Single White Female in Hanoi

by Carolyn Shine

This is largely because they’re wearing costumes and headdress, several types of costume in fact, which Natassia explains denotes which tribe they’re from. The ones in blue-black costumes, which predominate, are short and look almost Tibetan, while the mainly red costumed-ones are tall and dark with lots of gold teeth. They congregate in the middle of the street or walk up the hill in twos and threes. They call out to each other in nasal singing tones. Some of the young girls have tiny babies strapped to their back with a strip of cloth. The older women look ancient – impossibly wrinkly, with earlobes stretched to their shoulders by heavy metal hoops. Laughter and silver jewellery abound. This is a place lifted from the pages of an anthropologist’s textbook.

  But our timing is priceless. Before I’ve had a chance to take in the extraordinary tableau before me, we hear a rising commotion, and look up to the top of the street just in time to see the vanguard of a parade appear over the crest of the hill.

  By the time the parade draws level with us the atmosphere among the tribes-people has changed profoundly. The laughter and the shouting have stopped. They skulk, singly or in pairs, along one side of the road, staring off, occasionally, at the festivities that now occupy the other side. Clearly, they’ve just lost their stomping ground.

  It’s National Day today, and there’s no mistaking it. The other side of the street is taken up by a line of chanting children, four or five abreast, that snakes as far as the eye can see up a hill and shows no sign of tailing off, and each child is waving a small Vietnamese flag.

  It’s an impressive display of patriotism and I would have liked to celebrate the defeat of the French colonialists too, but the warm glow eludes me – it’s quite clear there’s something amiss here. The town seems to be in the grips of some kind of apartheid.

  And a couple of days talking to people in Sapa casts some light on it.

  Marginalised at best and brutalised at worst, Vietnam’s 53 ethnic minorities have managed to reap few if any benefits from the new Vietnam. They’re poor beyond belief and almost universally uneducated.

  Natassia and I befriend Zi, a fifteen-year-old H’mong girl. To my surprise she considers her English to be better than her Vietnamese. This doesn’t auger well for her Vietnamese, since her English is a bizarre melodic cascade of tumbling words, many of which make no sense at all.

  Zi’s fifteen and as flawlessly beautiful as a China doll, but she’s been ostracised by many of the other girls of her tribe for some reason, so she’s something of a loner. When I ask Zi about her family she explains that her father died three years ago, leaving her fifty-year-old mother with a toddler. On my final day in Sapa, when we’ve spent more time together, I ask her about her father and she starts to cry. Zi lives in a one-room bamboo hut with her ailing mother and two sisters in a village two hours walk from Sapa. She’s the sole bread-winner, selling hand-made H’mong relics to tourists. None-the-less, with an uncle who has five chickens, two pigs and a buffalo, she explains her family is ‘not so poor’.

  We sneak Zi into our hotel room to show her the view, but she’s more interested in MTV. Instead, Natassia and I stand on the balcony and marvel at the panorama. The mountains are permanently shrouded in endlessly shifting configurations of cloud, so that summits get revealed in random sequences. Only once during our stay do we look out in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of Mount Fansipan. I study the towering snowy cap and marvel at the number of tourists who insist on scaling it.

  On Sunday Zi takes us on a trek down the side of the mountain to Cat Cat village. She leads us on short cuts along the narrow verges that separate the rice terraces, providing access for farmers. Natassia and I sway vertiginously towards the waterlogged fields below, finding it difficult to walk in a narrow straight line along muddy, uneven pieces of turf only a few centimetres wide, for 300 metre stretches. Ahead of us, Zi skips along as nimbly as a goat. This is her terrain.

  Finally Zi announces we’ve reached Cat Cat village. I look around, grateful for this information. Without it, I wouldn’t have known we were in a village. I count three bamboo huts and a small bridge. We sit down on the bridge and rest. This is truly the middle of nowhere, I think to myself. The air is cool and so fresh it almost burns our lungs. The environment around us seems pristine and the paddies are so verdant they look computer-generated.

  Soon a number of other tourists come past us. Mostly groups of Vietnamese. Some continue down the mountain, others settle around the creek for a picnic. In no time at all they’re throwing cigarette butts and coke bottles around them.

  ‘I guess they haven’t quite caught up with the environmental movement,’ I say to Natassia, who’s disgusted.

  As we sit there a couple of Westerners come up the hill towards us, a woman and a man.

  ‘Huh?’ I say, catching sight of the woman’s hair.

  ‘What is it?’

  I watch them until they’re close enough to be sure. Then I turn to Natassia again.

  ‘That’s the woman with the red hair. The one I told you about.’ She looks at me blankly. ‘The one who gave money to the beggar girl outside the Nam Bo on Tuesday.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asks me dubiously. It does seem rather a coincidence.

  ‘Pretty sure. How’s that! In the middle of nowhere!’ I shake my head and rise. ‘I’m gonna go and say hello. Hopefully she speaks English.’

  ‘I saw you give money to a beggar girl on Nguyen Thai Hoc near my house last Tuesday,’ I tell the redhead.

  ‘That sounds like Kath,’ the man chimes in. I glance at him and like him immediately.

  I extend my hand to Kath in introduction but it never finds its target. She grabs my ring finger and turns around the Valentine ring so that she can look at the setting.

  ‘It’s tourmaline,’ I tell her, pre-empting her next question.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ she replies. ‘I made it’.

  And it’s true. I check and she’s the owner of the jewellery shop where the ring was purchased in Sydney, six years earlier.

  Kath introduces me to her friend Lee. He’s somewhere in his fifties, I estimate, with dark lively eyes and greying hair. Within a minute we’ve established that we once lived within a couple of blocks of one another in Sydney. I tell him a little about myself and learn that he’s a journalist. He asks if I’d be interested in working as a sub-editor for a national English-language financial review.

  ‘I’d love to do some subbing work, but believe me, finance isn’t my strong subject,’ I reply, laughing. But Lee laughs too.

  ‘I worked there for years. The office is full of arts graduates and musos.’ I raise my eyebrows, interested now. ‘They need an extra sub a couple of days a week. You should ring them,’ he says. I take down the phone number and we go our separate ways.

  Pulling out of Sapa, I peer back into the mountainous mist and wonder if I’ll ever return. Saying goodbye to Zi was tearful. I wonder how many Westerners she bonds with each year, how often she cries at separation, whether she holds any hopes of seeing them again.

  We find the Tulip carriage near the back of the train and jump on. Standing in the corridor with his back against the wall is Thinh, the company rep, hemmed in by a stern middle-aged Scottish woman.

  ‘Well, what are you going to do about it? This is naught good enough. We’ve paid $50 for this trip, we expect better,’ she’s saying.

  Thinh seems simultaneously cowed and amused. He catches my eye briefly. I wander up to the woman and ask her what the problem is. She wheels around to face me like a school teacher about to upbraid a naughty child. ‘Haven’t you looked at your bed yet?’ she snaps. They’re filthy. Mine’s full of ants.’

  I head back into our box where Natassia is squealing ‘bugs! bugs!’ as she picks though the sheets on her bed. I take a look at mine. Not so many ants, but shroud-of-Turin-like, I detect the faint impression of a body shaded in black grime on the sheet and of a head in the middle of the pillowcase. I sniff the pillow gingerly and nod. The sheets haven’t been washed since
the last passenger, at least.

  A harrowing trip to the toilet confirms the problem. We’ve been given an uncleaned carriage. By now the Scottish woman has whipped up an insurrection, and several berth-loads of Westerners are demanding answers from a flustered Thinh.

  Back in our box I find we’re sharing again with the same young Vietnamese couple. They’re finding the whole turn of events as gripping as we are. As the train pulls out, the drama swirls up into new levels and draws in railway employees who pile into the carriage corridor. Increasingly the yelling is in Vietnamese. Our cabin-mates have lived in Europe and speak excellent English and so we’re privy to on-the-spot translations.

  ‘Thinh says it is not the fault of Tulip. He says it is the fault of the railway authority who is supposed to clean the carriage,’ explains Hung, whose gorgeous wife, Bich is reclining in his arms, foreigner-style. They seem unruffled by the hygiene problem, but point out that they’ve paid less than a quarter of our price for their ticket.

  Reaching up, I lay my sarong carefully over the sheet and the pillow as a foul-tempered woman comes in to check our tickets. She leaves and I hear her voice added into the continuing dispute outside our door. ‘Tay’, the Vietnamese word for Westerner jumps intermittently out of the exchange.

  ‘She is shouting at Thinh!’ explains Hung, cheerfully. ‘She say his company has cheated the foreigner because they only give them the Vietnamese-style carriage.’

  After an hour or so the lights go out for sleeping, but periodic altercations in Vietnamese rattle through the carriage like gunfire. Natassia and I are still up and chatting with Hung and Bich when Thinh slouches into the carriage looking close to tears, holding a piece of Tulip letterhead paper. It’s nearly a full page of neatly handwritten Vietnamese. He asks us to sign it. Dat summarises it for us.

  ‘He has written a complaint to the railway authority. It say they should refund some money to the passenger because they didn’t clean the carriage. It say the railway authority did not do their job properly.’ Dat laughs and signs his name at the bottom. The petition is passed around and we all sign.

  An hour passes and the lights go out. We’re sitting in the semi-dark still chatting with our carriage-mates when our door is yanked open again, this time by the dour ticket inspector who reaches up to switch on the reading lamp and sits down heavily on the bunk. She surrenders a scrap of paper and I peer at the page. It’s written in a far less practised hand, on a thin piece of paper torn messily from a notebook. With difficulty, Hung translates the scrawl. He and Bich are laughing helplessly.

  ‘This one say that Tulip is to blame for the bad service. This is the Tulip carriage and it is their responsibility to look after it.’

  We add our signatures to this one too. It’s a game of no consequence. It’s obvious the buck will be passed backwards and forwards until the foreigners are out of sight. The truth may be unknowable. I’ve taken pity on the ticket inspector, realising she’s more tired than ill-willed.

  Some time after she leaves, we try to sleep, but there’s a fresh round of yelling outside. Hung pipes up in the dark.

  ‘Are you awake?’ I can hear the smile in his voice.

  ‘Tell us,’ I call back.

  ‘Now Thinh is saying this is not the Tulip carriage – they’ve given him the wrong carriage.’

  The dispute continues into the night. I wake up during a particularly loud bout and peer through the curtain on the door to find that two police officers have transubstantiated into the carriage from nowhere and are now involved. There’s some low key discussion, then another loud outburst. I recognise Thinh’s voice again, sounding more anguished than ever. Hung wakes up and translates. ‘The ticket inspector has discovered that Thinh does not have a ticket. She told him he must buy one, because he claim this is not the Tulip carriage.’

  In Hanoi, we roll off the train into pre-dawn darkness. The streets are not yet conscious, eerily quiet, except for the station exit, around which are scores of very persistent xe om and cyclo drivers. My place is only metres away so we don’t need one. They grab at us and I shake them off irritably. I have an eight am class at Global in just over two hours. Natassia comes back to my place too and we shower and lie down for an hour or so. We listen to Hanoi start the day. With the tourniquet of night removed, the din returns like blood rushing back into a limb.

  The cool hush of Sapa, cradled high in the mountains, is barely a memory.

  Ex-Adonis magnet

  Zac’s sitting in the staffroom looking gloomy when I arrive at Global. I make myself a cup of green tea and sit in the empty chair beside him. The Vietnamese English teachers are sitting around the table too, reading Tin Tue, the local daily newspaper. Trying to make conversation, one of the Vietnamese English teachers looks up from the headlines to ask him ‘Mr. Zac, have you heard about this epidemic that has spread through the country?

  ‘You mean communism?’ he asks, as the staffroom crunches into a dead silence.

  ‘Nice one,’ I tell him. ‘How was National Day?’

  He shrugs. ‘I dunno. Ask someone who went out of their house.’

  I tell him a bit about the weekend and he listens with the air of a doomed man listening to a prattling child.

  ‘Caz,’ he cuts in, finally. ‘I’ve decided we’re wasting our lives here. Over the weekend I realised that in terms of lifestyle and job satisfaction, I’d be better off working as a garbage collector in Darwin. The work wouldn’t be any less mentally stimulating, and after I knocked off I’d be able to talk to interesting, intelligent people.’ He leans back into the chair, his face set in a glum sort of pride. Lan walks past and the two engage in a mutual hate-stare.

  ‘Hey. You just had a bad weekend. ‘Cos we were away. You missed me.’

  ‘Not you – Natassia. It’s her voice.’ He sighs a long sigh. ‘I hope she never finds out how much time I spend alone fantasising about it.’

  ‘She won’t – if you start being a bit nicer to me.’

  ‘Caz,’ he begins gently, unperturbed by my peeved attempt at blackmail. ‘You know if I’d met you when you were, say, 28, I’d have devoted my entire life to trying to root you.’

  Groaning, I lean forward and ask him, ‘Zac. Have you ever been laid, here?’ I’m starting to wonder if he’s ever been laid at all.

  He hesitates. ‘Not really. I was seeing a Vina girl earlier this year who let me kiss her, but after I had a feel of her titties I never saw her again.’

  ‘I don’t think you should worry too much about Vietnam turning you into a feminist,’ I say crisply. He smiles, relieved, and I add: ‘What about paying for it?’

  ‘Whores? You obviously don’t understand how I feel about AIDS. Allow me to explain. I wouldn’t trust a whore here even through two condoms.’

  ‘So the answer’s no then. You haven’t had sex in … how long is it? Nearly a year!’ I watch his face move through a series of contortions, and then he cracks.

  ‘ … Well, I didn’t want to tell you this, but you’ve left my dignity with no choice … ‘

  This is when I learn Zac’s secret. He’s actually been having an affair with his ‘lucrative’ Korean private student, a lonely housewife whose husband is off playing golf and screwing local girls. I pat him on the back, relieved.

  ‘What about you?’ he asks me. ‘Have you had any action?’

  ‘You know I only have eyes for Vina guys,’ I tell him, knowing how he hates this.

  ‘You disgust me,’ he says predictably, then has a thought. ‘I’ve got a friend like you – hungry for small cock … ‘ I splurt out a mouthful of green tea onto the glass table and start choking. Ngoc, the teacher sitting next to me, thumps me on the back, and the bell rings for class. ‘But she’s got more sense than you,’ he continues. ‘She only goes for rich Japanese businessmen.’

  It’s been slowly dawning on me that thirty-something female expats in this town don’t get laid much. The male expats my age, unprepossessing as they generally are, are pairing of
f with gorgeous young local girls left right and centre. And ‘young’ means barely twenty. I seem to be at least ten years older than even the Western girls they occasionally chase. And then there’s the mysterious lack of sexual attention I’ve had from local guys. Has the enervating climate of Hanoi drained every last remnant of sex-appeal from me? Have I suddenly aged ten years? Under Hanoi’s signature fluorescent lighting my face in the mirror is starting to show signs of wear and tear that I hadn’t noticed before. I could be having my first aging crisis.

  Come to think of it – I’ve hardly seen Hanoian guys with Western girls of any age. Could it be they’re just not attracted to us? What’s gone wrong? I was an Adonis-magnet in Bali.

  Some of my questions are answered a few days later in a Global classroom. I’m trying out a new lesson for upper-intermediates in which the students are living two hundred years in the future at a time when sexual reproduction is no longer the best option. Inhabitants of this brave new world have to order their baby from a laboratory, after designing it from a generous range of options. Student groups, representing the new marital units, must choose their baby’s specifications. Hair-colour and eye-colour, for example, can be any colour imaginable. The first group, a mixed bunch of lively students, selects a very tall girl with wavy pale yellow hair and purple eyes. They name her ‘Atlanta’ and give her an IQ of 140. I nod approvingly.

  But the next group, all boys, isn’t settling for mere mensa-level brainpower. They’ve given their new daughter an IQ of 200, despite my suggestion that this may make it impossible for them to have a conversation with her. Given her other traits, this might well be her only distinguishing feature. For hair-colour they’ve selected black; for hair texture, straight; for eye-colour, dark brown.

  ‘You’ve made her Vietnamese!’ I cry out in abject disappointment.

  ‘Of course’, they smile back.

  ‘We’re living two-hundred years in the future, in an incredible world populated by a completely new type of human being,’ I remind them. ‘And you’ve created a Vietnamese girl! Where are your imaginations?’