I laughed. ‘He wasn’t dull, just . . . Just very earnest. I knew he’d end up marrying a local, and not for any creepy orientalist reason, but because he was desperate to get married and start a family and he was also desperate to become Vietnamese. He used to get up at 5 am to study the language for an hour before going to the park to exercise with the local oldies. I’m glad he’s found someone. He’s a lovely bloke, but it was never going to work between us.’
‘No, you like to sleep late.’
‘And learn Vietnamese at the rate of one word a year.’
‘And you hate exercise.’
‘And marriage.’
‘And boring twats who talk about the geopolitical ramifications of some Asian diplomat’s farts over dinner.’
‘Don’t be mean. He’s a sweetheart.’
Kerry flicked a shard of nail polish on to the table. ‘You won’t think that when you hear what he said about you.’
‘God. What?’
‘Well, you have to imagine the scene. We’re out the front of Hanoi Towers. I was about to go in and get a proper coffee at Highlands and he was – I don’t know, probably giving an impromptu lecture on the ironic juxtaposition of Lò Prison to the corporate office block – and so we sort of stopped in the middle of the path and there was a pineapple vendor up my arse and then Marcus’s wife starts chatting to her, though I thought she was telling her off at first, but then the pineapple lady laughed and while those two are carrying on like sisters, he puts his hand on my arm, like this—’ Kerry flattened her fingers across my wrist and furrowed her brow. ‘And he goes, “How is Mischa? I do worry about her, you know.” And of course, I said you were fine – no, great, I said you were great and I didn’t know why he worried and you know what he said?’ Kerry sat back and shook her head at me. ‘He said, “I always felt she’d given up on life. That she was finished. It was why things didn’t work out between us. I need to be with someone excited to wake up in the morning. You know?” ’
‘Wow. So it was because I hated getting up early.’
Kerry laughed. ‘I thought you’d be upset.’
‘So why did you tell me?’
‘So you’d be upset. With him. He deserves it. Smug git.’
I licked my fingertips and began to pick up the purple flecks all over my table. ‘If I thought it was true, I might be upset. But I don’t, so I’m not.’
Kerry said, ‘Good for you,’ but I knew she was disappointed. Truth was I thought Marcus was on to something and instead of being upset I was fascinated. I wanted Kerry gone so I could investigate this new and startling insight into myself.
When she left I climbed into bed and dozed on and off for the rest of the day. In my waking moments I poked at the sensation Marcus’s observation had created in me. I was like a child pushing a loose tooth with her tongue; there was pain, but also a thrill at the idea of what might be beyond it.
The next morning I stepped out of my front door and tasted ash. I saw the piles of burning paper at intervals along my street and remembered the hot surprise of lips on my collarbone. My phone buzzed and in my hand was a message from Cal saying what I’d been thinking: Has it been 2wks? I knew there was no psychic link between us, that we were not soulmates or mates at all, that it was eight in the morning and every tây in the city had just stepped outside and inhaled the ash and remembered it had been fourteen days since the last inhalation. But Cal had inhaled and thought of me and that wasn’t nothing.
I considered ignoring the text, but that would be an answer of sorts and one whose meaning he might misinterpret. I spent the walk to work thinking about replies that would put him in his place. 2 weeks since what? or Huh? or the classic burn, Who is this? At my desk I reread his message and then quickly typed, Time flies, huh? Hope you’re enjoying Hanoi, hit send and stuck the phone in my pocket.
I turned on my PC. My pocket buzzed. Wd enjoy it more w/ u. Drink this arvo?
I loaded up the first article of the day. A report on the comparatively low female birth rate in Vietnam. There was no mention of why this might be so, no quotes from obstetricians or ultrasound technicians. I gave it a light subbing – made sure the sentences were arranged in roughly logical order and that each sentence contained the required parts – then saved and filed the story.
I typed Bia ho’i on Tran Hung Dao, across from friendship palace 4pm.
I’d barely put my phone down when it buzzed again. CU there cant wait
Thuan was heading to her advanced English lesson down the street from the bia ho’i and we walked together. On the corner of was a votive vendor and Thuan purchased a wad of printed paper bills and a tube of red incense sticks almost without stopping.
‘Not long ago, this is illegal,’ she told me as we walked on.
‘Incense?’
‘No. Ah, memorise the dead family was not allowed. Only the heroic war dead could be memorised in public place.’
‘But now it’s okay?’
Thuan shook her head. ‘Always okay, but now, no penalty.’
In my work and conversations I was often frustrated by the gaps in understanding. Usually I tried to force myself into the gaps, demanding definition, clarifying usage, teasing out connotation. That day the muddiness felt like a gift. I took Thuan’s hand and we walked the rest of the way in silence.
Cal was already seated on a tiny stool, his back against the yellow stone wall. An overhead fan rustled his fringe. His face was narrower than I had remembered it and his skin darker. Only his awkward way of sitting, ramrod straight with his too-long legs stretching out under the table, gave him away as a foreigner. He spotted us, waved and, when we were within speaking distance, stood and pulled out two stools.
‘Thuan, this is Cal. Matthew’s son.’
‘Ah, I know your father, yes. Hello, nice to meet you. No, I can’t sit, sorry, sorry. I would like, but I must go. I have English lesson.’
‘But your English is good already,’ Cal said. ‘Besides, talking with native speakers is the best practice of all, right?’
Thuan shook her head. ‘Another time I hope. Now I must go. Goodbye, Mischa. Goodbye, Cal, please give my best to your father.’
Cal and I sat and watched Thuan walk away. ‘How does she know Dad?’
‘She’s come out with me a few times.’
‘She’s gorgeous. Maybe the hottest girl I’ve seen since I got here. And I’ve seen quite a few hot girls, I gotta say.’
I’d had this conversation so many times since I’d been in Hanoi and so I’m sure my response rolled out naturally, that none of the sting I felt came through in my voice. ‘Yes. She’s stunning. Off-the-charts smart, too. I barely have to edit her translations.’
‘Can’t you go after her? Convince her to have a drink with us?’
‘She’d feel too uncomfortable. She thinks is for men.’
Cal massaged his glass. ‘What about you?’
‘Oh, well, I’m an honorary man.’
‘Shit.’ He said and rubbed his eyes. ‘Shit.’ He laughed and, for the first time since I’d sat down, he looked right at me. ‘I’m an idiot.’
I caught the proprietor’s eye and signalled for some beer. ‘Why?’
He laughed again and shook his head. ‘So you and Thuan, you’re, like, a couple?’
‘You are an idiot.’
‘You were holding hands.’
‘Which we’d never do if we were a couple.’ I gulped the warm beer and wished, as always on the first taste, for a glass of icy-cold sauvignon blanc. ‘Jesus. I had no idea you were so naive.’
‘Settle down. I wouldn’t have thought it if you hadn’t said you were an honorary man.’
‘I just meant that the rules don’t apply to me. Western women aren’t judged by the same standards as Vietnamese women.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the men here have no interest in us as brides or mothers to their children.’
‘Why?’
‘This is like talking to a twelv
e year old.’
He stood and swaggered over to the counter. His dark jeans were a size too big and when he leant forward to speak to the old woman behind the cash register, I saw the band of his red underwear. The old woman shooed him away. He moved so slowly on his return that I picked up my phone and pretended to be typing a message.
‘I ordered some food. I don’t know what. I ordered another round of drinks, too.’
‘I can’t stay long.’
He sat and touched the back of my hand. ‘Come on, Mischa. I don’t know why I went on like that. I was just a bit thrown. It’s confusing. The gender politics of this place are so messed up.’
‘Gender politics! The way you talk.’
‘I just mean, like, men and men can hold hands in public and women and women can, but only if they’re not gay, and men and women aren’t supposed to show any affection for each other at all. It’s not right.’
‘Yeah, it’s a humanitarian crisis. I think the UN is working on it. You should ask Kerry where they’re at with that.’
‘And the idea that they see you as a man. I mean, in terms of, like, economic power or whatever, maybe, but look at you! I don’t reckon there’s a straight man in here who isn’t imagining what it’d be like to fuck you.’
Did I gasp? I don’t remember. I remember his words running through me and then his shins pressing against mine, his hands on my knees. ‘What?’ he said. ‘It’s like talking to a twelve year old, right?’
‘Stop it.’
He shuffled his stool backwards. My knees felt shockingly bare. I couldn’t look at him and I couldn’t look around me at the faces of the men who I thought of, suddenly, as a pack. I was aware again of the scoop-neck of my t-shirt and the shortness of its sleeves. I hoped desperately that my nipples were not visible, that the heat rushing through me would not show up on my sun-flushed face and neck.
I dropped a wad of bills on the table.
‘Mischa, wait.’
I moved as fast as I could without attracting even more attention than usual. I hoped Cal knew better than to call or chase after me. At the next cross-street I turned right and slumped against the wall of the tourist pub on the corner. Looming over me was Lò Prison. I blinked at the glare of broken glass on top of the brick fence and thought about my first day in Hanoi, Matthew peeling me off the wall in the Old Quarter and sitting with me, telling me about his lovely boy.
How I hated her, that drippy, beaten, joyless victim. Running scared, mad and thoughtless and self-absorbed, sucking up air until she collapsed and needed rescuing. There was no place for her in this city of orphans and torture survivors. The very air was blackened with the grief of those terrified for the souls of their massacred kin. People here knew that the good were as likely to be bombed, captured, struck with disease or left to starve as the wicked. Goodness may be its own reward, but happiness, pleasure, had to be snatched where and how it could.
I walked back to the bia ho’i, but he was gone.
hen I was new to Hanoi I would answer questions about my personal situation with the truth. I quickly learnt that doing this made me a figure of great pity and some suspicion. Family is everything in Vietnam and my choices seemed a direct challenge to that. Divorce is common enough, but childlessness after ten years of marriage is not. Moving to a country where you know no one, where you have no kin, is downright bizarre. ‘How do you know what to care?’ my first Vietnamese neighbour asked me, her meaning conveyed more by the expression on her face than her words.
That same neighbour asked about my parents and I told her I didn’t have any. She reared back as though I had slapped her. I explained that they had died and her horror turned to fury. ‘Mother and father are always mother and father. You do not say you do not have! You have! Always.’
She bustled me into her two-room home and showed me the altar in the corner of the sitting room/bedroom: the photos of her mother and father, the incense and oranges and whisky. I understood that her parents’ shrine was the first thing she saw in the morning and the last at night. I don’t think I have ever felt so foreign.
By the end of my first year, when people asked if I was married I would shake my head and smile. If they asked about children I would say ‘not yet’. If they asked about family I would say I was raised by my sisters and aunties and uncles and grandparents. This always went down well. Vietnamese understand distant relatives knitting together to patch the holes left by death and misfortune.
The irony is that I spoke about my sisters far more often than I spoke to them. My sisters are, in a sense, my world; they are my closest surviving relatives and my oldest, deepest loves. But they are alien to me. Their relationships have been long and happy, their children wanted and adored and adoring. They have planted themselves firmly on this earth.
I believe their solidity comes from having longer with our parents, although they disagree. They say that their – our – childhood was not a stable one. They swear that our parents fought regularly, sometimes going days without speaking. They say that our father would make cruel comments about our mother’s intelligence and that she would mock his ambitions. They tell of threats of abandonment, of holding their breath when they entered the house after school, unsure of what they’d find within.
I don’t remember any of that; I remember my parents clutching each other’s hands in the grocery store and kissing in front of the TV while my sisters pulled faces behind the sofa. I remember the way my mother would spring out of her chair when Dad got home and the way his cheek would remain against hers as he reached down and patted our heads in greeting. I remember them as sharing a perfect love which extended to their children and I think that has been my ruin. Not that I blame them. Blaming them for my doomed heart would be like blaming the French education system for the battle of Dien Bien Phu.
Identifying a trajectory of cause and effect is not the same as laying blame. The trajectory in my case is this: my parents died in a car wreck; they died together, thus their life stories ended but their love never would – this was my interpretation at twelve; at seventeen, I met a man who affirmed my interpretation, saying his love for me was so strong it would outlive us; much later I learnt this meant he would kill us both rather than let our relationship end; this frightened me but no more than the idea of losing him. One day I realised that the love was dead and I was still alive, but barely; I fled.
And then . . . Then I don’t know what happened. I was unnaturally calm for years. I never thought of myself that way until I changed. If I thought about my manner at the time I would have said I was content, unruffled, perhaps. On a bad day, resigned. I might have said, if forced to reflect, that I thought there was too much passion in the world, that it was at best a waste of energy and at worst a destroyer of nations. I would have said I was done with it.
Kerry called to invite me to a dinner party she was throwing for a childhood friend who had come to visit. I asked who else was coming and when she said, ‘Matthew and his kid,’ I bit my tongue rather than let myself say his name.
I bought a new dress, green silk with intricate yellow flowers embroidered on the hem. When I got to the corner of my street the moto drivers who’d been lounging on their bikes jumped to attention, nudging each other and smirking. I called out Kerry’s address and the men conferred for a moment, then pushed forward the youngest among them, a true Hanoian hipster with a wispy moustache, painted-on jeans and heavily moussed hair. I’d been hoping for my favourite driver, an older man who wore reading glasses around his neck and called me mademoiselle, but he must have knocked off already. Still, the hipster seemed sober and agreed to a reasonable price with minimal haggling.
He drove like the teen amphetamine addict that I now suspect he was. Few Hanoians pay attention to road rules, preferring to pay attention to other drivers instead. This kid drove like there was no one else on the road, like there wasn’t a road, in fact. He drove like the congested city streets were part of a racing circuit, at one point bumping us 50 me
tres over loose asphalt and at another, cutting a corner by speeding through a restaurant courtyard. I had refused the helmet so as not to flatten my hair and was riding side-saddle due to my dress; I was forced to grab the back bar with one hand and wrap my other arm around his waist just to stay upright. I contemplated leaping off the bike as soon as it slowed, but it never did. Six minutes into what should have been a ten minute ride he hurled the bike a few metres past Kerry’s house and then jerked it to a stop.
I paid the driver resentfully and stomped the shakiness out of my legs. I could feel my make-up sliding down my face, my silk dress turning to lycra on my back.
‘Hey ho,’ said Henry who had smoothly and almost silently pulled up alongside me. ‘You look a touch frazzled.’
‘Speed-demon .’
‘Ah.’ He climbed down and removed his helmet. ‘That’s why you need to get your own bike, my dear.’
‘Maybe I like speed-demon .’
‘Maybe you do, but your hair doesn’t.’
‘I hate you.’
He flipped up his seat, pulled out a paper sack and dropped his helmet in its place. ‘Cab sav. Plenty of it.’
‘I mean, I love you.’
‘I know you do, you poor frizzy sweat-hog.’
Inside, Kerry had the air-con and the Nina Simone blasting. A lean, white-haired man was on the purple-velvet couch deep in conversation with Amanda, who was wearing the same dress as me except hers was black with red trim and looked as fresh and light as mine felt sticky and creased. By the bay windows were Kerry’s UN workmates: three vaguely familiar-looking women and a man I’d met and disliked intensely, though I couldn’t remember when or why. Matthew and Kerry were lining up glasses on the corner bar. There was no one else.
‘Gosh, Mischa, you look like you arrived on horseback,’ Amanda said when she saw me. ‘This here is the guest of honour – Christopher.’
The white-haired man smiled at me vacantly then began speaking again to Amanda.
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