Single White Female in Hanoi (32 page)

With my maid Lien moving to Nguyet's new marital home and out of the picture, my place has started on its familiar backslide. To complicate matters, there's been a breakdown deep in the sewerage system. My toilet is exhaling third-world fumes like a gas canister with the stopcock blown off.

I complain to the landlords, Nga and Tuan. Tuan comes over and tinkers sullenly in my bathroom for a while. The smell improves for a few days, or at least, becomes more erratic. Sometimes it's hardly there. Then it returns. I complain again and this time I come home to find Tuan and a posse of tradesmen in my place. They smoke and stand around in the bathroom. The gas isn't flammable, I conclude. Tuan leaves saying ‘ok now' and the smell recedes again.

Luckily, a friend of a friend has found me a new maid called Kim. She's ‘expensive' – fifteen thousand dong an hour – but I'm happy to hear that she speaks some English. Quickly, I come to rue this fact since she never shuts up. She turns up for work wearing lipstick and going-out clothes and dons a tight apron. She's flirtatious. The main topic of her prattling is her old employer, an aging diplomat at the Danish Embassy who has now returned home.

‘I miss my old boss very much, very much,' she moans, leaning on the broom she hasn't used yet.

‘My boss, he alway give me ektra money,' she says, pausing thoughtfully while dusting the rice cooker.

‘My old boss, he buy me new clothez and a stereo,' she tells me an hour later, having progressed to re-arranging the pile of objects on my desk.

‘My old boss, he very good to me,' she reminds me a few days later, rearranging the dresses on my clothes rack by colour. If it's true, I can't imagine it was her domestic skills that impressed him, since she has barely more than I do, which is barely any at all. Yet although I'm uncomfortable with Kim's overtures of bosom-buddyship, we get along well enough, and she seems to be able to at least stem the tide of domestic deterioration.

But if Nga had nothing nice to say about Lien, she is far less impressed by Kim. I've learnt from experience that no one in Vietnam approves of anyone else's maid, but when Nga speaks to Kim the bark becomes more of a growl. I have no idea what it's about, but I'm more concerned by the fact that the toilet has relapsed. I keep incense burning at all times.

It's a quiet Sunday at home when Nga and Tuan break into the living room. They enter without knocking and without removing their shoes, which I would never dare to do at their place. They look around wildly, ignoring me, then turn and march into my bedroom, where Kim is re-arranging my collection of handbags. Without as much as a hello in my direction, Nga begins shouting at Kim in Vietnamese. Finally she turns to me.

‘She break the toilet,' Nga tells me.

‘The toilet was broken before I hired her,' I tell Nga angrily. ‘Now please take off your shoes.' Nga kicks off her sandals violently. Tuan, looming behind her, doesn't move, just glares at Kim. The air around us seems to be ticking with tension. Kim has frozen, her face impassive.

‘We do not agree to have her in
our
house,' says Nga. I'm almost too stunned to respond. I thought I paid Nga $200 a month to make this
my
house, and I paid Kim her wage to make her
my
maid. I've been too lax, I reflect. I've let them walk all over me.

‘She is no good,' Nga continues. ‘She is not a good person. We don't agree. She must finish now.'

‘Oy! Shut up Nga,' I shout. ‘Kim speaks English. Do you understand me?' The fury is building up inside me. ‘She speaks English probably better than you do. In my culture we don't speak badly about somebody in front of them.'

Nga turns back to Kim and barks out a few more words before I intervene. I want her and Tuan out of my bedroom.

‘Nga, we will talk about this tonight please. I want you to go now.'

‘Ok,' Nga says. ‘I will call you tonight.' I nod, as, with a last baleful glance at Kim, they retreat.

Kim takes a moment to reactivate, then removes her apron.

‘I go now,' she says quietly.

‘Oh no you don't,' I tell her, alarmed. She's been away for two weeks and my place is in urgent need of her ministrations, however incompetent. ‘Please don't be afraid of Nga. She's gone now. I will talk to her tonight and explain the toilet is not your fault. Okay?'

‘No, I think I must go now. She told me I must leave immediately.' says Kim. I shake my head.

‘Nga has gone home. She cannot sack you anyway. You work for me, not her. Please keep working.'

Kim looks dubious, but puts the apron back on and gets back to work. I wander over to the CD player and select some mellow Miles Davis. We both need to relax badly. I pour myself a glass of herbal
Ruou
from a bottle I bought months ago and light a cigarette. I smoke it at my desk staring off into the neighbour's rooftop laundry space. A young woman is hanging out a basket of whites. The blood stops buzzing in my head and peace slowly returns.

Then I hear footsteps in the stairwell. My heart turns over unpleasantly. I spin around in time to see Nga and Tuan appear in my hallway and this time they're really angry. Tuan, red-faced, leads the way.

I run into the bedroom, positioning myself between Tuan and Kim, and I turn to Tuan. But it's a new Tuan: more psychotic than the previous one. He jabs brutally at the air, pointing through me to Kim. He screams a few words at her then turns to me to translate, putting his full eight months of English tuition into use.

‘She. Out.' There's spittle around his mouth. Nga is standing behind him, her face half woman, half bulldog. I'm not going to mess with them in this state.

I hug Kim and give her a wad of notes. She's gone before I can ask for her phone number.

I'll never learn what Nga and Tuan knew, or saw, that I didn't. There was no doubt Kim had a rather slatternly air about her, yet Nga's assessment of her seemed impossibly fast.

The next day I ring Mr Can, a real estate agent I know through my friend Bill. I ask him to start looking for a one-bedroom place.

If Natassia were here we could get a place together. That would make moving house seem like a step forward, instead of sideways. I've received only one email from her since she left. She was in Cambodia. She missed me but was enjoying herself, travelling with some Israelis she'd met on the trail. ‘I don't know when I'll come back to Hanoi,' she wrote. I'm beginning to get the feeling she's moved on.

There's a seven-bedroom yellow house up on West Lake. I spend a fair bit of time there. It's party central.

Justin and his sister Alison, my Global colleagues, moved there over Christmas. So did Angela, the young American teacher, and five others, all of them friends of mine, all of them fond of a drink.

Recently, Angela and co-habitant Sheridan chipped in and bought a full-sized electronic piano. Since that day I've spent more time there than ever, practicing, working hard to recover the agility, or ‘chops', that have been in decline since my arrival in Vietnam.

The house also has cable TV. Zac's managed to wrangle a copy of the front door key from Justin, by pleading addiction to CNN. It's a cosy set up but it heralds the demise of an era.

I'm sitting with Zac on the roof of the Kiwi café, watching the street below when the moment comes. We're having a coffee en route to the yellow house. All inhabitants are out, but Zac's got the key. He needs his CNN fix, and I'm in need of a solid hour at the keyboard.

‘See that guy begging down there … ' Zac begins, drawing my attention to a ragged, elderly man with one leg.

We watch the guy for a moment. He's soliciting the Westerners leaving the café downstairs. He cuts the standard sad figure. I'm not sure why Zac's pointed him out, then he pipes up again.

‘I bet he cut his own leg off for the sympathy vote.'

I look at Zac in disgust. ‘I'd think a land mine might have saved him the bother, don't you?''

‘Caz, I won't hold your ignorance against you,' he bites, with sudden venom, ‘but there have never been any landmines in Vietnam.'

‘What? Are you sure?' I ask, dubiously. Given that kids get killed nearly every week in the provinces by unexploded ordnance, I imagined land mines abounded. Zac exhales that warning breath.

‘I'll say it one more time. There are no landmines in Vietnam.'

‘So what's killing these kids that get blown up every day?' I expect him to tell me it's all cluster bombs, which I might accept, since I'm no expert. But Zac's pedagogic skills have gone down in a blaze of defensiveness.

‘I'll say it one more time,' he repeats, through gritted teeth. ‘There are no land mines in Vietnam.'

‘Alright!' I intone, exasperated. ‘You've made your point. What's with your foul temper today?'

‘Look,' that terrible fricative exhalation again, ‘I don't try to tell you how to play an E sharp,' he grinds his teeth momentarily. ‘I'd appreciate it if you don't try telling me about South East Asian history.'

‘Fuck Zac. You should hear yourself right now.' We make eye contact, hold it for a moment. It occurs to me that his coffee drinking habit may have spiralled out of control. ‘E sharp' is usually known as F anyway,' I add.

Zac's face gets darker. I continue: ‘Forgive my ignorance, but I've just come back from Laos and there was certainly a shitload of landmines there.'

‘Caz. You need to get your facts straight,' his voice is thoroughly nasty now. ‘There's never been any landmines in Laos either.'

It's not any firm conviction that I'm right, although it later turns out I am, that makes me walk away. It's the magnitude of the arsehole factor.

‘I'll see you downstairs when your mood's improved.'

But minutes later, while I'm sitting with a friend downstairs, I see Zac paying at the counter. Then I hear him roar off angrily on the Minsk, scuttling our plan.

My fury doubles at the thought of my much-anticipated piano session, which is now receding, with Doppler effect, with every incompetent swerve, with every stomped-on gear change, with every violent pull on the Minsk's throttle.

This fallout leaves me angrier than the others. Over the next week, pride puts the final boot in. I know this irrational truculence isn't the real Zac. It's the insecure, bullied kid he once was. The fact is I miss his company but I'm too proud to solicit it until I've had the apology that he's too proud to provide. The stand off is total. In another month or two, without another word having passed between us, Zac will leave Hanoi, a city and a culture he's despised from the moment he arrived two years earlier. His personal growth trajectory here, such as it was, is over. Hanoi has no more to offer him, never had much. He'll move to China, where he'll find a culture for which he has more respect, a culture in which he feels the exigencies of survival haven't shattered the intellectual climate as badly.

My fallout with Zac affects me in stages. Once I realise it's irreversible, I hit a new low. I shun social engagements. Insomnia plagues me, and in the unnatural quiet of the Hanoi night I'm forced to evaluate what's left for me here.

With beef, beer and bike-riding off the menu, Hanoi, for me, has never been quite the garden of pleasures it is for other expats. Furthermore, Zac and Natassia feel irreplaceable. Without them, I feel displaced and not even my closest other friends here can fill the void.

I'm beset by my degree of alienation from the Vietnamese mind. I feel different beyond measure – too complex, too steeped in irony, too individuated. I'm too quick to find myriad perspectives on events and situations, too critical, unable to confine my reality to irreducible truths, in fact, unable to reduce it much at all, so that there's a constant background level of bewilderment.

By virtue of being Vietnamese, my Vietnamese friends share unfathomable commonalities. Their sense of identity is so solid, so universal, it's taken for granted. They don't suffer existential uncertainties and confusion. They seem, in some ways, like simplified humans, naïve, repetitive, unpondering. They have no fear of stating the bleeding obvious, of looking stupid. None of them spent their teen years experimenting, questioning, rebelling. They never had the solitude required for it. I conceive their personalities as smooth, unfurrowed things.

My personality flaps around in the crosswinds of perception, frayed ends everywhere. Like many Westerners, I'm partly unstuck from the full context of my own history and culture, and this very fact is also what makes me cynical, overly analytical, inconsistent.

I toy with the idea of leaving Hanoi. And the more I contemplate it, the more attractive it seems. I want to move house anyway, and Mr Can, the real estate agent has found me nothing viable. I'm sick of Nga and Tuan – in fact, of my entire neighbourhood. After nearly a year, the gargoyle-headed neighbour downstairs still fixes me in a hate stare every time she spots me. Then there's the discomfort, albeit self-inflicted, to be had every time I pass Oanh's
pho
stall.

With the assiduous tuition of Zac, I've come to see the culture around me as hostile, backwards, and rather brutal. This is the very antithesis of what I came here to find. How can I reconcile my disappointment with my former philosophies?

And yet … the fact is, with Zac gone, some of my cynicism towards all things Vietnamese is starting to come loose. There are key things I haven't bothered to see or do, possibly because Zac dismissed most cultural activities out of hand. I decide to give myself to the end of June, during which I'll take advantage of Zac's absence to renew my interest in Hanoi life. It's April now, three months shy of my first anniversary. If I can make a year it'll feel like I've earned the right to declare my mission concluded.

Without great enthusiasm, I emerge from the bedroom and set to the task of taking a bite out of Hanoi's cultural apple.

I begin official Vietnamese lessons with my giggly, round-faced friend Hoa, who has already taught me a great deal of her language. I accompany Alexa to the ethnic museum, and Sheridan to the military museum. I join some journalist friends and visit Uncle Ho Chi Minh, marvelling at how in-the-pink-of-health he looks in death and at the discipline involved in standing bolt upright with a bayonet for hours at a time, which the young guards spend their days doing. Afterwards we visit ‘Ho Chi Minh's house' and the Ho Chi Minh museum.

As the founding father of a nation, and revolutionary leader, Ho Chi Minh seems a far cry from the alpha males that often characterise this role. Emaciated and goateed, Uncle Ho looked every bit the aesthete. The Vietnamese proudly tell me he lived a life of celibacy and died a virgin, which in some other cultures might be received less positively, not to mention with some scepticism. Ho Chi Minh wrote a body of poetry, most of it while imprisoned as a revolutionary at the orders of the British in Hong Kong, which is still memorised at schools today. Yet it seems apparent he was also a capable military leader and strategist. As the leader of a famously effective army, he once warned his opponents ‘You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, yet even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.' The French made the expensive mistake of ignoring this remark. Then the Americans, too big-headed to learn by this example, followed suit. It's hard not to admire him, yet, like so many of his compatriots, Ho Chi Minh is mysterious to me.

Now I notice the genuine devotion to culture and history displayed by every Vietnamese person I meet on these outings. And I grow, finally, to realise something else, something Zac never understood. The Vienamese people are nationalists before they are communists. They accept communism stoically, only because it represents their historical path to self-determination.

Vietnamese history books are full of heroes who save the country from its invaders. Among these are the Trung sisters – two incredible women who led an 80,000-strong army to vanquish the Chinese in 40 AD. This strong sense of national identity is behind the great support for Ho Chi Minh and his vision. I see now that the veneration of Ho Chi Minh is not a veneration of communism.

Nga visits, and I detect the spirit of reconciliation. Perhaps it's the way she cleans the place until it's immaculate and pledges to continue doing this every weekend from now on. I can't deny that the whole drama with Kim has had its upside. I lost an expensive, slovenly, and possibly untrustworthy maid, and got an excellent one for free: one with a genuine interest in keeping the place in good shape.

Next, I discover I have some friendly neighbours in the compound, Dat and Phuong. I've been listening to their toddler screaming night and day for months, wondering why no one has euthanased him. It's Dat and Phuong's rooftop laundry area that my living room window overlooks, and their young maid who likes to clear her airways from the window above it.

I find a woman pacing the compound one day, trying to calm a screaming child. I recognise the pitch of the scream and sidle up to see if this faceless menace has red irises and goat-slit pupils. He smiles back at me through teary eyes. He's beautiful. I start chatting with the woman, who introduces herself as Phuong, and a few moments in, I'm struck by a realisation: we're speaking English.

Phuong smiles at my exclamation.

‘My husband, Dat, he speak good English,' she replies modestly.

Days later, I meet Dat, who's a graphic designer. Thirty, playful, it's clear from our first meeting that Dat is intelligent and something of an independent thinker. He also plays guitar and sings. And he has a small keyboard. We jam together and I transcribe some Vietnamese pop songs for him. I like Dat and Phuong a lot. It's an entirely new kind of friendship for me in Hanoi, especially with Dat – a male with whom I actually have stuff in common.

But Dat and Phuong are Hanoians through and through. They have an older daughter, but have ‘given' her to Dat's parents.

‘My parents don't get along,' explains Dat. ‘So we thought maybe if they have a child to look after they will be happier.'

One Monday night I finally take up Kiwi Alexa's invitation, and accompany her to choir practice at the
Goethe Institut
. The Hanoi International Choir is the first choir I've sung with. Alexa got it right when she said to me,

‘Your hair stands on end just from the warm ups!'