Single White Female in Hanoi (5 page)

Featuring the increasingly busy palace and the nearby Red River, which was used for transportation, the area had the three qualities that real estate agents rave about: location, location, and location.

The Old Quarter also borders Hanoi's most famous, most mythical lake – Hoan Kiem Lake (Lake of the Restored Sword). My first sight of Hoan Kiem Lake comes on this particular evening. I hit the end of a swarming street and it appears before me. I'm mesmerised. A rippling expanse of tranquillity amid the urban chaos, the lights around it reflect in a pointillist myriad of colours. Until this moment Hanoi has been a series of dilapidated streets. Immediately, I understand why people describe this as a beautiful city.

I note the well-maintained parkland around the lake, with lots of big old trees. Weeping willows bow to the water. In the middle of the lake are two small islands, each with a pagoda on it. One is accessible by a little stone bridge. All of this is lit up like a scene from a fairytale. Local lore has it there's a giant turtle, many hundreds of years old, living down there somewhere.

At this time of night (about 9pm), the lake is ringed by young local couples romancing beneath the trees without ever leaving the motorcycle they arrived on. They're enjoying one of the special privileges of the park.

On beaches around Sydney, women often sunbake and swim topless. Wandering around topless in the streets, even one adjacent to the beach, would be socially unacceptable, but bare breasts on a beach are unremarkable. In the same mysterious way, the shores of Hanoi's lakes are beyond the reach of normal social mores. Here, unmarried couples and lovestruck youngsters kiss and embrace with impunity. In the streets or at home in front of their families, this would be scandalous.

The avenue that runs between Hanoi's two other most famous lakes, West Lake and Chuc Bac Lake, is referred to as ‘Lover's Lane' – after sunset it's crowded with amorous young couples. Silhouetted against the pink sky, they're the picture of youthful romance. They shift on the saddle of the motorcycle for maximum intimacy and sit there in quiet agony. I imagine they're beside themselves with arousal, but there's not much they can do about it until they get married. Until that day, this anonymity is the closest thing they'll get to privacy.

At the top of
Ly Thai To
Street, named after the old King, I enter the Old Quarter and lose myself in the animated mayhem. It's a whole new world. There are restaurants with English on the facades. They boast ‘Western-style food'. I'm almost shocked to see Westerners everywhere. Many of them are clutching a copy of the Lonely Planet guide to Vietnam, and a great number, being trailed by persistent postcard boys, look agitated. They also look a bit dishevelled. It takes me a couple of blinks to realise they're backpackers wandering the blocks around their hotels in search of dinner or entertainment. In their brief transit through Hanoi, it's possible they may never see much more of the place than these streets.

I'll be here long after they leave. I'm an expat now.

If sleep is a womb and consciousness the outside world, I'm trapped in the birth canal. I struggle against the warm suction of the womb behind me. Centuries pass before I manage to force my head out into the noisy glare of day, but my eyelids don't want to open. I spend a millennium shaking off the siren song of sleep. It's later than usual, and I have to drag myself into the upright position.

It's my fifth day, and the heat has hit me.

I'm told this is the normal envelope – foreigners who turn up in the monsoon season tend to bounce around full of beans for five days, then collapse. Only yesterday, the heat was just another fascinating thing about Hanoi. I moved around in it with the detached interest of a scientist on a field trip. Now it has soaked into my bones and poisoned me.

My face in the mirror looks like the face of someone being pulled backwards at 300 kilometres an hour. I take a long cold shower. The shower fitting in my bathroom is Korean, and the unnerving brand name engraved on the chrome tap, I now notice, is ‘
Dae-Young
'.

I'm just finishing breakfast when I hear a motorcycle outside.

‘Allo? Allo? Caroleen, ees Yvette'. Her gentle voice drifts in through the living-room window. I grab the key and plod down the stairs to let her in. Yvette has the day off work and has arranged to take me for a wander. She's dressed practically, in light-coloured cotton clothes and a hat. I'm dressed entirely in black. I wave to her husband Khai, who has dropped her off.

‘Enjoy your day,' he calls back and takes off at an impressive speed, negotiating without difficulty the 30-centimetre-wide cement ramp at the gate.

I show Yvette how I've set up her old apartment, and she becomes nostalgic.

‘I really enjoy when I live 'ere. One time my parents come and we were four 'ere with a little organisation,' she tells me. I have a brief, amusing image of my parents trying to tolerate the conditions here.

Looking relaxed in the humidity, Yvette leads me up past the
Nam Bo
supermarket and we cross an intersection where six roads meet, with results that resist scientific explanation. Natassia and I will come to refer to this intersection, when giving directions, as ‘Crazy Junction'. Unlike many other intersections, this one has some traffic lights, but motorists don't pay much attention to them unless there are cops standing around, augmenting their meagre pay packets with ‘on-the-spot fines' for traffic offenders.

‘I seem to have found a wormhole to a parallel universe,'
I write to my friends.
‘Don't believe me? Watch an average intersection for five minutes. There are no ‘Give Way' signs, and nobody gives way. This is because they're able to pass through one another in Vietnam. Kind of like what happened in the Philadelphia Experiment, except no one gets hurt.'

In the centre of the intersection is a triangular traffic island where an old man is crouched over a basket of hopping young bunnies. Presumably, he's selling them. They leap in and out of the basket and swing perilously off the edges of the kerb towards certain death, but he always manages to grab them before they become rabbit pie. I expect this will be their ultimate fate anyway.

We make the far side of the intersection undamaged. We're now on famous
Hang Bong
Street, once home of the cotton guild. These days, the street mainly specialises in carbon monoxide. Because of the volume of traffic that passes along this narrow thoroughfare, it's been made illegal to drive a four-wheeled vehicle here. But you'd be wasting your time pointing this out to the drivers of cars and vans that struggle up here, honking angrily at the pesky two-wheeled vehicles in their way.

‘On this street you can buy silk clothes and maybe find a good teller,' Yvette tells me as we window-shop the length of
Hang Bong
. She's right. There are a great number of fashion shops, and tailors. Silks of every imaginable colour shimmer alluringly. Some are two-toned, with colours pure as light. A prescient thought hits me: I'm going to be parting with a great deal of cash on this street in the near future.

‘Now, we ‘ave coffee, uh?' Yvette says at the end of the long sticky walk.

She takes me into what looks like a normal souvenir shop but then leads me through the back and along a cement hallway. We pass what looks like a family's living room, and then we're out the back in a tiny courtyard. It's a local secret that only switched-on Hanoians and long-term expats know about.

We sit at a table beside an old stone fountain with tortoises swimming around in it. There's a fan trained on us. Although we're virtually in the centre of Hanoi, the air seems mysteriously clean and the roar of the street out the front is almost inaudible. Plants in big stone pots provide shade. Hens are running around the tables. I'm enchanted by the rustic ambience.

‘Ees good to ‘ave the day off work,' says Yvette, handing me a menu. ‘I been so busy and we are going to France in a week. This afternoon I start to pack.'

‘Do you like it where you work?' I ask. Yvette teaches French at
Alliance Francais
.

‘Ees okay,' she tells me. ‘I meet some interesting people, like Khai'

‘Ahhhh!' I've been wondering how on earth she found this guy. ‘He seems very, er, unusual for a Vietnamese man,' I volunteer carefully. I've been slowly coming to the conclusion that Khai is a perfect, self-actualised being. By contrast, the other Vietnamese men I've met since I arrived seem crude and immature.

‘Yeah – 'e's good, but I 'ave to teach 'im a few thing,' she replies. My ears prick up.

‘What kinds of things?'

‘Well, you know, the sex.' I lean forward subtly in my chair as she expands on this. 'I 'ave to teach him some thing. Vietnamese man don't know nothing about woman. I ‘ave to do a lot of sex education.'

‘Uh? Like what?' This sounds like bad news, but I stay hopeful. She's probably referring to some Gallic notion of advanced love-making.

‘Well, like foreplay, you know. He don't know to do this one, and also when I get my menstruation he's very surprised, he don't know about this one too.'

‘Holy shit,' I say involuntarily. There's a prolonged pause while I try to digest this.

A loud crowing from above our heads breaks the silence and I look up at the wall opposite. About two metres up, a fat rooster is eyeing us from a wall-mounted branch. Someone has thoughtfully attached little plastic containers for food and drink to his perch. It's nice to see animals being looked after. I've already seen some disturbing sights involving animal mistreatment.

‘Plea?' says a little voice. A girl with notepad is standing by our table. Burnt by my last coffee experience, I order an iced lemon juice, but Yvette orders something that she describes to me as ‘a cup of coffee with a scrambled egg in it'. Among the many strange things I've seen and heard in the last few days, this strikes me as the strongest evidence yet that I'm not in the Third World so much as a parallel one.

Even more unexpected, Yvette gives me a taste of it when it arrives, and it's delicious.

‘
Eeeeeow Eeeeeeow.
' A sudden high-pitched shrieking. I turn around. It's a pitifully thin orange kitten on a short tether outside the kitchen. The newest member of the rat-catching team.

‘Excuse me,' I say to Yvette who doesn't seem to have noticed. I walk across the courtyard, untie the kitten and carry it gently back to the table where I place it on my lap and comfort it. Slowly, the staff gather round to watch the Westerner fuss over a cat. It's an endless source of amusement and disgust to a Hanoian. Before I reluctantly return the kitten to its life on a string, Yvette takes a photo of me slouched maternally over it. This immortalises the moment, so that later I can look at the picture and appreciate that in the throes of my day-five heat exhaustion and bleeding-heart concern, I look closer to death than the cat.

Before we leave the little café the rooster belts out another almighty crow and looking up, I notice something I'd missed before. It's the loop of string around his scaly red leg. He's tied to the branch, unable to move more than about five centimetres. That's why the seed and water containers were nailed so close to his feet.

I haven't yet cottoned onto the Vietnamese penchant for animals-as-decoration. This will only apply to animals that use few resources, essentially birds, fish and sometimes squirrels. Like the birds in tiny cages I'd seen everywhere, the rooster was there for aesthetic reasons. He was a handsome and proud fellow with a beautiful plumage. He looked so
good
sitting regally above it all on his perch.

‘Eh, 'ave you seen this before?' We're on the way back to my place and Yvette is pointing at a dusty little shop. It's a snake-liquor retailer. Dozens of bottles of snake wine line the display cases. A snake is intact inside each one, suspended in an attitude of attack. There are lots of different varieties, including a cobra. One showy display features about five different-sized snakes nested like Russian dolls. Imagine a medium-sized snake. From its open mouth peers a smaller one enclosed within, its own mouth agape to reveal the gaping head of its still-smaller cousin.

Cat, chicken, snake: rat-catcher, trophy, aphrodisiac. Animals here have to work for a living, or die for it. One evening, while I'm teaching an advanced English class, a female student will put up her hand to speak.

‘Excuse me teacher, is it true cats in the West do not have to work?'

The whole class leans forward for my answer, which takes a moment to formulate.

‘Yes. It's true. They don't work,' I tell her. ‘They're pets and we care about them almost like family.' There's an exclamatory swell from the class. The girl who asked the question turns to her friends with an ‘I told you so' look. The concept of keeping a cat as a pet baffles them.

Actually, so does the concept of giving a cat a name. When I have enough Vietnamese to ask ‘Name is what?' I ask it not only of people, with great success, but of cats. Owners look askance at me. There's a pause that I can't explain, then a polite answer: ‘Name of cat is
Mieu Mieu
'. Seems like a nice name. Strange thing is it's the name of the first cat, the second, third and the fourth cat I ask it of. ‘
Mieu Mieu
', it turns out, is the onomatopoeic Vietnamese equivalent of ‘puss'.

I'm hoping to become inured to the sight of animal suffering while in Vietnam. It seems like a useful ability in life. I figure the more I see, the less I'll react.

Back home I say goodbye to Yvette and raid my fridge for something quick and familiar. Some Edam cheese and crackers I found at
Nam Bo
do the job perfectly. Then I spreadeagle under the fan in my bedroom and return to the welcoming bosom of Morpheus for a couple of hours.

When I wake up, it's raining and the furnace heat has again died down. With a sigh, I look up Ralph's phone number in my little book, and reach for the phone. I said I'd ring him, but now I have an ulterior motive.

On the way into
Nam Bo
on Monday, I noticed a woman. She was one of a number of homeless people that live in and around the entrance to the supermarket. When I first saw her, she was lying down between two others in the entrance – napping in the noonday heat. She lifted her head and smiled at me, and the smile exuded warmth and humanity. She wasn't young, although her hair was still black and her face still beautiful. But she was thin. Terribly thin. While I was shopping I bought her a coconut milk drink. When I handed it to her, she seemed joyous. The next day, I bought her a vitamin drink – one with glucose and amino acids as well as vitamins and minerals. I decided to buy one every day for her.

Yesterday, when I went out for groceries, she waved when she saw me. But as I handed her the vitamin drink, I realised I'd never seen her open the bottle. Maybe she didn't drink the stuff. Maybe she didn't trust it. I wasn't sure, but I knew I needed some help to communicate with her. I presumed the drink was just what she needed, but maybe she was ill, and needed medicine instead.

Ralph's wife is Vietnamese, and a doctor.

So I ring him, and listen patiently as he offers his grievances and lamentations of the day.

‘This town is nothing but trouble,' he tells me. ‘These people are terrible, they only care about money. And they are such thieves. You have to tie things down. Things are different in Singapore.'

The bulk of today's sermon, for some reason, is a dissertation on the dangers of older Western men marrying younger local women for their ‘beauty, not their true nature'. He ‘can't stress strongly enough' how these marriages will always come to a nasty end. I know, from our earlier communications, that Ralph is pushing fifty.

‘How old is your wife?' I ask casually after he mentions he used to be married to a Zulu woman during a stint in South Africa.

‘Thirty-one,' he replies without a trace of irony.

Before he hands me over to his wife, I also learn that they spend Sundays in church. This is the surest sign yet that they're not going to form the centrepiece of my social life in this town.

His wife tells me I can call her Tina, although her real name is Thanh. She's taciturn but kind. She agrees to turn up with her husband at my place tomorrow afternoon, so I can take her to meet the homeless woman.

The rain continues through to the evening, but abates as I dash over to Global College, running a little late for my first class observation. It's the last class of the day. It starts at 7.45 and goes for an hour and a half. Owen's not around, but the staff at the front desk are friendly and I'm led upstairs to a classroom where Natassia has already begun teaching a lesson called ‘My Disastrous Day'.

Natassia's tall, lean and slim-hipped, in well-fitted clothes. Dark, straight hair, pale blue eyes. Horn-rimmed glasses and a severe fringe – she strikes me as humourless and rather prim, especially for such a young thing. Her mood is serious, and at no time during the lesson does she smile. But every time she says the words ‘disastrous day' I nearly curl up in mirth. She has a strong Germanic accent with a slow low-pitched drawl and it comes out as a long, drawn-out ‘deezahsterrerss deyyy'. Her speaking voice is also very soft and scant on intonation, and I wonder whether any of the students understand her at all.