has developed a caffeine-driven habit of visiting me late at night to regale me with his latest gruesome political conclusions. I jam some old earplugs into my ears, turn out the light and slip into a deep sleep. I sleep soundly until 5.30 in the morning when I'm woken from the deepest dreams by a noise I can only describe as diabolical. It sounds like a demented bag-lady is pushing a supermarket trolley with four squeaky wheels round and round in endless circles at the foot of my bed.

I pull out an earplug and the noise gets proportionally louder. It's the sound of an entire civilisation of little animals with long incisors making as much noise as it possibly can. I hit the side of the bed with great force, smashing my wrist-bone on the wooden frame. The noise stops. When the pain in my wrist subsides, I drift back to sleep. Within a minute the noise is back and I'm fully awake. I lie still, paralysed by a creeping horror. I can't run – the invisible enemy is on the floor – but I'm not harbouring any illusions it will stay there. One of its number uses my pillow for a toilet.

It's a long and tormented night. Some time after dawn I realise I've been dozing and the noise has stopped. Without leaving the bed I lean over to the curtains and yank them open, allowing some light in. My terracotta tiled floor is just where it was yesterday, no higher, no softer, no busier. The enemy has retreated. I draw the curtains again and sleep.

Later in the morning I conduct a nervous search of the room. The biomass of what I heard in the night must be several kilos. Where's it hiding? I check the wardrobe thoroughly. Nothing. Then I remember the stiff wooden drawer at the bottom where I dumped my many pairs of fancy tights on my first day in Hanoi. On impulse, I open it.

I'm assailed simultaneously by a myriad of glittering silver and a fresh minty smell. In a flash I've solved the mystery of the packets of Wrigley's doublemint gum that regularly seem to go missing from my windowsill. My rodents have the freshest breath of any rats in Asia.

The packet and contents have been dismantled into maybe thousands of tiny pieces and strewn throughout. Tiny bits of silver foil, green paper, chewing gum, and, of course, the ubiquitous turds, have been tossed through my tights. The culprits are still at large, but I've found headquarters.

I call Nguyet and tell her what's happened.

‘You cannot sleep in your house tonight,' she tells me. ‘You must sleep here,
a chez moi
. I will phone your landlady.'

I resign myself to the sticky trap, to dismembered body parts and squeals of agony in the night. When I arrive at Nguyet's place late in the evening, she has spoken to Nga. There's another solution.

‘Nga will bring a cat.'

Nguyet shows me to a makeshift bed in the living room. It's where Lien sleeps but she's not around tonight. I'm suddenly curious about the sleeping arrangements in this house. The only bed I've seen is the wooden dais where grandmother sleeps, continuously. But as I'm about to change into my pyjamas Nguyet points me to a pair of drawn curtains at the end of the room.

‘For dress, in there.'

I part the fabric and find a double bed with a tiny space beside it in which I get changed. Whose bed is this?

Pyjamaed, I hop into the little bed in the living room. Nguyet's mother, appearing from the other end of the house, bids me the standard ‘
chuc ngu ngon'
(wish sleep delicious)' and disappears through the curtains. Nguyet takes off her glasses, rubs her eyes and sits on my bed. We chat. She confirms that Binh is now her boyfriend.

‘I thought you were only friends,' I tell her.

‘Before, we were friends, but now we discover we are in love,' she replies matter-of-factly.

‘Is Binh okay that you are not a virgin?' I whisper, paranoid even though her mother speaks no English.

‘No!' she whispers back, eyes wide.

‘He must not know about this.' ‘He doesn't know? But when you have sex …'

‘No!' she whispers emphatically. ‘We cannot have sex because we not yet marry!' She sees the confusion on my face and clarifies. ‘Binh look very … modern and he live in France before, I know, but he is very traditional Vietnamese. I can never tell him. Never.' She becomes agitated and adds, ‘Please Carolyn, never say it. Nobody can know.'

A late-night vendor has entered the compound. His song echoes plangently up and through the window. I'm assailed by that familiar feeling of cultural vertigo. Nothing is as I thought. Binh and Nguyet struck me as two worldly, well-educated characters from relatively affluent families. They've both lived in France. I just assumed they were exceptions to the usual rules. But Binh insists on a virginal girlfriend in a no-sex-before-marriage relationship. And when I ask Nguyet, she confirms that as a male Binh is neither expected nor likely to be a virgin.

The weight of Nguyet's secret is becoming apparent to me. And for the first time, another thing has become apparent to me: that some Westerners who have been here a great deal longer than I have either don't know or don't care about this aspect of the culture. All the male expats screwing their young Vietnamese girlfriends (and talking about it at the
Bia Hoi
) – do they wonder what will happen to these girls after they get bored of them, or move countries?

I ask where the toilet is and find out there isn't one. If I need a toilet I have to get dressed and cross the compound. Someone across the other side has a toilet to which they've given Nguyet's family a copy of the key. The sole water outlet in the house is a pipe in the oil-stained cement entrance area, downstairs, where the motorcycles are kept. Attached to it are a tap and a showerhead.