Single White Female in Hanoi (25 page)

My previous night of a thousand squeals has left me underslept and I'm starting to drift off. Nguyet pats me on the shoulder, says ‘
bonne nuit
' and vanishes through the curtains. I realise she shares a bed with her mother. I never learn where the father sleeps. Conceivably he shares the wooden dais beside the kitchen with his ancient mother, or possibly he sleeps somewhere else in the compound. This is my first encounter with Vietnamese sleeping arrangements. In fact, it's normal for families to share beds with same-sex relatives. Communal family sleeping is a new concept for me.

As trendy, well-educated, independent, single women and fellow musicians who divide our incomes between gigs and students, Nguyet and I seemed to have comparable lives. But now I realise she lives with the terrible secret of carnal knowledge in a house with no toilet and shares a bed with her mother every night.

Nga is waiting in my living room with the news.

‘We bring the cat today.'

As if in response, a loud yowl fills the air.

‘Where?' I look around wildly. I'm very excited about having a cat.

‘He, upstairs,' she gestures. ‘On the roof.' There's another reverberating yowl.

‘Huh?' I experience a sudden bolt of alarm. Every cat I've seen in Hanoi has been tied to something. Could they have tied my cat up on the roof?

I tear up the two flights of stairs to the roof, and sure enough, there's Tuan, Nga's husband, putting the finishing touch on a highly-skilled knot. The knot is at the far end of a piece of string connected to a horrified ginger cat, fresh from a ride on the back of a motorcycle, now securely tethered to a chair beside the washing machine. Beside it is a plastic tray full of big chunks of broken brick – the litter tray. I crouch beside the cat and stroke it. It seems responsive, nuzzling the back of my hand. Tuan looks on blankly.

‘Why?' I ask him in his tongue, pointing to the cat and its tether. He replies in a fluid stream of Vietnamese, as though he expected me to be speaking his language like a native within a few months of my arrival. I understand nothing.

When I shake my head he changes tack. He throws his arms towards the edge of the roof and barks more Vietnamese at me. The cat cowers.

I keep shaking my head. With violent motions, Tuan repeatedly mimes something either jumping or being thrown off the roof. I'm completely stumped. Eventually he sighs, holds up four fingers and yells, ‘
Bon ngay, bon ngay
.'

‘Four days?' I repeat back in English, my face slack with total incomprehension. No doubt Natassia, whose strengths are so different to mine, would have worked this out. When we're in situations that require Vietnamese, I do the speaking and she does the listening. My pronunciation and vocabulary are ahead of hers, yet she only needs one or two familiar words to get the gist. I panic and draw a blank if I can't understand every word. And with Vietnamese words only one syllable long, five can fly past while I'm fighting to remember the meaning of one.

Tuan goes back downstairs. I stroke the cat some more and head down after him. As soon as I walk away the wretched animal starts crying again.

Downstairs Nga tells me that her mother, Xuyen, will feed the cat, every day, on the roof. This means that in addition to all her other exhausting duties and responsibilities, Xuyen has to climb three long and steep flights of stairs daily. I can hardly make the two flights up there from my floor without a pit stop, and I'm twenty years younger than she is. I ask Nga the cat's name.

‘Mieu Mieu,' she tells me, predictably. ‘He is very good cat. Soon, you will have no more mouse.'

When I go through Tuan's mime with Natassia she interprets without even having been there.

‘I suppose the cat must be tied on the roof for four days otherwise he will run away, maybe by jumping off the roof. After that he will stay around the house,' she says. ‘Poor thing,' she adds, with a sigh. She loves cats as much as I do. ‘Does he have a name?'

‘Nope. They just call him Mieu Mieu. But I've named him Jupiter, because he's red and, er, thin … well, I'm not sure why.'

For the next three days, Jupiter cries continuously, except when I pat him, after which the crying continues double-fold. The yowls echo down the stairwell. It's haunting. But by the last day I've grown almost deaf to the distress calls. They're really nothing out of the ordinary anyway. By tuning one's ears closely into the melange of sounds that, combined, create the sawing, roaring, screaming, pounding din of Hanoi, one can nearly always pick out the pitiful squeak of a spindly worm-ridden kitten tied to a motorbike in a new and frightening environment. At any given time, one or two of my neighbours are breaking in a tiny new ratter and sometimes, for many days, I've had to live with the sound round the clock, until I'm certain the animal will drop dead from exhaustion and misery.

On day four, Tuan turns up grinning, saying ‘cat, okay, cat, okay.' For the last couple of months he's been learning English for free at UNCO, where his sister Ly works, but his progress has been almost undetectable. We climb up to the roof and I watch as Jupiter's leash is untied, but at the far end, so that he's as free as a furry flightless kite. Holding the far end of the rope, Tuan drags him down to my place where he ties him to the bedroom door handle.

‘Cat, okay, cat, okay,' he tells me again, and departs.

I fetch the dada litter tray from the roof and put it down in the landing area. Jupiter's string is long enough to reach most parts of my flat. I cancel a social engagement in the Old Quarter to stay home with my new cat. He purrs easily and likes to get up with me on my soft bed, although the sight of a cat harnessed with yards of coloured string sitting on my bed takes some getting used to. That evening, as I bond with Jupiter, I ponder, with some trepidation, what kind of entrail-strewing, rat-mutilating horrors I'll be witnessing soon.

Jupiter stays tied up for the next week, either in my bedroom, the living room, or up on the roof when I go out. After that I untie him, and when I go out I leave him the full run of the stairwell and the rooftop, which he cleverly accesses by jumping through an ornate hole high up in the padlocked sheet metal door leading to the roof. Maybe it's the soft bed and cuddles, but he seems uninterested in making a break for it from the rooftop. When I get home I cry ‘Mieu Mieu' up the stairs and he comes careering down from his favourite spot on the roof to greet me. Calling ‘Jupiter' didn't seem to work. After a few days I ditched ‘Jupiter' altogether and reverted to ‘Mieu Mieu' because every time I called out ‘Jupiter' I felt like an idiot. It's a case of ‘when in Rome'. The name ‘Jupiter' is completely unpronounceable to a local, and, at the end of the day, that's exactly what Mieu Mieu is.

Over his first week in the flat, Mieu Mieu embarks on a curious odyssey. Straining at the end of his string, he works his way around the place, nosing hard into every corner, and especially the ones where the
chuot
activity has been most boisterous. When he comes upon such a corner his ears prick up and his back legs shiver slightly. He turns his head delicately to one side and then emits a curious and specific wail. But while it's certainly intriguing, I'm starting to become impatient. When's he going to get down to business and start on the carnage jag?

It's another week before I realise, with a jolt of astonishment, that I haven't laid eyes nor ears on a single rodent since Mieu Mieu arrived. The spooky wailing, it seems, was a designated rat-tone. He's a latter-day Pied Piper. The rats have packed up and moved on without a drop of blood spilt.

However, like all cats raised by Hanoians, he shows signs of mental illness. His grooming skills are patchy, his behaviour can be a little unpredictable and he has an extensive vocabulary of strange and disturbed noises that I would not previously have associated with a cat. Sometimes he breaks from a perfectly happy disposition to yowl a low ululation for no apparent reason, as though at the misery of it all. Other times he unleashes a bowelful of reeking diarrhoea onto my bed, causing bedlam as Lien and I go into damage control. It's a toss-up sometimes whether or not I was better off with the rats. But in general, he's my new buddy, and he sleeps on the bed with me at night, or at least until about 4.30am, when he bleats powerfully at the door until I get up and let him out.

Nga tells me her family has had Mieu Mieu for some time.

‘He is very old,' she reveals.

‘Oh! He still seems young! How old is he?' I ask her.

‘Ah, he, nearly three,' she tells me.

Natassia and two other female expats from her elevator-less, seven-storey building have decided to throw a vegetarian buffet party on their roof and I've been conscripted into the organising committee.

Early invitees complain about the meatless cuisine, so we concoct a story about celebrating a South Indian festival in honour of the Vegetarian Goddess, Leguma. For some reason people seem to swallow this flimflam without complaint.

In the afternoon Natassia takes me to a massive supermarket north of the Old Quarter. This place makes the
Nam Bo
look like a hole in the wall. It's the size of a large supermarket in Sydney, although, perhaps surprisingly, not as busy. We go crazy, buying cooking ingredients, snack foods, soft drinks, paper plates and cups and a huge frying pan, spending nearly 300,000 dong, which at US$20, is the equivalent of a month's wage for the average Hanoian. The cashier piles the goods into a series of plastic bags the size of Santa's toysack.

We stagger out to collect the Angel 80 from the attendant. I lay down my quarry beside the bike. Between us we have about twenty five kilos.

‘There's no way we can get all this stuff back to your place,' I tell Natassia.

‘We have to try,' she says, beginning to load the handlebars and the saddle.

Ten minutes later we wobble out of the parking area. I can't see anything at all of the outside world.

‘Just hold on tight with your knees. I'll let you know if you need to duck or lean,' Natassia promises, although we both know neither of these manoeuvres would be possible. I appear to the onlooker as a mountain of white plastic sacks. Only the presence of a hand emerging from somewhere at the top reveals my human identity. The hand is holding tightly onto a massive frying pan. Things commonly seen sharing motorcycles with humans in Hanoi include televisions, bicycles, adult skinned pigs, and refrigerators, so we're not particularly conspicuous. In fact, from this position, I could just about pass for a local.

Back at the block, the other two girls are waiting for us downstairs. Natassia's kitchen is a large, shared affair on the ground floor, so that if she wants to cook anything she has to book ahead and walk down six flights of stairs. Anybody with any interest or ability in cooking would have vetoed the apartment on the strength of this. It doesn't inconvenience Natassia in the slightest.

In order to get the cooking started we have to evict three generations of women from the kitchen, which we had pre-booked, and air it to ameliorate the fish sauce fumes. We get to work. The Dutch girl from the third floor, Gisela, has scored a kilo of ‘Western sweet potatoes', known in the West as ‘potatoes', and embarks on a potato salad. Laura, a six-foot tall German beauty from the fourth floor makes dhal with lentils then cuts up fruit for a massive fruit salad. I discovered okra, my favourite vegetable, at the supermarket, so I'm going to make a middle-eastern-style dish. This leaves Natassia with her one speciality – Russian salad.

Russian salad, at best, is a crime against flavour and an indicator that I would starve in Russia. Natassia's recipe calls for a tin of peas, a tin of diced carrot and potato, some hard-boiled eggs and half a jar of locally-made mayonnaise. Tinned food is scarce and dear in Hanoi, which is why there are no tin-openers.

Natassia manages to get the tins open with her Swiss Army Knife, although she needs help boiling the eggs. The half-jar of translucent Vietnamese mayo makes sucking noises before surrendering its contents.

People start arriving before we finish, so we ask them to carry bowls up to the table we've put out on the roof. Justin, the young teacher from Global turns up with his sister Alison and their massive social circle. By 9pm the rooftop is packed with a crowd which, I'm glad to observe, includes several Vietnamese. The latter gather curiously round our food and discuss it. Many of them have brought food, mostly mooncakes or fresh fruit. Vietnamese will rarely turn up to a social engagement without a gift of seasonal food. Nguyet pops in for an hour and even Zac, in his new incarnation as caffeine-crazed anti-Buddha makes an appearance, provoking a brief but bloody political stoush with a young girl who recently turned up to teach English, before disappearing.

At around 10pm, Laura, the German giantess, fetches me, chaperoning me across the rooftop towards a recently arrived crowd.

‘My friend My Linh is here and she knows you! She wants to say hi.' Laura feeds me into a small group of Vietnamese guests and one of them yelps and puts her hands on my shoulders, bringing her face close to mine.

‘I was looking for you for long time!' she exclaims in a singsong voice. ‘Since that day you come to my shop, remember?' She sees my face straining and adds ‘I am My Linh, the poet. You are the musician.'

My Linh has a broad, acne-scarred face, a shoulder-length bob and burning bright eyes. I've only once before met a self-described poet in Hanoi. It's a rare and memorable thing. I begin to recall the encounter.

‘You work in the CD shop on Hang Bac?' I ask her. She screams ‘yes' and kisses me on both cheeks.

I met My Linh about a week after I arrived. At the time, she seemed like just any other eager shop assistant practicing her English, and I didn't take her friendliness too personally, but in hindsight, she was atypical. Firstly because she referred critically, if cryptically, to her government, and secondly because she told me she wrote romantic stories and poetry. I'm not sure if I've met a single local since that day that laid claim to being a creative writer of any kind. I remember My Linh filled a page of my notebook with new vocabulary for me, which I've long since learnt. She seemed so chuffed to meet me on that day that I gave her my phone number and email address, but, as I learn, she lost them and has been looking for me ever since.

Naturally, I'm very flattered by this, and gladly provide my details again. We chat for a while about what I've been doing since we last met. She talks about Laura a lot and I realise they're good friends. I'm very happy to meet My Linh again too. I feel certain she can help show me her culture, of which she's very proud. But for now, the effort of feigning sobriety is starting to take its toll and I make a polite escape back to messier company.

By 11pm most Vietnamese who made the trip to the ‘Westerner party' have cleared the deck. By 1am even the most footloose and curfew-free Vietnamese have followed suit and left the festivities to the experts. Justin tries to stay in the toilet while his friend takes a dump, but loses the bet and emerges gargling for help into the crowd upstairs, his eyes streaming. An unknown woman manages to get soaked in something from head to toe with her clothes on. Eddy, a long-term expat suffering legendary alcoholism, falls down drunk and can't get up again. He calls from the floor for someone to bring him more beer. Someone does. The good vodka runs out and someone unveils a bottle of the local namesake. The night spins on.

Below us Hanoi sleeps or works. A team of construction workers has been dropped off by bus at the building site next door. They work loud, hard and helmetless until dawn on flimsy wooden scaffolding lit by a single floodlight. Ancient flaking trucks full of young guys smoking cigarettes trundle along the dyke-road below. From 3am onwards the road fills with sleepy-eyed vendors arriving from the provinces to sell flowers, livestock or vegetables from the market that sprawls along it. They come by truck, motorcycle, tractor, bicycle or water-buffalo. By mid-morning they'll be fast asleep sitting up, their heads on their knees, conical hats dangling from their fingers.

At 4am an Anglo-Indian girl with impressive endurance leads those of us still standing in a paean to the Goddess Leguma. Then we join hands and do the chicken dance. We're loud. We act like total dickheads. It could be any old party in any old city in the West. But it isn't.