Single White Female in Hanoi

by Carolyn Shine

  I toy with the idea of leaving Hanoi. And the more I contemplate it, the more attractive it seems. I want to move house anyway, and Mr Can, the real estate agent has found me nothing viable. I’m sick of Nga and Tuan – in fact, of my entire neighbourhood. After nearly a year, the gargoyle-headed neighbour downstairs still fixes me in a hate stare every time she spots me. Then there’s the discomfort, albeit self-inflicted, to be had every time I pass Oanh’s pho stall.

  With the assiduous tuition of Zac, I’ve come to see the culture around me as hostile, backwards, and rather brutal. This is the very antithesis of what I came here to find. How can I reconcile my disappointment with my former philosophies?

  And yet … the fact is, with Zac gone, some of my cynicism towards all things Vietnamese is starting to come loose. There are key things I haven’t bothered to see or do, possibly because Zac dismissed most cultural activities out of hand. I decide to give myself to the end of June, during which I’ll take advantage of Zac’s absence to renew my interest in Hanoi life. It’s April now, three months shy of my first anniversary. If I can make a year it’ll feel like I’ve earned the right to declare my mission concluded.

  Without great enthusiasm, I emerge from the bedroom and set to the task of taking a bite out of Hanoi’s cultural apple.

  I begin official Vietnamese lessons with my giggly, round-faced friend Hoa, who has already taught me a great deal of her language. I accompany Alexa to the ethnic museum, and Sheridan to the military museum. I join some journalist friends and visit Uncle Ho Chi Minh, marvelling at how in-the-pink-of-health he looks in death and at the discipline involved in standing bolt upright with a bayonet for hours at a time, which the young guards spend their days doing. Afterwards we visit ‘Ho Chi Minh’s house’ and the Ho Chi Minh museum.

  As the founding father of a nation, and revolutionary leader, Ho Chi Minh seems a far cry from the alpha males that often characterise this role. Emaciated and goateed, Uncle Ho looked every bit the aesthete. The Vietnamese proudly tell me he lived a life of celibacy and died a virgin, which in some other cultures might be received less positively, not to mention with some scepticism. Ho Chi Minh wrote a body of poetry, most of it while imprisoned as a revolutionary at the orders of the British in Hong Kong, which is still memorised at schools today. Yet it seems apparent he was also a capable military leader and strategist. As the leader of a famously effective army, he once warned his opponents ‘You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, yet even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.’ The French made the expensive mistake of ignoring this remark. Then the Americans, too big-headed to learn by this example, followed suit. It’s hard not to admire him, yet, like so many of his compatriots, Ho Chi Minh is mysterious to me.

  Now I notice the genuine devotion to culture and history displayed by every Vietnamese person I meet on these outings. And I grow, finally, to realise something else, something Zac never understood. The Vienamese people are nationalists before they are communists. They accept communism stoically, only because it represents their historical path to self-determination.

  Vietnamese history books are full of heroes who save the country from its invaders. Among these are the Trung sisters – two incredible women who led an 80,000-strong army to vanquish the Chinese in 40 AD. This strong sense of national identity is behind the great support for Ho Chi Minh and his vision. I see now that the veneration of Ho Chi Minh is not a veneration of communism.

  Nga visits, and I detect the spirit of reconciliation. Perhaps it’s the way she cleans the place until it’s immaculate and pledges to continue doing this every weekend from now on. I can’t deny that the whole drama with Kim has had its upside. I lost an expensive, slovenly, and possibly untrustworthy maid, and got an excellent one for free: one with a genuine interest in keeping the place in good shape.

  Next, I discover I have some friendly neighbours in the compound, Dat and Phuong. I’ve been listening to their toddler screaming night and day for months, wondering why no one has euthanased him. It’s Dat and Phuong’s rooftop laundry area that my living room window overlooks, and their young maid who likes to clear her airways from the window above it.

  I find a woman pacing the compound one day, trying to calm a screaming child. I recognise the pitch of the scream and sidle up to see if this faceless menace has red irises and goat-slit pupils. He smiles back at me through teary eyes. He’s beautiful. I start chatting with the woman, who introduces herself as Phuong, and a few moments in, I’m struck by a realisation: we’re speaking English.

  Phuong smiles at my exclamation.

  ‘My husband, Dat, he speak good English,’ she replies modestly.

  Days later, I meet Dat, who’s a graphic designer. Thirty, playful, it’s clear from our first meeting that Dat is intelligent and something of an independent thinker. He also plays guitar and sings. And he has a small keyboard. We jam together and I transcribe some Vietnamese pop songs for him. I like Dat and Phuong a lot. It’s an entirely new kind of friendship for me in Hanoi, especially with Dat – a male with whom I actually have stuff in common.

  But Dat and Phuong are Hanoians through and through. They have an older daughter, but have ‘given’ her to Dat’s parents.

  ‘My parents don’t get along,’ explains Dat. ‘So we thought maybe if they have a child to look after they will be happier.’

  One Monday night I finally take up Kiwi Alexa’s invitation, and accompany her to choir practice at the Goethe Institut. The Hanoi International Choir is the first choir I’ve sung with. Alexa got it right when she said to me,

  ‘Your hair stands on end just from the warm ups!’

  The choir is of a surprisingly high standard and I struggle to keep up. The numbers wax and wane dramatically each week, but there’s a dedicated core of talented singers from all over the world. When I join, Graham, the choirmaster, is preparing us for an upcoming performance of Vivaldi’s ‘Gloria’. I’m going to be singing at the famous Hanoi Opera House.

  Meanwhile, I’ve hooked up with a couple of good expat musicians, Massey, an Englishman, and Neil, an Irishman, and we’ve started plotting a blues band, which I’ve already named Caboose. Inspired by this, I inquire about hiring a piano.

  Within a week, I’ve tracked down a guy who says he can help. A few days later I’m standing at the top of my stairwell wringing my hands as three small men painfully haul a Russian upright up the stairs. It just fits against the wall beside the fridge. By that evening, I’m at the piano with Massey and Neil, having our first rehearsal.

  Within weeks of my fallout with Zac, my life has changed dramatically.

  I’m not alone, I discover. There’s a post-Zac atmosphere around.

  ‘Since Zac’s left, I’ve started liking Hanoi more,’ says Angela. ‘I think his jaundiced view really got to me.’

  ‘Yup, I’ve noticed that too,’ agrees Erin, who also lives at the yellow house. It’s now become fashionable to admit how much one disliked the man. This makes me miss Zac all the more. For all his boasts to the contrary, he was incapable of guile. He was arrogant, contemptuous, and inept at small talk, and the in-crowd was never going to like him, but he was never boring. Zac rarely told people what they wanted to hear, but sometimes he could cut to the truth of a matter with surgical precision.

  Bill's new job

  ‘No guarantees,’ Aussie Bill says over a lunch-time lasagna at the Kiwi café, ‘but I think we might be able to help your homeless friend.’

  ‘Hien?’ I turn my attention to Bill. I’d been focused on shy Thiep. Tall, graceful and, to my eyes, if apparently no one else’s, mesmerisingly beautiful, Thiep works behind the counter, and persists in offering me long smouldering stares that cause whole armies of ants to parade down the inside of my sternum. Unfortunately, he’s twenty-three. Why, oh why? But Bill now has my full attention.

  ‘Yes, Hien,’ he confirms. ‘Have I introduced you to the lovely Miss Duong at NET? No? Well, I will.’ Bill puts his fork down and reach
es for his packet of state-owned Vinataba cigarettes. ‘She’s a good reporter, and her boyfriend works for Cong An Nhan Dan, the police newspaper. Also a lovely guy.’

  ‘Right … ‘ Slow rising tone. Police newspaper? Hien lives in justified fear of the police.

  ‘Well, once a month the paper runs a piece on a homeless person. It’s feel-good patriotic stuff about how we can help these people back into the community. The person then usually gets some attention. I’ve spoken to Duong about your mate and she’s spoken to the boyfriend.’ Bill lights the Vinataba in his hand and inhales a lungful of the deadly thing before exhaling over his half-eaten lasagna. ‘She thinks we might be able to get his people to run a story on her.’

  Dare I allow myself the luxury of hope again? I wonder, a moment later, as I’m standing in the toilet queue downstairs. My troubled thoughts are disrupted by the approach of Vinh, the cute and friendly Vietnamese manager. He’s a little older than the others, and also pays me flattering amounts of attention, although not quite as intensely as Thiep. He’s on a cigarette break and sidles over towards me smiling warmly.

  ‘You know, we talk about you,’ he tells me.

  ‘Who talks about me?’ I ask, although it’s clear what he means, and I instinctively become a little flirtatious.

  ‘The Vietnamese staff. We like to talk about you,’ Vinh continues. He’s now sporting the kind of smile a person wears when they’re about to give a friend some great news, or a surprise gift. My heartbeat has started on a new groove – a kind of upbeat samba. Then he drops it.

  ‘Yes, we say, you must have been very attractive when you were about fifteen or sixteen.’

  It would be a funnier world if security cameras had captured the change in my expression for posterity. Fifteen or sixteen? Twenty-one would have been simply insulting, but ‘fifteen or sixteen’? Vinh, at least, is in his early thirties. I say nothing, just nod and offer a one-sided smile till he departs, looking a little uncertain himself.

  Before we leave the café, where my gaze drifts repeatedly back to Thiep, Bill drops a casual comment. ‘You must have worked out by now that Vietnamese men don’t reach maturity till they’re about 50,’ he says. I put my head in my hands. It’s time to let go.

  Bill now works as the chief foreign editor of NER’s rival publication, NET, the National Economic Times. This is in a magazine format, as opposed to NER’s ostentatious broadsheet, but is of considerably higher quality. NET employs decent reporters and has the sense to hire foreigners with real backgrounds in journalism. Best of all, it’s housed in the same publishing compound as NER, so that I can pop over and grab Bill for lunch. I like hanging out at NET headquarters when I get the chance, just for the contrast. The office rooms are small and friendly. My friend Penny, a young Australian on a youth ambassador program, also works there and her almost continuous laughter forms part of the background noise. At NET the staff morale is higher: foreigners and Vietnamese work side by side and form real bonds.

  Bill is also able to commission me to write the occasional article for him. I write observations from the angle of a single white female in Hanoi, and Bill edits my work to make it palatable. We’re a good team – Bill is expert at squeezing seditious ideas through the filters. My friend feels that change for the better is happening around us, but in slow-motion – slow enough to prevent any outbreaks of panic. He describes Vietnam as being in the throes of a bloodless coup.

  Back at the publishing compound, at the NET office, Bill takes me into a small room where a young, neatly dressed Vietnamese woman is working at a desk. She turns around. Heavy eyelids, intelligent eyes.

  ‘Miss Carolyn, may I introduce Miss Duong’

  Duong smiles a crooked smile with great warmth as we shake hands.

  ‘Mr Bill he tell me about your friend,’ she begins…

  I’m feeling pretty good as I leave work later in the afternoon. Duong inspired confidence. I head down to tell Hien that I’ll be back with some people in three days. She smiles peaceably and nods. It’s doubtful that much of what I said was comprehensible. My ever-expanding vocabulary is captive to my foreigner’s ineptitude at grasping tones, word order and those elusive little particles that hold the language together.

  When I return to the Nam Bo supermarket with Duong, who has volunteered to join us as translator, her boyfriend Huy, who writes for the police newspaper, and a photographer, Hien is on the pavement. She looks nervous when she sees us, despite my efforts at forewarning. With help from Duong, I tell Hien again that these people may be able to help her, then I stand by protectively as Huy interviews her. He learns of her family in a neighbouring province, the husband that beat her until she fled in terror, leaving her beloved son behind. Perhaps Hien would have revealed more, but as soon as the photographer starts trying to set up a shot she becomes agitated, then abusive.

  ‘Your friend say many bad words!’ Duong exclaims. ‘Please can you explain again that we try to help her.’ She translates again as I do so. Hien looks at me and calms down. Then the photographer tries for a shot and she actually stands up in an effort to escape.

  I beg her to let the man take the photos and she sits down again but will not look at the camera, turning her head away sullenly. When I discuss this with Bill later we reach two theories: that she fears arrest because she doesn’t have the correct papers to ‘live’ in Hanoi, or that she’s afraid her family will see images of her demise. When Huy has concluded the interview and the photographer has his shots, we depart. I have a sinking feeling.

  ‘We will try,’ says Duong

  It is more than a week before Bill is able to confirm the results. Hien’s story will not run.

  The rise and rise of caboose

  Once a year, the infamous Hanoi Minsk Club throws a party that goes all night and sometimes all the next day too. The club secretary straps to his back a pressurised pesticide spray-pack filled with vodka or gin – with just a hint of mixer – and circulates the room, spraying the poison into the willing mouths of party-goers.

  The next party’s coming up and Caboose has been offered its first gig.

  Massey has found us a local rhythm section. They’re from the Hanoi jazz scene and work together in other bands too. They’re both called Son. Little Son, the drummer is a pocket-sized hyperactive kid with star charisma, oodles of charm, and probably a little more energy than skill at the kit. His pockets are always bulging with technology – with state-of-the-art mobile phones and electronic diaries. It takes me a few meetings to realise why. If anything’s fallen off the back of a moped, Little Son was right there behind, with his lovable grin, catching it.

  ‘What kind of mobile phone you like? I can get for you!’ he promises me.

  ‘I’m happy with this one,’ I tell him, flashing my old Nokia.

  Little Son squints comically at it.

  ‘This old! You can put in the rubbish!’

  ‘It works very well, no problem,’I assure him.

  ‘Why do the Nguoi Tay always want the cheap phone?’ he asks, amazed.

  Mobile phone shops sell cheap, outdated phones to foreigners and flashy, overpriced ones to Hanoi’s new yuppie class. It’s got the locals baffled.

  On the drums, Little Son specialises in explosive showy solos. In fact, it can be hard to get him to stop soloing. Even during verses. Even during the quiet bits.

  Big Son, the bass player, is a larger, slower, rather more sombre fellow who tends to linger just slightly behind the beat and needs energetic encouragement to keep up with the rest of the band. Getting his attention is tricky, though, because he insists on playing with his head down. How these guys came to work together is a mystery.

  But the two Sons are reliable, and we have a lot of fun rehearsing and stringing the set-list together. We choose some covers by Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmy Smith, Taj Mahal, even some Steely Dan, and add in a few originals.

  A few days before the gig, I buy myself a cheap keyboard from a shop on the electronic keyboard street. The k
eyboard is admittedly missing a few pro-features, but has a pitch bend wheel and some surprisingly good sounds. It’ll do the job. I take it to a tiny, specialised street on the outskirts of the Old Quarter where a guy measures it and has sewn me a soft backpack for it by the afternoon. This means I can strap the keyboard to my back and hop on motorcycles to and from gigs.

  This year’s Minsk Club party is in a massive wooden house on the far side of West Lake. Hundreds of people fill every nook and cranny. To celebrate my debut gig in Hanoi, I play in a red cowboy hat and yellow sunglasses. The crowd surrounds us, occasionally falls into us, and generally goes wild. The set is over before we know it and all agree that our inaugural gig’s been a great success. This is confirmed when the owner of the R & R Bar, an expat haunt near the Old Quarter, approaches us backstage.

  ‘Would you guys be interested in a month of Saturday nights in my backroom?’ He asks. We are.

  After the second R&R Bar show, the Hanoi Jazz Club offers us a gig. This is where I marvelled at the local jazz quintet, on my second night in Hanoi, with Yvette and Khai. Eons ago. A newcomer wandering in tonight will see me up there, with my multi-cultural blues band.

  For this gig, we invite everyone we know – we fill the room! The band plays better than ever; Massey sings his heart out, Neil tears the roof off with his searing guitar, and Little Son wins the crowd over with his spontaneous improvisations. As the set draws to a close, Big Son turns out a surprisingly melodic bass solo and I find I’ve developed a fan club, which includes a guy who keeps handing me glasses of straight Irish whiskey, and another chap, a visiting friend of Aussie Bill, who proposes to me. Tonight I’ll meet loads of familiar-looking expats and locals I hadn’t formally met before. It’s taken a year, but I’ve entered a new phase of expatdom.