Afterwards, my hosts have some fun putting the cork back in the half-empty bottle and shaking it for long enough that there’ll be a detectible sound when it’s loosened again. Then I hum and goldfish along as the family sings Vietnamese songs for another hour or so, mainly dedications to Uncle Ho, whose altar is beside the bed with a fresh glass of ‘champagne’ sitting on it. The family insist I shoot a half a roll of film of them balancing empty sweet boxes on each other’s heads. Even My Linh’s tired mother is laughing big belly laughs. I look around and notice the shining eyes and the flushed glowing faces and I realise, with envy, that these guys really are having the time of their lives.
Excuse me while I kiss the tarmac
Somewhere above Noi Bai airport, the plane finally breaks through the malignant morass of cloud and I see wonderful, beautiful blue sky.
And my forgotten star, the sun.
From my window seat I experience a moment of childlike wonder. The sun makes things glisten and sparkle. It makes shadows. I move my hand into the patch of light that falls on my lap and study the darker patch it creates. I notice the penumbra of muted light around it. The sun makes fibres shine and dots them with those tiny granular rainbows. I let my dark hair fall across my face and peer though it at the constellation of dancing discs. The sun makes me glad to be alive. I blink into the blue and watch the mysterious translucent larvae drift down my field of vision. The sun is warm. It soaks into me like hot tea into a sugar cube, and liquefies the hard crystals on my spirit.
When I disembark at Vientiane the air is a heavenly 32 degrees. It’s embarrassing how close I come to kissing the tarmac.
Poor Ly
‘I’d like to say I’m glad to be back,’ I tell Zac over espressos at the Kiwi Cafe. ‘But it wouldn’t be honest. I’ve just left behind 32 degrees and a large, handsome holiday fling called Mat.’
‘And you came back here?’ he asks in disbelief.
I shrug. ‘Hey – how come you didn’t get to Laos?’
‘Well, actually, I had a better offer,’ he tells me.
I squint at the big man. He is subtly changed. Winter has improved him. Height seems to have replaced width as his most imposing feature. The sweaty polo shirts are gone. The sweat’s gone. He’s in dark, loose-fitting street gear and it suits him. He seems unusually relaxed. His eyes are clear and his baby face has a look in it I haven’t seen before.
‘You didn’t!’ I shout. He grins convincingly. ‘Who is she? Anyone I know?’
‘No way. She’s a chick from Vinh province.’
‘Name?’
‘Ly.’
‘Student?’
‘Student?’ he snorts. ‘I guess she is. I’m teaching her to read and write … ‘ He pauses for effect, ‘Vietnamese.’
‘And in return?’ I ask him, riveted.
‘She’s teaching me a whole lot of Vietnamese I didn’t learn at uni.’ He scrapes at the dried foam on the sides of his cup with the teaspoon. ‘You’ll be impressed to know there really is a word for cunnilingus?’
I am. ‘Would you mind sharing it with me? I’d like to think I’ll need it someday.’
‘You never give up do you.’
‘That’s a bit rich coming from Hanoi’s number one sexpat.’
Zac smirks, flattered. He really hasn’t had the success rate to call himself a sexpat.
‘How was Tet in the provinces?’
‘I’m not ready to talk about it yet,’ I shudder. ‘I’m going to need the help of a recovered memories specialist.’
My Linh chooses a different kind of café for our first post-Tet coffee together. She rides me to a region deep in the Old Quarter, a thicket of narrow streets, barely penetrated by backpackers. The air at the intersection is intense with the combined smells of Chinese medicines and cooking fish sauce. Above us, nine storeys of cloud are hanging on for dear life as the suggestion of spring steals the chill from the air.
The café is a new one, built for the new, upmarket Hanoian – the aspirational with a mobile phone and a painstakingly developed taste for black tea and pizza. The chairs are full-sized, adult ones, at full-sized tables. The menus list a full selection of Lipton teas.
We sit downstairs beside an open window overlooking the part of the sidewalk reserved for patron parking. A bored, chain-smoking attendant is minding the bikes.
My Linh stirs spoon afer spoon of sugar into her orange juice.
‘I enjoyed meeting your family,’ I tell her.
‘Yes! They are very happy when they meet you. Do you print the photos yet?’
‘Oh, no,’ I’ve forgotten about the photos. They’ll be a catalogue of my misery. ‘I’ll take them in tomorrow.’
‘We can send to my family.’
‘Yes, I’ll make two copies.’ Hopefully there’ll be a couple where I appear to be smiling. I gaze out at the intersection. At the kerb, an old man with a beautiful face is squatting, stirring ice-cubes into a jug of arrowroot milk with a chopstick. His brow is furrowed. The cigarette in his mouth has a pellet of ash poised on the end. I wait for it to drop off into the milk but it stays there. The image makes me smile and I picture My Linh’s handsome father with one arm around his wife, the other around My Linh’s two sisters. Smiling, vibrant, attractive. Radiating love. I turn to My Linh.
‘Your father is unusual I think, for a Vietnamese man.’
‘Why unusual?’
‘I don’t know, he seems so happy. Always laughing. And he still loves your mother!’ My Linh says nothing for a moment. Outside, the man is still stirring his milk. I notice the log of ash has disappeared from the end of the cigarette.
‘It is good now,’ she says finally. ‘But for a long time, many year, it was very bad.’
‘Really! Why?’
‘Because my mother give him three daughter.’ My Linh sucks orange juice through the straw. ‘Very bad luck.’
‘But he loves his daughters!’ I exclaim. His seeming unconcern over the bad luck of having had three girls is one of the things that charmed me.
‘No! When Doan, the oldest, was born, everything is okay. Because it is good luck to have a daughter first, before the son. But when I was born, he was not happy, so my parents try again for a boy, and they have Lien, my younger sister.’ My Linh shakes her head, sucks up more sticky juice.
‘And, then?’ I ask, bemused.
‘He want to divorce my mother. His mother tell him he must divorce her, say to him my mother is not a good wife.’
‘Oh jesus. It’s not your mother’s fault!’
‘Yes, but in Vietnam…the people, they think like this.’
I leave this alone. Aussie Bill has explained to me before that here in Vietnam, men blame women for producing daughters, despite the simply-explained fact that the X or Y chromosome in the sperm dictates gender, not the egg.
Outside, a yoked vendor is passing, blue bucket in her right hand. On her other shoulder, she’s carrying an entire food stall– plastic chairs, bowls, boards, vegetables, charcoal-burner, wok with tofu still frying in it. My eyes flick back to the bike attendant, now slouched against the doorframe, drinking green tea. Cushy job. Why are all motorcycle attendants male? I wonder which of these two earns more.
‘But – your father loves Lien so much, I can see it!’
‘Now – yes. But he…he don’t speak to her when she is young. Never touch her or do anything for her. When she get older, he realise she is so kind and nice, and now, he love her. But for years, the situation very terrible.’
‘What about when your brother was born?’
‘When my brother come, it get a little bit better.’
This revelation has unsettled me. I sip my iced coffee in silence.
I don’t see much of Zac for the next fortnight. He rings every few nights to update me on the exquisite perfection of Ly’s buttocks or to narrate stories of the extent of her nha que-ness.
‘I took her to a good restaurant the other night, and after the meal, she took a swig on her m
ineral water, swished it around her mouth and spat it onto the floor,’ he tells me.
‘Bullshit! There’s no way she could be that nha que.’
‘Dude! She’s from Vinh Province! I don’t think you get it,’ he growls, with surprising vehemence. My mind files away an indelible image of Vinh Province as a grassless cement strip among the paddies, teeming with rotten-toothed, multiple-toed peasants.
I track down a mutual friend who had dinner with them.
‘Penny, did Ly spit La Vie water onto the floor at Illy’s the other night?’
Penny laughs for ages. Zac’s fabrications fill her with delight. ‘I wish she did. That’s a beauty.’
‘Well, I had to make it sound convincing,’ says Zac when I chastise him for having the gall to get stroppy at me when I disbelieved a lie. But the thing with Ly is starting to bother him. Maybe he’s finally starting to wonder whether an unmarried Vietnamese girl that sucks cock and does anal could really be a model of clean family values, but nothing about her is adding up, except her cash flow from some job she doesn’t discuss. When I finally meet her I’m knocked out by her beauty, and her apparent affection for Zac. They almost look like a great couple. But the heavy makeup and perfume spell it out.
‘I don’t know how to get rid of her,’ Zac moans.
‘Look, if she was just in it for the cash, why would she pick a stingy prick like you?’
‘I don’t know!’ Zac moans even loader, burying his face in his hands.
‘You could tell her your wife is turning up,’ I suggest, and watch his eyes light up.
‘That’s the best idea yet. Can you role-play?’
‘Give me a break! She knows me anyway. Just tell her.’
‘It won’t work. She won’t go away.’
A week later, round at Zac’s house I discover he’s besieged. The phone rings continuously. He ignores it. Later, there’s a prolonged knocking at the front door, then some low female keening. Zac slips an envelope with half a million dong under his door and retreats wearing a gallows grin. It’s a pathetic show, but the fear is contagious. I stay the night in an empty bedroom, undaunted by the enormous rat running laps around the room. At dawn, the builders across the lane start hammering wood together and I roll onto my back, contemplate the blue of dawn projected onto the fresh moulded ceiling. Poor Ly, I think to myself. It’s possible she really did fall for Zac.
Birthday
In general, when I wake up on my birthday I like the following conditions to apply:
a) A late hour, because I’ve slept in.
b) A hangover, but not a nasty one, more the kind that makes me feel dreamy and lazy and carefree, because I had a magical evening the night before.
c) Someone beside me. Someone warm and fragrant and smooth and lovely.
A frightful banging on my bedroom door wakes me at 8am. If this is someone delivering a birthday present, I don’t want it. I stand in my nightdress and croak at the door, ‘co ai day?’ ‘Who is it?’ My head is pounding with a hangover. The voice that garbles back at me is that of Nguyet’s live-in maid and my cleaner, Lien.
Less than a week ago she climbed onto my bed and shyly showed me fading colour photos of her son and daughter. Then she reached somewhere down the front of her pants and produced, for my inspection, the wad of money she was taking back to her village for them. She was flushed with excitement, happier than I’d seen her. Now she’s back, early, and seems to have forgotten what day she was due to turn up.
I open the door, but I’m nowhere near awake yet so I rub her arm affectionately and clamber back into bed. But in a second she’s on the bed too and she’s making a lot of noise. I begin to wake up into a bad feeling. I open my eyes and look at Lien and the bad feeling intensifies. Her face is so close to mine that the only feature I can make out is her wild eyes. She looks crazed. She’s shouting in a fast anguished Vietnamese that I can’t follow a word of, and she’s holding my shoulders. Then she backs off a little and her left hand flies out to grasp an imaginary stick with which she mimes hitting herself in the face.
I sit up in bed and focus on her for the first time. One eye is swollen and there’s a vivid crimson stripe running up the left side of her face, into her hairline, darkest over her beautiful cheekbone. At her hairline, the skin is broken. I touch her cheek lightly with my finger.
‘Who?’ I ask her in Vietnamese.
‘Nguoi chong’ ‘husband’, she cries, over and over. This looks like the work of the legendary iron bar that wife-beating husbands often wield in Zac’s tales.
Whatever happened at the village was so traumatic that the shock has survived the tortuously long road trip back from there, driven her half to madness. I encourage her to lie down beside me but she’s charged with adrenaline and won’t stay still. Eventually she runs out the door and is gone.
In the afternoon I cross Nguyen Thai Hoc to Nguyet’s compound. Nguyet is out. Lien is sitting at the table with Nguyet’s mother, drinking tea. Even in the gloom, the line of impact stands distinct across her forehead. She seems suddenly shy of me. The language barrier makes the situation more painful. While Nguyet’s urbanised mother can often grasp my efforts, Lien speaks provincial Vietnamese and our verbal communication is close to negligible. I drink a cup of green tea with them in silence then I do what I came to do. I deliver an envelope with a month’s wages in it and summon every word in my vocabulary in an effort to explain to Nguyet’s mother the concept of paid sick leave. I hold Lien’s hand, then leave before the translation begins to take effect.
There’s a gang of friends already at the Bia Hoi when I arrive that evening.
‘Happy Birthday,’ says Angela, a young American teacher from Global College. She hands me a gift-wrapped box and a beer. I unwrap the box layer by layer to reveal a red silk lantern. ‘Seriously, I wanted one of these,’ I tell her.
‘This town is a gift-buyer’s paradise!’ she laughs.
I agree wholeheartedly. Birthdays are fun in Hanoi, an excuse to go gift-shopping.
My Linh soon arrives, shouting ‘chi oi!’ She pulls up a plastic stool and places a package in front of me.
I unwrap the package and find a beautiful gold lacquered jewellery box. The lid depicts a pastoral scene with water buffalo. Inside, the box is lined with mirrors and red velvet. There’s a note inside too. It reads: ‘Happy Birthday Carolyn. Our friendship is unlimited.’ This line will come to be a source of ironic reflection – a quotable statement on the problematic nature of Viet-Western friendships, since after tonight, I will never see My Linh again.
Now Nguyet turns up, her long hair tied back, wearing simple clothes. Despite being at her house earlier today, I’ve barely had any contact with her at all this year, and already it’s March. We embrace, in the Vietnamese way – minimising body contact. She hands me a small package and I introduce her to the others. Inside the rice paper wrapping I find a crepe scarf, delicate as Nguyet herself, in shades of lilac and white. It smells of cedarwood and fresh cotton.
‘How are you? What’s happening? How’s Binh?
‘It is good with Binh, although sometime he … jealous. He don’t like when I am with my friends,’ she tells me.
‘That’s not good,’ I say, concerned. Binh has always struck me as a gentle, supportive kind of guy. What else is up his sleeve? He’d seemed like a sexually modern kind of guy too until Nguyet disappointed me with the details.
‘He don’t like if I wear make-up, or the dress that is too … you know … sanh dieu.’
‘Trendy,’ I translate.
‘Yes. Trendy dress.’ She pauses and I jump in.
‘Nguyet,’ I start. ‘What about Lien? I saw her today and it was terrible.’
‘Lien.’ Nguyet looks down and shakes her head for ages. I can see the effort of translating her thoughts into English is too daunting. She just sighs. ‘Thank you for giving her the money. You know, she cannot come back to your house.’
‘Huh?’ I say, stricken. ‘Why not?’
‘Ah! God! It’s March – you’re getting married!’ I exclaim. Maybe I never believed it until this moment, and now it seems less prudent than ever. Nguyet smiles, reaches into her handbag and withdraws an envelope with my name on it. Then she kisses me on both cheeks and takes her leave.
I read the invitation. The wedding is next Sunday – a mere eight days away. I’ll have to attend alone. I sigh and miss Natassia.
Wedding
Nguyet’s wedding celebrations, I’m surprised to learn, are a few blocks away, at Hanoi Towers, a twin-tower modern building that’s been central Hanoi’s tallest building for most of its life. I can’t imagine how Nguyet’s family could afford to hire a room there.
The tower on the right is an air-conditioned luxury shopping mall for tourists and expats, with offices, a child-care centre and an American-style restaurant on higher floors. The other tower has function rooms. This is the one I enter, treading the confetti-strewn red carpet laid out into the entrance and beyond, into the teeming marble reception area. Vietnamese, shrouded in gold, gemstones and freshly-pressed clothes, are crowding around a table handing in gifts and envelopes of money. I stare in astonishment at the décor. There are red and gold banners hanging from the forty-foot high walls, and draped everywhere possible. There’s red carpet laid up the symmetrical twin staircases.
I head up the stairs to the mezzanine, which is completely laid out with tables and chairs. Towards the main hall, the crowd weaving around the furniture becomes denser and a man can be heard shouting into a microphone. I shoulder my way though the throngs spilling out into the mezzanine. Inside the hall are countless immaculately-laid tables, with immaculate people seated around them.
Everyone is watching the stage, on which at least twenty people are lined up behind a preposterously large wedding cake.
Single White Female in Hanoi Page 31