And when he’s finished, he apologises, and with grand charm kisses each of us again. Then he grabs his scarf from the waiter and tears out the door. Cuong has left the building. And the bill, as it happens. I look at Huong expectantly.
‘I think he must go to his wife now!’ she whispers knowingly.
‘He’s married. Great,’ I say in the same tone. ‘Thanks for telling me’.
‘But he want to see you again.’
It’s the last I see of Cuong. Except on the big screen. To my great amusement, there he is in a well-known Tran Anh Hung film, playing a philandering husband. It’s uncanny how convincing he is.
Tet
Sunday morning arrives, brutally cold, and with it comes My Linh, an hour earlier than I expected. She watches me eat breakfast and get dressed. Twenty minutes later we’re riding out of the compound.
‘So, My Linh,’ I shout. ‘We come back tonight, yeah?’ I feel the brakes go on slightly.
‘Oh, chi, please, we stay with my family tonight!’ she says. ‘Come back tomorrow.’
I protest for a minute, but the truth is, I packed my toothbrush and a change of clothes as a precaution, so it’s no big deal.
‘In the morning.’ I say authoritatively. ‘I have two piano students tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Yes, okay. Don’t worry.’
The traffic out of Hanoi is predictably wheel-to-wheel. It takes us about fifteen minutes just to get onto Kim Ma, which is barely a kilometre west of my place. As we turn into Kim Ma I notice a large pink carcass, soft and floppy, bouncing around up ahead. We gain on it. It’s a particularly horrible carcass, fully skinned, tied to the back of a Chinese bicycle battling its way through the traffic. In a land where modesty prevails, I’d expect it to be covered up.
Finally we draw level and I observe that the pig has died in an emaciated state judging by the lack of fat under the ribcage. Then I see the tail, the unmistakeable tail.
‘My Linh! Cho, cho It’s a dog!’
‘Yes, con cho,’ she says. She nods round at me and her jaw is set in a firm line. Even she seems repulsed. We swerve a little to avoid physical contact with the overhanging cargo. By the look of it, the carcass belonged, only hours ago, to a live, fully-grown Alsatian.
As we pass the bicycle I check out the driver. A young guy in ragged clothing with a handsome, angular face. His expression is bland, uncomprehending, as I shout out: ‘Da man qua! (inhumane!). He’s on his way home with his Tet surprise.
‘Couldn’t he just get a cumquat tree?’
‘He is poor. Maybe the dog more cheap.’
But the gelatinous dog’s body seems inauspicious to me. I’m being taken off for a priceless cultural experience, I should be steeped in gratitude. But the lop-sided line of my mouth reflects the twisted gratitude I suffer when someone does me a favour that I didn’t ask for, and didn’t really want.
It’s nearly an hour before we make the city outskirts and hit the open road.
‘How far to your village?’ I ask.
‘My village far from here only one hundred and fifty kilometre,’ My Linh replies reassuringly. I nearly fall of the back of the bike.
‘What! You said your village was close to Hanoi.’
‘Yes. Travel only three hour.’
Uncomfortably cold, my trepidations deepening by the minute, I start to wonder whether I’ll be able to speak English to anyone else when we get there. As if she can read my mind, My Linh pipes up again.
‘Don’t worry! My family very kind, and my brother and sister can speak English.’
‘Really? That’s good news My Linh.’
‘Don’t worry chi! Soon we will arrive.’
I take this last remark with a grain of salt. With the possible exception of water buffalo-drawn carts, My Linh is the slowest thing on the road. I calculate that our ground speed of around thirty kilometres an hour will get us there in closer to five hours.
I pass time trying to get My Linh to tell me whether we’re travelling north, south, east, or west. I ask her in English and in Vietnamese. I ask her in many different ways. I draw maps with my finger on her back. But the answer is the same. A pointing finger.
‘It is this way.’
It seems to me Vietnamese conceptualise geography differently to Westerners, because they rarely know the answer to this question.
Beyond the paddy belt, we pass though poor villages and poorer ones. My Linh teaches me to make the distinction based on how much green is visible. Paradoxically, the poorest villages have the most concrete – it’s the grass and trees they can’t afford. But in between villages, we pass verdant paddy fields with limestone karsts erupting out of them like jagged teeth. I marvel, as I always do outside Hanoi, at how unique, how fecund, and how staggeringly beautiful the northern Vietnamese landscape is.
At the four hour mark we sing karaoke favourites to take our minds off the freezing wind and cramping buttocks. At the five hour mark we lapse into silence.
Nearly six hours into the trip, we enter Thanh Hoa Province.
‘My Linh,’ I say, finally. ‘Tell me, why do you drive so slow?’
‘Ah. I go slowly because I think you are tired,’ she replies.
By the time we arrive at the house, I have to be helped off the back of the bike. The lower half of my body has fused into an excruciating ‘pillion posture’, a yoga position with nothing whatsoever to offer. I give the friendliest salutations I can muster to the sea of excited faces dancing in front of me and then, completely disoriented and frozen rigid, I’m shown to the bed – a wooden board in one corner of the sole room in the house.
Someone covers me gently with a blanket, although there is no pillow. One of My Linh’s sisters, who’s a doctor, takes my pulse and brings me a hot sugary drink. But it’s a lost cause – I shake like a chihuahua for about fifteen minutes, then I’m down for the count.
At some point in the afternoon I wake up long enough to meet the family and discover two things. They’re really nice. They don’t speak English. I notice it’s dark outside and sink back into sleep.
Some time later, My Linh and a sister climb into the bed on either side of me. They each put an arm over me and fall asleep. I surface intermittently during the night, whenever truck horns doppler along the main road 30 metres away, or I need to turn over on the hard wood. Towards dawn there’s an unbelievable cacophony of chickens. Half asleep I turn to My Linh.
‘The chickens. Will they stop? Will the chickens stop?’ She smiles a bit in reply and keeps on sleeping. She looks extremely happy.
To my enormous relief, I wake later in the morning feeling human. It’s time to properly meet the family.
The four children are all in their twenties. Three girls, then a boy, with My Linh the second-born. It’s a rare family reunion, and the house is full of laughter and antics. I hear My Linh tell her family that I’m a teacher, a journalist and a musician and that I am very intelligent. She seems very proud to have brought me home.
The sisters are Doan, the doctor, and Lien – both lively and vivacious. I especially connect with My Linh’s 21-year-old brother Thanh. He’s playful, considerate and astonishingly affectionate, with a mischievous sense of humour that spans the culture gap. Of the siblings, Thanh has the most English – he’s been learning for two years at university.
‘I … study … university – contraction,’ he explains solemnly. I teach him to pronounce the very tricky ‘construction’. I know from My Linh that Thanh is studying construction engineering. We try to converse but it’s very difficult, and we just end up laughing.
‘Your Vietnamese same my English,’ he observes. ‘Bang – equal.’ Sadly, it’s true. We’ve both got maybe a couple of hundred words of vocabulary, and little knowledge of how to glue it together into sense.
My Linh’s father, improbably, is sixty. He doesn’t have a grey hair to show for it and has the energy and humour of a far younger man. But Mum, who does look sixty, doesn’t make so many appearances. She’s
too tired from working at the market, where she sells sundry items, and keeping the house together. While everyone’s running around laughing, she’s working, tireless and uncomplaining, or lying down, exhausted.
Over the course of the next two hours there are five or six visitors, turning up singly or in groups. They seem to have been foretold there’d be a foreigner in the house. I hear My Linh tell them I’m a teacher, a journalist and a musician and that I’m very intelligent. They stare at me. By the third time through, the description has begun to make me feel lonely. I’ve been reduced and flattened into a kind of caricature.
The house is a brick hut with a pitched bamboo roof, set on old and uneven cement. The windows have fat steel bars but no glass. The doorway is enormous, and the door stays open while we’re in the house. There’s no heating of any kind. The floor is swept cement, no rugs. There are no soft surfaces anywhere – a phenomenon that seems to sum up the country and explain the people – just a few hardwood chairs and benches and two wooden beds.
Outside is a small concrete yard with a well from which all water is drawn, around which we clean our teeth in the morning. On the far side is a wooden shed where the father shares a bed with Thanh. Adjacent to this is an outdoor undercover kitchen. The toilet, out past the chickens, whose numbers will dwindle sharply over my time in the village, is mercifully a proper porcelain squat toilet. Other village dwellings simply have a cement space in the yard, no holes, no plumbing, with a partial brick wall for privacy. When finished, the user simply pours water over the area until whatever was there has been dispersed.
All up, it’s basic, but mid-range – this is a village with grass, trees and electricity. Hence the omnipresent sound of the TV in the house.
At breakfast Doan unrolls a bamboo mat onto the cement floor beneath the TV. Humans and food go on it. Surreptitiously, I scan the room for a cushion. Fruitless. I sit with my legs crossed like the rest of the family and smile sweetly. My Linh has cooked me a special tofu and tomato dish. It’s tasty and I’m grateful.
After breakfast I remind My Linh that we have to leave immediately. She stares back at me, her face a mask of sorrow.
‘But, tonight is Tet,’ she whispers.
‘Yes, and you promised to take me home now. I have two piano students this afternoon.’ My Linh looks grief-stricken. ‘Tet in Hanoi looks very interesting,’ I add brightly. “Fireworks at Hoan Kiem Lake.’ The truth is I’m now rather looking forward to joining in the lakeside celebrations.
There’s a long, awful silence.
‘Ok,’ she says finally. ‘I will take you home. But tonight I must stay with you because I will be very sad if I am not with my family at Tet. Never before this happen.’ Her voice is breaking and I realise she’s deeply upset. I have to let it go. I can call my students when I get home, if I ever get home, and apologise.
Once we’ve established that I’m staying, My Linh becomes voluble and excited again, she has a big day planned.
‘First, I give you a bath and wash your hair,’ she announces. The idea of a hot bath cheers me, until I realise the house has no bath, indeed, no bathroom. Just some metal buckets that can be filled with water and heated on a fire, then taken to an area beside the well that has a low brick wall for privacy. It’s about ten degrees, with a humidity that precludes dryness, and the fact is I’m just not evolved for crouching naked outdoors in these kinds of temperatures.
So Lien takes me by motorcycle into town, where a woman washes my hair with cheap shampoo by the side of the street in cold water. There’s no conditioner. Even the hair-dryer seems set on ‘cold blast’. My nose runs, my eyes water. When it’s all over, I put my warm hat back on, ungratefully squashing the lank hair back into a hat shape.
We jump back on the bike and pull out. My disposition, I fear, is a few shades short of the Tetly bonhomie it should be.
Fifty metres later I hear a crashing noise and watch a young girl go flying from her bicycle into the gutter, landing hard. The culprit is a young boy who has flown past and knocked her off. I watch his face as we overtake him. He looks back at the scene a couple of times, then grins and keeps riding. I ask Lien to stop the bike, and I jump off. I stand in the middle of the road, forcing him to stop, and I yell at him in a puree of Vietnamese and English. The swearwords are in English. I order him to turn around and apologise. Shocked into obedience, he does this. By now, the usual mob of staring villagers has gathered around the new scene. None of them showed much interest in the previous scene.
For the rest of the day, My Linh takes me visiting. She parades me from pillar to post, until I feel we’ve left no threshold uncrossed.
‘It’s good luck to have foreigner in the house on the day before Tet,’ My Linh reveals to me at one point.
At each house the routine is the same. I sit, unoccupied, under the watchful eye of Uncle Ho, who looks down from his obligatory altar, while endless cups of green tea are poured and rapid-fire Vietnamese is exchanged. At each abode, My Linh boastfully expounds my many forms of employment and virtues to the host. ‘She is a teacher, a journalist and a musician, and she is very intelligent.’ Since the incident in the village main street this morning, the epithet of my wondrousness now includes how I’m a very kind person. The story of the foreigner who upbraided the naughty boy will be repeated endlessly in Vietnamese today, and possibly spread throughout the village, with unknown elaborations.
The singing of my praises out of the way, My Linh then seems to ask and answer the same series of mundane questions about the family, before we move on to the next hauntingly familiar scene. By the third or fourth house-call, my tolerance for being a lumbering good-luck charm is starting to wear thin. What bothers me most is the incuriousness. These villagers have possibly never met a foreigner before, least of all had one in their house drinking tea, accompanied by a translator. Yet any effort at communication will be the same pointless semi-rhetorical question each time:
‘You like Vietnam?’
My mood veers downhill. I begin to suspect these villagers have nothing more to teach me than a few new superstitions. The whole ritual strikes me as a joyless, obligation-driven chore. I can’t understand how My Linh can be enthusiastic about riding hundreds of kilometres through skin-numbing cold to spend a day making small talk in a pitiable village full of people who wouldn’t have anything to say if Confucius himself sat down with a translator.
And what of tonight? In Hanoi, at least there’ll be partying at the lake. Probably drinking, presumably some fireworks at midnight. What could be worse than spending New Year’s Eve with your parents, when you could follow my traditional example and be playing music with friends, your brain happily gummed up on party drugs? But my reflection starts to oxidise and spoil. It’s all equally meaningless, I conclude, with a sour jolt.
Culture, tradition, ritual, superstition; they’re just ways of filling the same existential void. I’ve never felt so far from home in my life. I feel stretched and woozy inside and my mind is spiralling downwards towards panic. I suspect acute, comfortless homesickness, but today I can’t remember what home is, or what it ever felt like.
Our last house-call takes us to the house of My Linh’s oldest uncle, his married children and their toddlers. The three generations live in two connected rooms lit by low-power fluorescent tubes and walled with pock-marked cement, which has been painted turquoise.
In this poor excuse for a bomb shelter, my spirits are restored. For more than an hour, My Linh translates as the uncle and a sonin-law, leaning forward and bright-eyed with excitement, ask me question after question and answer mine. They ask about Australia – the culture, the climate, the topography, the government and about the differences between their world and mine. Finally, through My Linh’s translation, the uncle begins to ask about the American War.
‘The Viet Cong – we won the war, but we lost more than one million soldiers. More than the Americans, yes?’
‘Yes,’ I tell him. ‘The Americans lost about 60,000
men.’ He sits with this for a moment, nodding, taking it in.
‘Tell me. Do you think my people are brave, or crazy?’
‘I think they were following orders, that’s all.’ I watch as My Linh struggles to translate this.
‘I think maybe we are crazy.’ For a moment the uncle looks bereft, and I wonder at his war experiences. ‘So many dead men.’
By evening back at the house, the visitors are pouring in. My Linh’s mother has gone for a nap after working at the markets all day, but the others are inexhaustible. I sit on the teak chair and smile through aching cheeks. Thanh, the younger brother holds my hand, trying to warm it up. In the 36 hours I’ve been in the village I haven’t yet removed the top half of my clothing and I don’t intend to. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been cold and the sky has been the same preternatural thatch of white.
As midnight approaches, the visitors trickle off and Mum is woken up. The event of the year is nigh. We sit together on the bamboo mat surrounded by red and gold boxes of sweets and candied fruit and a bottle of Vietnamese ‘champagne’, which is a strange orange colour.
For the opening act the TV is turned down and Thanh begins the shaking of the bottle. He shakes it vigorously for about five minutes, during which time, to the amusement of the family, I back off into the furthest corner muttering ‘you’re nuts’.
When the TV shows fireworks exploding over Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi, we know it’s midnight. The family scream and yell for a minute then I adopt the crash position near the bed as Thanh coaxes out the cork. There’s a small pop, which causes a round of excited exclamations from my hosts, then glasses of the stuff are disseminated.
I put it to my lips and activate the drinking muscles, but can’t induce the stuff to enter my mouth. Who was it that gave the Vietnamese the idea of making champagne? Presumably defeated French colonialists, as a vindictive parting gesture, one of many. The label bears the legend ‘Best Quality’ but the stuff tastes like Ganges water that’s been filtered through a rancid dishcloth then adulterated with a small amount of cheap Riesling.
Single White Female in Hanoi Page 30