Single White Female in Hanoi (26 page)

It's impossible not to fall in love with Hanoi in November.

It's not just a weather thing, although the dry warm days and cooler nights are like a meteorological miracle. It's not just the cornflower blue heavens which, after an eternity of low white skies, look like a masterpiece to rival the Sistine Chapel ceiling. For me, it's above all about an obscure flower-bearing tree.

The flower is called
Hoa Sua
, which translates as milk flower. Hanoians tell me that the tree is found nowhere in the world outside of North Vietnam, which adds further to its charisma. November is its month of glory.

The smell insinuates its way into my memory like a beautiful song heard in fragments on shop radios. A verse here, a chorus there, until the whole arrangement is known.
Hoa Sua
flowers release their fragrance only at night, and there's nothing so obscure, so hard to know the full specifications of as that smell. A hint of it one time and I smell fresh apples, another time and it's the smell of a memory of my grandmother's flat in London, next time and it's the purest essence of white flower. But I can only ever know the smell in hints, wafts, or at best, a single lungful, and only from the back of a motorcycle. It's maddeningly elusive, striking without preamble. Each time, by the very next breath, the smell has crumbled to exhaust, gutters and fish sauce.

Hoa Sua
trees are broadcast almost randomly throughout Hanoi, although certain streets are renowned for them. No matter how many nights I persuade Natassia or whoever is riding to stop the motorcycle so that I can locate the tree and lay eyes on the flower, I always fail. I never manage to inhale more than enough to tell me merely that the tree is nearby. I never see the flower.

November has another trick up its sleeve. It's called ‘Teacher's Day'. It's a day for acknowledging the efforts of teachers. In the West, being a teacher is probably on a par with being a desk clerk. In Vietnam, in line with Confucian teaching, teachers are very highly regarded and accorded great respect. On teacher's day, every teacher in the country is showered with gifts by all their students and some by their employers. I'm genuinely surprised when I realise how seriously this is taken.

By the end of the day I'm lugging a spectacular lacquered plate, a carved wooden box and a huge bunch of flowers from the students and staff at UNCO. I struggle to get it all home on a
xe om
.

The next day, Thinh, the Global ‘Rector', treats all staff members at Global to a free lunch at a buffet in town. I arrive home toting another bunch of flowers. At the entrance to
Pho Yen The
I find
Ba Gia
on her cement throne and present her with the bouquet. Her watery eyes shine and her face cracks into a beaming smile.

Zac, having been sacked, naturally misses out on the staff buffet. Miffed, he pumps me for details afterwards.

‘Miss Ngoc has announced her wedding,' is all I have for him. His face falls.

‘Those titties,' he whimpers.

Zac's been on my back again for a job at UNCO. I've put in a good word for him, telling Ly untruthfully that he's fully qualified, and truthfully, that he's prepared to work for a lower wage than I am.

A week later, I discover him teaching a trial class on the first floor while on my way up the stairs. I wave and smile, continuing up towards my favourite class. On the second floor I pass a classroom in which a Vietnamese teacher is teaching a class of about thirty students. In local style, the lesson is conducted in perfect silence, save for the squeak of chalk on the board. I peer in to read the board. It appears to be a lesson on travel. The blackboard reads:
Road
Singler-way, double-ways Trek=path.

I watch a student copy it all down into her book. ‘Trek=past'.

This helps me to understand some of the inexplicable words students sometimes use. One day in the future this girl will tell her American boss: ‘In my country, things were different in the trek.'

I've had a large intermediate class at UNCO for a whole term now and we've bonded. The students clap on my entry each lesson and often bring me fruit and other gifts. I know I've bonded with a class when I know everyone's first name, even the girls who never speak, which is most of the girls.

There's a rough-looking young guy called Duy. He turns up to class wearing a backwards baseball hat. He scowls in his seat and rarely talks. In week five I discover he's earnest, sweet-natured, and a dancer. It's a typical example of the difficulty in pigeonholing Vietnamese.

There's an intriguing guy in the class called Lam. He's lanky and long-necked, with round, black-rimmed glasses and teeth of random lengths, colours and inclinations. Lam spent ten years in the Czech Republic so he speaks fluent Czech and is culturally different from the others. He's quick-witted and seems to understand irony. His English is good too and despite his odd appearance I sometimes wish he'd ask me out. But, as I'm learning, that would never happen.

The star of the show, however, is the enigmatic An. Without An in the class I would have to work almost as hard as a real teacher. With him, I can count on enough non-sequiturs, shambolic anecdotes and fantastic malapropisms to steer the class through a happy hour and a half.

An is short but solidly built with perfect skin, glasses and buck teeth. He's long-sighted enough that his dreamy eyes are in a permanent state of magnification. His lips are red and habitually stretched into a rueful smile around his teeth. Until he starts to talk he gives off an air of considered intelligence.

Today I teach the class a lesson on superstition where students volunteer their own ghost stories. It's great fun. Each narrator has the undivided attention of the class. The girls shudder as they tell me of flickering altar lights and messages from the ancestors. A boy called Thai tells of seeing his grandmother after she'd been buried. It's all going well until Lam alienates everyone by expressing disbelief in ghosts. I'm impressed as hell – skepticism like this is rare indeed, but the stories dry up immediately. The subject flickers and wanes like a haunted light then An's hand goes up.

‘Miss Carolyn! I have story. You will be so scare.'

‘An! Tell us your ghost story!' I cry.

‘Oh. Very scare. I go to forest with some my friend, camping! And in the night when it is very dark I am sleeping. A terrible!' An looks anguished as he scans the class. He has everyone's attention, although already some of the girls are looking dubious.

‘What?' we chorus.

‘The Mummy come!'

‘Mummies are from Egypt!' Lam cries out exasperated.

‘I know, but before, I do not know, and I was so scare!'

‘An,' I begin, ‘What was it really, this mummy? How did you see a mummy in the forest of North Vietnam?'

‘Ah. Later I find out,' he recollects. ‘My friend, they take toilet paper and put like this around the body … ' he breaks off because the class is in hysterics, myself included. After a moment An smiles his rueful, bemused smile and shrugs happily. It's likely he has provoked great laughter throughout his schooling, and it's likely this continues now that he's at University. And this is the thing about An that's scarier than any ghost story, the reason I now flinch intermittently whenever I stand in a locally-designed building: he's a fourth-year architecture student.

I'm meeting Natassia and some mutual friends for dinner later but I'm not in a hurry so I pop up the road to visit Nga. I know she's unhappy at the moment. She doesn't get along with Tuan's mother, which is the classic Vietnamese family drama. Of course, as the daughter-in-law, Nga has to live with her husband's parents and keep house for them, and, seeing as how she hates them, she's just not in the mood.

She's in the downstairs room watching TV with her toddler, Dao, and looks delighted when I appear at the open door. She can talk to me in English without the in-laws following a word, which is as good as a holiday. She offers me some fried silkworms and a cup of lotus-scented tea. I accept the tea and we sit together on the couch.

‘Who's home tonight?' I ask Nga.

‘We home,' she gestures to herself and Dao, ‘and Tuan parent,' she adds in a whisper, indicating the next room in the compound.

‘Where is Chang?'

‘My daughter?' Nga always seems surprised when I mention Chang. ‘Oh! She is upstair. In her room.'

Chang is ten, beautiful, immaculately-behaved and roundly ignored. I've began to realise that gender differences here are fostered from birth. From my observations, a boy is likely to be pandered to more than a girl, fondled more, given wildly different playthings, encouraged to vocalise more and to urinate anywhere, and he'll notice from infancy that he's served and doted on by females. It all helps to explain the apparent lack of ‘Sensitive New Age Guys'.

I ask after Dao, who's still coughing. He's been sick for two months.

‘Not so good,' Nga admits. ‘He don't like to eat.' She points to the plastic bowl of uneaten food on the table. It's fish porridge. I wonder whether I would have been the same if I'd been a Vietnamese baby. Nga herself is looking thin too and her skin is poor. She needs cheering up so I tell her stories about foreigner antics and she chuckles in disbelief. But after a few minutes she jumps up, plunges her hand into the front of Dao's pyjama pants and removes his penis.

‘One minute!' She cries. With her free hand she grabs the plastic tumbler on the table beside the food bowl. ‘I'm sorry,' is the last coherent thing she says before she directs Dao's tiny member into the cup and issues the sustained sibilant noise used by all mothers in the country. ‘Schsschsschssch.' It works. I hear the trickling sound of pee running down the inside of the cup. Whatever cue Dao's bladder gave was too subtle for me.

‘Is it like this in your country?' Nga turns her head to ask me, mid-stream.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Do the mother do … like this?' she looks hopeful. She's just had a moment of cultural self-awareness – perhaps her first – and it's made her self-conscious. I shake my head and suppress a grin. I cannot lie.

‘No. They do not.' I consider telling her about nappies, but decide against. It's too complicated.

Dao has just completed his performance when Tuan arrives home and sits himself down heavily at the table by the door. He's tall and good-looking enough that even a couple of my Western girlfriends have commented on it. But he seems different tonight. His face is red and his eyes are sly. Nga gets up and crosses the compound to the kitchen to get his dinner, leaving me alone with him. He lights a cigarette and leers at me in an unfamiliar way, saying nothing. It's very surprising. Tuan has always been perfectly polite to me, if perhaps a little indifferent.

As it happens, tonight my hair is washed and I'm wearing a short skirt over pants with high heels and a little make-up. Damn it, where I come from I would probably turn heads, but not in Hanoi. It's flattering to be noticed by a Vietnamese man but this isn't the ideal context. I'm relieved when Nga gets back. She sits herself back down beside me and Tuan speaks to her with long emphasised tones. She laughs.

‘What did Tuan say?'

‘He say he think you look attractive tonight,' she tells me smiling. ‘It's true! Tonight you look … young.' Tuan adds another comment, and Nga seems to agree with him. She turns to me.

‘What?' I say impatiently.

‘I'm not sure! I think, maybe he is … drunk.' Nga whispers, clearly amused. I look back at Tuan. His dark eyes are shining at me lecherously. It's perfectly obvious to me that he's drunk, randy and wearing beer goggles with lenses so thick that even a Western woman in her thirties looks alluring. It's unsettling, and so is Nga's lack of concern. I realise, almost with regret, that I pose no danger at all. It's just an amusing aberration on Tuan's part, as threatening to their marriage as a hard on caused by the vibrations of a motorcycle engine. I want to leave.

‘You know,' Nga pipes up suddenly, ‘I think maybe you can still find a husband! But you must try to wear more make-up.'

The green ceiling fan in my room has five speeds. It's a kind of barometer. In August fifth gear hardly stirred the air. By late September, fourth gear seemed to do the job. By October, third gear. By the first week of November second gear was more than enough. Now, late-November, the fateful day has arrived. With a click of finality, the fan is off. I sleep clutching my bedding about me. In the morning I put socks on, then boots. Soon, at night, when the boots come off, the socks stay on. Outside, the sky gets lower, and dark-coloured padded ski-coats proliferate, like a bloom, on motorcyclists.

Luckily I packed my red woollen Turkish poncho. I wrap it luxuriously around me before leaving the house. The
xe om
drivers gather round to inspect it, grinning, and I smile back like a rock star giving it up for the fans. Within a block of travel, I realise I have the attention of everybody within seeing distance. I take an objective look at myself and realise, with a sinking feeling, that I look ridiculous. My red tasselled poncho sticks out like a dog boner. Hanoi is a town where no one dares to be different.

In haste, I ask my way to the coat district and for about US$6 I get a beauty. A dark-coloured padded ski-coat. No one will stare now. The poncho goes back in the wardrobe for good.

Hien, meanwhile, is tearing through the bales of lurid yellow, electric orange and hot pink. I now have the not-quite-long-enough orange scarf and three yellow knitted shoulder bags of different sizes. The last one has a spectacular lacy trim in hot pink. But she wraps up in cotton rags to stay warm. I buy her a blanket and a pillow.

The sublime smell of
Hoa Sua
still lingers on some streets, but weakly. The creeping chill heralds its demise. I'm downcast by the fact the flower has come and gone without Natassia managing to smell it once. She seems to regard its very existence with some cynicism. Her smoker's nose detects only industrial-strength smells. It's true this is mostly a blessing in Hanoi, but for me,
Hoa Sua
is the payoff for all the lurking stenches.

One moonless night I get home late, tired. The street and the compound are in total darkness. I realise when I try to turn on the light at the bottom of the stairs that there's a late night power cut on. By the light of my imitation zippo I make it up the stairs and get my key in the lock. Mieu Mieu prrrinks a happy entrance from upstairs as I open my bedroom door. I undress and crawl into bed.

In no time I'm dozing happily with the cat on top of me. I snuggle harder into the cosy bedding and drift off thinking about how much I love my warm bed, how I love to feel the weight of a doona on me in winter. I'm almost asleep when the jarring note sounds.
What is wrong with this picture?
My bed isn't cosy. I've been cold for the last week. My top bedding consists of an empty doona cover I brought from Australia and a little polyester blanket. With one finger, I explore my doona cover in the darkness.
Huh?

I sit up and reach for the torch I keep on the dresser. Its pale beam reveals a stuffed doona. Someone with a key has let themselves into my apartment, stuffed my doona cover, and snuck out again. I suspect Xuyen.

No party ever claims responsibility.

I tell Zac and Natassia over lunch at the Kiwi café.

‘What a beautiful story,' Natassia glows.

‘Ah, the milk of human kindness,' Zac sighs joylessly. He orders a strong cappuccino and sinks his head into his hands. His new neighbourhood is turning out to be a non-stop shop of horrors. Last week he claims to have watched, whimpering, from his balcony as two junkies injected heroin into their penises under the shelter of the overgrown weed patch opposite his front gate.

‘I'm living beside an enormous outdoor brothel,' he intones, without a trace of enthusiasm. ‘I can't leave home at night without falling over at least one man in the throes of … ' he shudders, ‘ … ministrations.'

‘Of what?' squints Natassia.

‘You know. Like, picture two people, hiding in the shadows and they're almost invisible except for the flash of jiggling jewellery,' he explains, illustrating with a hand gesture.

‘Really!' her eyes light up playfully. ‘Aren't you tempted?'

‘Get real!' he sneers contemptuously. ‘Why would I
pay
a
stranger
for a service that I've spent nearly fourteen years perfecting myself?' There's a pause while we digest this piece of reasoning. It's watertight, there's no denying it.

‘Are you thinking of moving out?' she asks him, carefully.

‘No chance. The location's perfect, I've got five bedrooms to myself, ridiculously cheap, and the rent's only gonna get cheaper when I tell my landlord about this.'

‘Good! So, you'd better hurry up and have your housewarming party,' she says in a tone that strikes fear into Zac and me. ‘I've set the date.'

The fact of the matter is, November's almost over and Natassia's still here. For a long time, the question of her travel plans has lingered in the air, but Zac and I were loathe to remind her of it. Her departure seemed to be mercifully fixed to an ever-receding time in the near future. But now she announces an actual date, with more than the usual certainty.

‘I'm leaving on the tenth of December,' she declares.

Call it a coincidence, but the thought of being in Hanoi without Natassia seems to cripple my immune system. With Natassia, even the most depressing, most unfair, most offensive things about Hanoi are bearable.

I leave the café feeling fine. On the way home I swallow and notice a slight irritation in my throat. By sunset, my throat is carpeted in angry pustules. By night time it's so infected, I can taste blood when I cough, which is now quite often. I've been struck down by the fastest bug in town.

I cancel all work and spend the next week in bed, whacked out on over-the-counter codeine. Natassia brings me groceries and makes me hot drinks. An, the goofy architecture student, makes an unannounced visit, hoping to take me to an art gallery. He's joined the list of students who have taken it upon themselves to show me their culture. When he sees I'm sick, he returns the next day with fruit and flowers. He sits on the far end of my bed and with great seriousness, delivers a Vietnamese lesson, teaching me to ask for a glass.

‘
Xin, mot cai coc nay
'. Word for word, this translates to ‘please, one thing cup this.' I know intuitively that he's just taught me a piece of puffed-up text-book Vietnamese, perfectly correct and perfectly unusable.

My convalescence is slow. By the end of the first week, my course is clear. I ring Thai Airways and book a return flight back to Sydney for Christmas. Five weeks of summer with family and friends, maybe some gigs. I feel better immediately. Pre-emptive nostalgia kicks in, and Hanoi suddenly looks better, smells better. I care about everyone around me that much more. Like many places, maybe all places, Hanoi looks most spectacular when viewed through the warm ruby lens of imminent departure.

But back at the computer at NER headquarters, I cough for weeks, distracting everyone around me. Eventually, Chanh the Stooge sidles up to me with a maternal expression, puts her hands on my shoulders.

‘You very sick,' she declares. I look up at her in wonder. She's never spoken a word to me before. My cough was considerably worse last week.

‘I'm getting better,' I assure her.

‘No! You must take special medicine, traditional medicine of Vietnam,' she says. Her pronunciation is abominable. ‘Now I bring you to the
Nha Thuoc
.'

‘Now, I'm working on this story, very busy,' I try. But Chanh, sister-in-law of ‘Malcolm' upstairs, knows better.

‘Not important,' she snaps.

My protests are fruitless. As she prises me out of my chair, I decide some herbal medicine probably won't kill me, and I wouldn't have the knowledge or vocabulary to order it myself.

Gripping my elbow, Chanh guides me out through the compound gates and across the main road to a
Nha Thuoc
. A small, dusty, old man shuffles out in a white coat and leans across the glass counter full of medicaments. Chanh speaks to him, pointing at me as though I were a sore knee. Periodically she nods at me reassuringly and says ‘special medicine.'

Eventually the old guy unlocks the glass counter and reaches inside. His bony hand roves along like the hydraulic claw that picks up fluffy toys in the amusement arcade machine. In place of furry gonks there are boxes with pictures of tigers and seahorses, and packet upon packet of pills. He brings his claw to a halt over a packet labelled ‘Keflex'. I squint at the generic name: ‘Cephalexin'. This is no fruit and herb cocktail.

‘This is antibiotics.' I say.

‘Very good medicine,' she replies, taking the packet from the man.

‘Yes, I know Chanh. Western medicine.'

‘No!' she says sternly. ‘Vietnam medicine. You must buy.' She brings her face close to mine for emphasis, and adds ‘You too thin. This make you strong.'

I pay for the pills, figuring I can throw them away when I get home, but Chanh is as cluey as a psychiatric nurse. She orders me a glass of boiled water over the counter, opens the packet and puts a pill in my hand. She and the dusty vendor watch me in pointed silence. Resistance is useless. I take the pill.