In the next class I ask students how long they’ve been learning English.
‘How long have you been learning English?’ I ask a young woman. She shakes her head.
‘How-long-have-you-been-learning-English?’
‘nguh…, nguh…, nguh…’ This is the Vietnames equivalent of ‘errrrm’. I wait. No answer. I try again.
‘How-long-you-learn-English?’
She stares at me panic-stricken, cocks her head towards me for a repeat.
I walk up to her and repeat the question more quietly. I don’t want to embarrass her. It’s useless. The girl beside her pipes up. She’s a friend. ‘She learn English only three year.’
I walk away shell-shocked. I ask tight-lipped Ly about it. The students have never heard a native English speaker. They’ve learnt lots of reading and writing and truckloads of grammar, but the only spoken English they’ve heard has come from the mouth of a Vietnamese English teacher who has no more idea of what real English sounds like than they do.
By week four, I’ve modified my teaching approach, focussing on pronunciation and intonation, writing everything on the board. The students start to respond.
By week five all is lost.
Minutes into the lesson, the padlocked fire-door beside me at the front of the room breaks into song. It sings in a drunken baritone. The song has the unmistakeable boom and bluster of the Russian patriotic song, although sung in Vietnamese. Over the next ten minutes, the singing gets louder and louder as other male voices join in. The voices create an enormous amount of reverberation. I deduce this to be because they’re singing inside a cavernous wooden hall on the other side of the door.
I pull a face at the door and raise an eyebrow at the class, but incredibly, they’re ignoring it completely. It’s as though I’ve gone mad and for my intellectual swansong my brain has chosen a programme of drunken military music.
To keep teaching, I have to shout. The singing continues for the duration of the lesson.
And the next lesson. And every following lesson for the remainder of the course. It’s a weekly gathering. By the next week the invisible war vets are dancing too, judging by the thumping and pounding on the other side of the firedoor. And clapping out of time. I shout ever louder above the din and the students continue to act as though nothing is going on. The scenario is so absurd, so unmistakeably Vietnamese that sometimes I fear I’ll break down and cry with laughter.
When I ask Ly if I can be transferred to another classroom she explains there isn’t one. She doesn’t seem to want to discuss the problem either. It seems likely that I’ve hit the boundaries of permissible topics of discussion. This singing is a war thing. As a foreigner, perhaps I’m not expected to understand.
Rat sack Zac
Meanwhile, something has happened at Global.
The staff, both Vietnamese and foreign, shoot me pregnant glances when I enter the staffroom. I ignore them and bury myself in reading the usual scant follow-up reports by the other teachers who share my classes.
Miss Ngoc is the first to approach.
‘Miss Carolyn! How are you? You look thinner today.’ She waits a nanosecond, then cuts to the chase. ‘What happened to your friend?’
‘What friend?’
‘To Mr Zac! Why did Miss Lan sack him?’
‘Huh?’
I grab the phone on the accountant’s desk beside the aquarium and call Zac at home.
‘Jesus! What’ve you gone and done?’
‘It’s all there in the follow-up book,’ he answers proudly.
I hang up and go through the follow-up books until I find it. I put the slim file under my arm and excuse myself, retreating to an empty classroom, where I read it in detail.
Zac has cracked. Something’s sent him over the edge. He’s filled out the entire page, including the margins.
Under ‘Resources Used’ he has written ‘Bootlegged, mostly indecipherable cassette-tape, execrable textbook, dried-up white board marker. Under ‘Notes on Class’ he has unkindly described a group of gormless nose-pickers with no capacity for independent thought. Then he has defended them with a vitriolic attack on management. ‘Owing to another prime case of maladministration this class was confused as to what it was supposed to be learning, although not as confused as I was. Perhaps Miss Lan could ascertain their level before selling them the textbooks. It’s doubtful they could learn anything anyway given the constant hammering and drilling coming from downstairs …’
He concludes with a satirical reflection on the ‘tragic incompetence’ of the college. It’s high-level language but he makes sure Lan gets the gist. He singles her out repeatedly. When I go to show the page to Natassia later in the day I find it has been neatly excised, never to be seen again.
‘How are you going to survive?’ I ask Zac over a coconut juice.
‘I’m fine. Got loads of privates at $15 an hour.’ He chuckles. ‘God! I’m so glad to be out of that nest of corruption. Life’s looking up. I moved all my stuff by taxi to the new house over the weekend. It’ll be ready to move into the day after tomorrow. When are you gonna give your scamming landlady notice on your place?’
‘Zac – I don’t know if I’m ready to move yet.’
‘Caz – you’re paying too much rent and you’ve got rats.’
‘Firstly, I think my rent’s reasonable, secondly, the rats aren’t bothering me and thirdly, if I move out, I won’t see Quan. I think our relationship is developing.’
‘That’s another reason for you to move,’ Zac points out. ‘We’ve got to wean you off that guy. Maybe we could introduce you to someone who’s not a dog-eating, wife-bashing illiterate. Maybe even someone who speaks English.’
‘Fuck off Zac. You don’t know anything about him,’ I bristle, although his words have perturbed me. I’m still pretty sure Quan doesn’t beat his wife, although I did recently see him take to his daughter with a stick in full view of everyone on the street. I reflect uneasily on the dog-eating charge. Could I kiss someone wearing dog-grease lip balm?
Zac gets up, pays for himself and leaves. It looks like another tiff.
But this one doesn’t last long. The next day the skies open and a post-seasonal deluge tumbles out of it. The rain lasts for two days. When it stops, Zac heads over to the new house, ready to move in and finds everything he possesses, including a rented TV and DVD player, sitting in half a metre of water. The roof wasn’t finished yet. He somehow convinces the new landowner to cover costs, but the house remains unfinished; the builders couldn’t work in the rain.
‘Caz. Can I stay at your place for a few nights?’
‘Where?’ I shoot back, alarmed. I’m fond of Zac, when he’s not being an arsehole, but I’m not ready to share my bed with the guy, and I have no other bedding at all.
‘I’ll make myself a bed in the living-room,’ he says.
And he does. He collects whatever meagre blankets and cushions he can find and gathers himself into what strikes me as a singularly tortuous position, humped face-down over the stuffed pyramid of my Thai cushion-chair. When I say goodnight to him he’s a giant soft mound on the floor tiles.
Yet miraculously he manages to deliver a late night sermon from this position. This one’s on a new obsession – ‘The value of insincerity’.
‘Caz,’ he croaks from his face down position. ‘I’ve decided that it’s better to be insincere in life.’
‘I happen to value sincerity.’
‘I think that’s an emotional choice, not a rational one. Wouldn’t you rather people just treated you in a polite and friendly manner?’
‘Even if they felt like spitting on me?’
‘Especially if they felt like spitting on you.’
‘You don’t find insincerity a bit jarring?’
‘Put it this way – who would you rather serve you in a restaurant – a scowling rude Vina chick with an undisguised hatred of foreigners, or a smiling reverential Japanese one? You know neither of them would piss on you if you
were on fire.’ He pauses to allow me to concur, then continues. ‘That’s why I respect the Japanese. They’ve elevated insincerity to an art. I’ve started working on my fake smile. It’s gonna form part of my get-rich plan. I think people respond better to you if you can master insincerity.’
Zac’s voice is fading. He’s almost asleep. I pat the top of the mound maternally and retire. I suspect anyone who has to actually work on their insincerity hasn’t got what it takes.
When I wake up in the morning, he’s gone, but he’s left me a note. The note has a dead rat on top of it.
‘Morning Caz – I wasn’t sure what to do with this. It ran over my arm in the night and I chased it onto the landing and down the stairs. I trapped it at the bottom and killed it by hitting it repeatedly with a rolled up National Economic Review. See you tonight, Z.’
Zac stays for three nights, then moves to his new place. He takes me to see it and I almost change my mind. It’s a four-storey, five-bedroom terrace with a bathroom on each floor. The place is brand new, the tile job, immaculate. Every window and balcony is fully enclosed by steel bars. A ladder leads to the roof, which allows a cutaway view of Hanoi from the north. I climb up to the roof with Zac, where we chat as the sun sets over West Lake and the sky slowly fades to a dark sepia.
It’s truly tempting. My chuot situation is starting to unnerve me. This afternoon I found a turd in the centre of my pillow, laid out there like guest soap at a hotel. I’ve started asking about humane ways of dealing with it.
‘Just don’t get one of those sticky traps,’ warns Georgia, the newish American teacher at Global. ‘They’re the worst. We used one and this rat got stuck on it in the night and she put her head down and her whole face got stuck on it and she tried to pull away and she lost an eyeball. She was still alive when we found her. It was horrible.’
‘Those sticky traps are a bit grisly,’ says Charlie at NER. ‘We used one and we found just a mouse’s leg stuck to it in the morning,’ he grimaces. ‘And nearby was the owner, dead from blood loss. It’d gnawed its own leg off to get away.’
‘I get for you mouse trap,’ says Nga. ‘Bay Dinh Chuot.’
‘Not the sticky trap!’ I know Dinh means sticky.
‘Yes! Trap like this,’ she says, using her hands to mime a sticky surface.
‘No, please don’t Nga.’ I’m starting to feel alarmed. I have to stop her.
‘Yes. Sticky trap. You will see!’
‘No, please Nga. The sticky trap is not good!’
‘Sticky trap is very good.’
‘No, it’s not good,’
‘Sticky trap, very good! It always catch the mouse!’
‘No!’ I shout.
I’ve been pushed into a corner. We’re speaking at cross-purposes and I’m forced to say it. I look deeply into her confounded face.
‘Not good … ’ I stammer, ‘ … for the mouse.’
I watch in utter humiliation as the expression on Nga’s face changes. It changes from the earnest, confused face of someone unable to convince another person of something plainly obvious, to the face of someone who’s just learnt that everything they’ve heard about foreigners is true, that they’re face to face with a specimen of humanity so wretched, so pathetic, it’s incomprehensible they’ve survived history.
‘I see,’ she says eventually. The look on her face is more than I can take, but luckily at this point she nods, turns and takes her leave.
Recently, teaching my advanced class at UNCO, I described a friend as a good person who loves animals. The response is what prepared me for Nga’s reaction. Once again, the robust Pham stood up to turn my world on its head: ‘In our culture, we do not like the kind of person who love animal. We think this person is weak. They care too much about animal and they forget about people. There are four-generation family in the Old Quarter who live in only sixteen square metre. Sixteen square metre only! If people worry about animal, who will worry about these family?’
Without a guide to Vietnamese culture, I’m learning everything the hard way. I turned up here with excess baggage I didn’t know I was carrying. It consisted of all the ideologies and philosophies I took for granted after an adulthood steeped in a liberal, leftish bohemian culture.
For example, cultural relativism – the idea that all cultures, with the possible exception of my own, are equally good and worthy of respect. Now I meet head-on with Zac’s unashamed ‘West is Best’ philosophy and I start to wonder whether the truth may lie somewhere in the middle.
Or the idea that on some level, morality is universal – not on details like drug use and sexuality, but the deeper essentials we call ‘ethics’, like being kind to strangers and animals. I thought ‘human rights’ was a term all humans could relate to. But no, because here in Hanoi my advanced UNCO students have told me that ‘human rights’ is seen as yet another hypocritical piece of Western sermonising, used by people who leave their own parents to rot in old-age homes, in order to denounce countries they don’t like.
My ideas about the universality of ‘givens’ are going up in flames. Even the fact that I held these ideas marks me as a foreigner. Other things that mark me as a foreigner include: the way I walk, gesture, dress and eat, the expressions I allow to roam across my face, the volume and style of my laughter, the fact that I have now cried in public, and my displays of concern for animals. These things are above and beyond the unchangeable fact of my whiteness.
I thought I was making energetic progress with this new culture. I now know how to make students laugh, which wins them over immediately, and have a basic verbal exchange with a local. I feel close to Nguyet. I’m learning to cook the food, drink the drinks. I’ve learnt a little slang and a couple of idioms. But increasingly I realise every step forward has been accompanied by a slide backwards. And with every back-slide I feel again that I’m living among aliens, and I find myself wondering whether ‘Right’ and ‘True’ can survive travel; which features of humanity are truly universal.
And I wonder how much longer I can withstand the alienation of being here. I don’t know it, but I’m smack bang in the middle of culture shock, as described in that book Natassia was reading.
A night of uninvited guests
The young woman at my door greets me with tentative familiarity. Her two friends hang back anonymously in the darkness of the compound. It’s early evening.
Maybe it’s the poor lighting but I can’t say I recognise her. Luckily, she’s not phased when I ask her name.
‘I am Van Anh, your student, I bring you to Van Mieu University.’ she tells me.
‘Van Anh! Of course! I’m so sorry!’ I exclaim unenthusiastically, remembering the long ago visit to Van Mieu, which preceded a series of seemingly pointless visits from Van Anh and her assorted non-English speaking friends. ‘I haven’t seen you in a long time.’
‘Do you make some tea now?’ she asks hopefully. I stand aside as the trio enters and climb the stairs.
In the living room, they plump some cushions and position themselves on the floor around the low glass table. I serve them tea and wonder guiltily whether it would be impolite to eject them afterwards.
‘I hope you can help me,’ says Van Anh, finally. ‘My friend have not very much money and want to learn English,’ she gestures to the couple beside her, who haven’t spoken so far. ‘I tell them you are very good teacher.’
I turn to them. ‘What are your names?’ There’s an embarrassed silence as they look to Van Anh for a translation. She tells me their names.
‘They are beginners,’ she adds, unnecessarily.
I nod and the culture chasm yawns wide across my living room. Van Anh has turned up unannounced and uninvited, with strangers, and is now asking me a favour. Am I being flattered or exploited? I’m sure Natassia would know. Zac would just snigger and play with them like a cat with a grasshopper. Either way, they’d be liberated into certainty by making some kind of value judgement – Zac’s, predictable, or Natassia’s, well-considere
d. Why has the simple act of making a value judgement come to elude me?
I regard Van Anh dispassionately. She’s told me she’s a law student. She’s not much larger than a twelve-year-old Western girl. Not all that much older, either. As a single Western woman, in my thirties, living away from my family, I’m certain that I must be as enigmatic to her as she is to me. She looks delicate and surpassingly innocent, yet, by my standards, she’s displayed admirable chutzpah in turning up repeatedly at the house of a barely-known foreigner.
Does she like me? Can her feelings for me even be reduced to like or dislike? As a Westerner, I’m made of gold – a walking bankroll, I’m virtually a supernatural being walking in the midst of mortals. But she doesn’t seem to be cowed. As a Westerner, I’m someone who bombed six different shades of daylight out of her parents’ family homes, yet she doesn’t seem to be vengeful. As a Westerner, I have dangerous degenerate values, yet she doesn’t seem to be afraid.
Just persistent.
Perhaps, as a Westerner, I owe her something, and she knows it.
But I’m overwhelmingly uninterested in teaching these strangers English as an act of charity. Maybe I’d teach them piano, if they showed promise. But teaching adult beginners anything is a labour of love.
‘Maybe your friends can enrol at the UNCO school,’ I tell her, diplomatically. ‘I teach there, and it is very cheap.’
‘OK,’ she says, her disappointment mild, ‘but maybe tonight you can tell them some easy vocabulary.’
‘Sure’ I sigh. It’s a good compromise. A gain for them, an expiation for me. ‘Just let me get a book for you.’ I rise and cross the landing to fetch a beginner’s book I have in my bedroom, but I’m interrupted by the distinctive sound of a cheery, if flat, voice singing ‘one is the loneliest number’ followed by a perfunctory knock on the downstairs door. It’s Zac. A surprise visit.
Single White Female in Hanoi Page 23