I manage to identify Nguyet and Binh in the middle of the line up. They’ve been waxed and polished almost beyond recognition. Binh is in a black tuxedo, his lips blood-red, his androgynous face pure Madame Tussauds. His eyes seem too big, too glassy. Beside him is a human doll. The skin is dusted porcelain, the hair has been set into shining coils and plastered into place with product and glittering accessories. The little-girl’s body has been fastened into a blinding white wedding dress with the hip-to-waist proportions of a wasp. While Binh stares glass-eyed into the haze of camera flashes, Nguyet blinks myopically around her and executes an endless series of tiny nods in all directions. Whether she can see much at all without her glasses is doubtful. This is weird. I’ve been to a few local weddings now and this one’s in a class of its own. Either Nguyet’s family has sold a priceless heirloom I didn’t know about, or Binh’s mob are rolling in it. There’s an overall impression of wealth the likes of which I haven’t seen in Hanoi. This looks to be the wedding of the year, and I sense the presence of some significant party men.
On the stage, Binh is now pouring champagne from a magnum into a multi-tiered wall of empty champagne glasses. The glasses have been arranged so that the overflow from each row fills the layer of glasses beneath it. The liquid has a familiar orange colour. No foreign stuff for this crowd.
Eventually the man stops shouting into the microphone and the crowd clap while Nguyet and Binh, their arms entwined, are forced to drink a glass each. I fear for Nguyet, who can’t keep alcohol down at all, but the horrid stuff seems to find shelter somewhere in her modified waist.
Then the ceremony’s over and the couple leaves the stage. They parade though the room of tables, nodding and shaking hands every two metres. When they reach me, I kiss Nguyen with infinite care on her painted cheek and shake Binh’s hand.
‘I take you to your table,’ Nguyet announces, leading me to the ‘foreigner’ table. The only other Westerner seated there is a corpulent Italian man with thinning black hair. He shuns me altogether, preferring to talk to the Vietnamese at the table.
‘The Consul-General is my friend,’ he’s telling them, patting his chest with both hands.
For the remainder of my time at the reception, I sit patiently at the table, biting down on the acid juices of my own hunger, as the food is brought out. This is food that screams of means. To demonstrate how ‘no expenses spared’ this event is, even the rice has some kind of meat in it. It’s the only dish in which the animal that died for it has remained anonymous. In the centre of the table is a roast chicken whose legs have been sawn off and fed into its own cloaca. It looks like the victim of a Mafia killing. Beside it, some large fish are reclining side by side with small fish in their mouths.
The duck soup arrives for everyone around me. From the centre of the bowl, the duck’s eyeless head is lording over the soup, like a statue in the middle of a pond. When the soup is finished, the bowls are collected and new dishes are laid out. The Italian guy gormandises his way across the table with omnipresent fingers and flared nostrils. Eventually he turns to me and asks, ‘Why you don’t eat anything?’
This is a moment I’ve been dreading. In most respects, while I regard my aversion to meat as a kind of disability, most people are tolerant of it. But for some reason, In Hanoi at least, I’ve found Italians less so. They seem to take vegetarianism as a personal insult.
‘I’m sick’ I whisper back, placing my hand on my stomach.
He nods relieved. ‘I thought you were going to say you were vegetarian.’
As soon as the last dish has been consumed, guests begin to rise and head back downstairs to leave. The celebrations are over. This at least, is consistent with other Vietnamese weddings I’ve attended. The running order has been something like this:
Guests file in, wearing their best clothes. They hand over an envelope containing 50,000 dong. They sit at trestle tables and eat themselves torpid, they chuck lesser morsels of meat and toothpicks on the floor, smoke the free cigarettes, then leave in droves. The whole process doesn’t take much more than an hour. A realisation hits me. This is the first real Hanoi wedding I’ve been to. And it’s middle class. Almost everyone else I know here comes from a village.
Back downstairs in the foyer, the newly-weds are in a photo shoot. I watch Nguyet and Binh closely. They’re concentrating on being good hosts, admittedly, but I can’t see the spark I’d expect to see if two of my Western friends got married. Are they really in love? Is she going to be okay with this guy? The thick coat of Vietnamese culture has knocked all signifiers into another language so that I can’t read anything reliably from their behaviour.
‘Carolyn!’ Nguyet cries, grabbing me and yanking me into the frame. She squeezes my hand as we pose for a few shots with her family. When it’s over she hugs me.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she whispers in my ear. I glance at her mother standing behind her. Recently I went shopping with Nguyet to pick out a gold neck-chain and earrings for her. Despite her new gold jewellery, she looks small amid the splendour. But she’s beaming. Even Nguyet’s father is wearing a smile. I wonder how much sadness at losing their daughter lurks behind the smiles. And I wonder how torn up Nguyet’s heart is at the thought of moving out of her family home.
Nguyet seems to read my mind. She turns to me and says, emphatically ‘Carolyn, I am so happy!’ I look deeply into her face and a sense of calm and relief washes over me. For there, under the veil of unguents and pigments, I think I can see real joy.
Kim
With my maid Lien moving to Nguyet’s new marital home and out of the picture, my place has started on its familiar backslide. To complicate matters, there’s been a breakdown deep in the sewerage system. My toilet is exhaling third-world fumes like a gas canister with the stopcock blown off.
I complain to the landlords, Nga and Tuan. Tuan comes over and tinkers sullenly in my bathroom for a while. The smell improves for a few days, or at least, becomes more erratic. Sometimes it’s hardly there. Then it returns. I complain again and this time I come home to find Tuan and a posse of tradesmen in my place. They smoke and stand around in the bathroom. The gas isn’t flammable, I conclude. Tuan leaves saying ‘ok now’ and the smell recedes again.
Luckily, a friend of a friend has found me a new maid called Kim. She’s ‘expensive’ – fifteen thousand dong an hour – but I’m happy to hear that she speaks some English. Quickly, I come to rue this fact since she never shuts up. She turns up for work wearing lipstick and going-out clothes and dons a tight apron. She’s flirtatious. The main topic of her prattling is her old employer, an aging diplomat at the Danish Embassy who has now returned home.
‘I miss my old boss very much, very much,’ she moans, leaning on the broom she hasn’t used yet.
‘My boss, he alway give me ektra money,’ she says, pausing thoughtfully while dusting the rice cooker.
‘My old boss, he buy me new clothez and a stereo,’ she tells me an hour later, having progressed to re-arranging the pile of objects on my desk.
‘My old boss, he very good to me,’ she reminds me a few days later, rearranging the dresses on my clothes rack by colour. If it’s true, I can’t imagine it was her domestic skills that impressed him, since she has barely more than I do, which is barely any at all. Yet although I’m uncomfortable with Kim’s overtures of bosom-buddyship, we get along well enough, and she seems to be able to at least stem the tide of domestic deterioration.
But if Nga had nothing nice to say about Lien, she is far less impressed by Kim. I’ve learnt from experience that no one in Vietnam approves of anyone else’s maid, but when Nga speaks to Kim the bark becomes more of a growl. I have no idea what it’s about, but I’m more concerned by the fact that the toilet has relapsed. I keep incense burning at all times.
It’s a quiet Sunday at home when Nga and Tuan break into the living room. They enter without knocking and without removing their shoes, which I would never dare to do at their place. They look around wildly,
ignoring me, then turn and march into my bedroom, where Kim is re-arranging my collection of handbags. Without as much as a hello in my direction, Nga begins shouting at Kim in Vietnamese. Finally she turns to me.
‘She break the toilet,’ Nga tells me.
‘The toilet was broken before I hired her,’ I tell Nga angrily. ‘Now please take off your shoes.’ Nga kicks off her sandals violently. Tuan, looming behind her, doesn’t move, just glares at Kim. The air around us seems to be ticking with tension. Kim has frozen, her face impassive.
‘We do not agree to have her in our house,’ says Nga. I’m almost too stunned to respond. I thought I paid Nga $200 a month to make this my house, and I paid Kim her wage to make her my maid. I’ve been too lax, I reflect. I’ve let them walk all over me.
‘She is no good,’ Nga continues. ‘She is not a good person. We don’t agree. She must finish now.’
‘Oy! Shut up Nga,’ I shout. ‘Kim speaks English. Do you understand me?’ The fury is building up inside me. ‘She speaks English probably better than you do. In my culture we don’t speak badly about somebody in front of them.’
Nga turns back to Kim and barks out a few more words before I intervene. I want her and Tuan out of my bedroom.
‘Nga, we will talk about this tonight please. I want you to go now.’
‘Ok,’ Nga says. ‘I will call you tonight.’ I nod, as, with a last baleful glance at Kim, they retreat.
Kim takes a moment to reactivate, then removes her apron.
‘I go now,’ she says quietly.
‘Oh no you don’t,’ I tell her, alarmed. She’s been away for two weeks and my place is in urgent need of her ministrations, however incompetent. ‘Please don’t be afraid of Nga. She’s gone now. I will talk to her tonight and explain the toilet is not your fault. Okay?’
‘No, I think I must go now. She told me I must leave immediately.’ says Kim. I shake my head.
‘Nga has gone home. She cannot sack you anyway. You work for me, not her. Please keep working.’
Kim looks dubious, but puts the apron back on and gets back to work. I wander over to the CD player and select some mellow Miles Davis. We both need to relax badly. I pour myself a glass of herbal Ruou from a bottle I bought months ago and light a cigarette. I smoke it at my desk staring off into the neighbour’s rooftop laundry space. A young woman is hanging out a basket of whites. The blood stops buzzing in my head and peace slowly returns.
Then I hear footsteps in the stairwell. My heart turns over unpleasantly. I spin around in time to see Nga and Tuan appear in my hallway and this time they’re really angry. Tuan, red-faced, leads the way.
I run into the bedroom, positioning myself between Tuan and Kim, and I turn to Tuan. But it’s a new Tuan: more psychotic than the previous one. He jabs brutally at the air, pointing through me to Kim. He screams a few words at her then turns to me to translate, putting his full eight months of English tuition into use.
‘She. Out.’ There’s spittle around his mouth. Nga is standing behind him, her face half woman, half bulldog. I’m not going to mess with them in this state.
I hug Kim and give her a wad of notes. She’s gone before I can ask for her phone number.
I’ll never learn what Nga and Tuan knew, or saw, that I didn’t. There was no doubt Kim had a rather slatternly air about her, yet Nga’s assessment of her seemed impossibly fast.
The next day I ring Mr Can, a real estate agent I know through my friend Bill. I ask him to start looking for a one-bedroom place.
If Natassia were here we could get a place together. That would make moving house seem like a step forward, instead of sideways. I’ve received only one email from her since she left. She was in Cambodia. She missed me but was enjoying herself, travelling with some Israelis she’d met on the trail. ‘I don’t know when I’ll come back to Hanoi,’ she wrote. I’m beginning to get the feeling she’s moved on.
Fat lady sings for me and the fat man
There’s a seven-bedroom yellow house up on West Lake. I spend a fair bit of time there. It’s party central.
Justin and his sister Alison, my Global colleagues, moved there over Christmas. So did Angela, the young American teacher, and five others, all of them friends of mine, all of them fond of a drink.
Recently, Angela and co-habitant Sheridan chipped in and bought a full-sized electronic piano. Since that day I’ve spent more time there than ever, practicing, working hard to recover the agility, or ‘chops’, that have been in decline since my arrival in Vietnam.
The house also has cable TV. Zac’s managed to wrangle a copy of the front door key from Justin, by pleading addiction to CNN. It’s a cosy set up but it heralds the demise of an era.
I’m sitting with Zac on the roof of the Kiwi café, watching the street below when the moment comes. We’re having a coffee en route to the yellow house. All inhabitants are out, but Zac’s got the key. He needs his CNN fix, and I’m in need of a solid hour at the keyboard.
‘See that guy begging down there … ’ Zac begins, drawing my attention to a ragged, elderly man with one leg.
We watch the guy for a moment. He’s soliciting the Westerners leaving the café downstairs. He cuts the standard sad figure. I’m not sure why Zac’s pointed him out, then he pipes up again.
‘I bet he cut his own leg off for the sympathy vote.’
I look at Zac in disgust. ‘I’d think a land mine might have saved him the bother, don’t you?’’
‘Caz, I won’t hold your ignorance against you,’ he bites, with sudden venom, ‘but there have never been any landmines in Vietnam.’
‘What? Are you sure?’ I ask, dubiously. Given that kids get killed nearly every week in the provinces by unexploded ordnance, I imagined land mines abounded. Zac exhales that warning breath.
‘I’ll say it one more time. There are no landmines in Vietnam.’
‘So what’s killing these kids that get blown up every day?’ I expect him to tell me it’s all cluster bombs, which I might accept, since I’m no expert. But Zac’s pedagogic skills have gone down in a blaze of defensiveness.
‘I’ll say it one more time,’ he repeats, through gritted teeth. ‘There are no land mines in Vietnam.’
‘Alright!’ I intone, exasperated. ‘You’ve made your point. What’s with your foul temper today?’
‘Look,’ that terrible fricative exhalation again, ‘I don’t try to tell you how to play an E sharp,’ he grinds his teeth momentarily. ‘I’d appreciate it if you don’t try telling me about South East Asian history.’
‘Fuck Zac. You should hear yourself right now.’ We make eye contact, hold it for a moment. It occurs to me that his coffee drinking habit may have spiralled out of control. ‘E sharp’ is usually known as F anyway,’ I add.
Zac’s face gets darker. I continue: ‘Forgive my ignorance, but I’ve just come back from Laos and there was certainly a shitload of landmines there.’
‘Caz. You need to get your facts straight,’ his voice is thoroughly nasty now. ‘There’s never been any landmines in Laos either.’
It’s not any firm conviction that I’m right, although it later turns out I am, that makes me walk away. It’s the magnitude of the arsehole factor.
‘I’ll see you downstairs when your mood’s improved.’
But minutes later, while I’m sitting with a friend downstairs, I see Zac paying at the counter. Then I hear him roar off angrily on the Minsk, scuttling our plan.
My fury doubles at the thought of my much-anticipated piano session, which is now receding, with Doppler effect, with every incompetent swerve, with every stomped-on gear change, with every violent pull on the Minsk’s throttle.
This fallout leaves me angrier than the others. Over the next week, pride puts the final boot in. I know this irrational truculence isn’t the real Zac. It’s the insecure, bullied kid he once was. The fact is I miss his company but I’m too proud to solicit it until I’ve had the apology that he’s too proud to provide. The stand off is
total. In another month or two, without another word having passed between us, Zac will leave Hanoi, a city and a culture he’s despised from the moment he arrived two years earlier. His personal growth trajectory here, such as it was, is over. Hanoi has no more to offer him, never had much. He’ll move to China, where he’ll find a culture for which he has more respect, a culture in which he feels the exigencies of survival haven’t shattered the intellectual climate as badly.
My fallout with Zac affects me in stages. Once I realise it’s irreversible, I hit a new low. I shun social engagements. Insomnia plagues me, and in the unnatural quiet of the Hanoi night I’m forced to evaluate what’s left for me here.
With beef, beer and bike-riding off the menu, Hanoi, for me, has never been quite the garden of pleasures it is for other expats. Furthermore, Zac and Natassia feel irreplaceable. Without them, I feel displaced and not even my closest other friends here can fill the void.
I’m beset by my degree of alienation from the Vietnamese mind. I feel different beyond measure – too complex, too steeped in irony, too individuated. I’m too quick to find myriad perspectives on events and situations, too critical, unable to confine my reality to irreducible truths, in fact, unable to reduce it much at all, so that there’s a constant background level of bewilderment.
By virtue of being Vietnamese, my Vietnamese friends share unfathomable commonalities. Their sense of identity is so solid, so universal, it’s taken for granted. They don’t suffer existential uncertainties and confusion. They seem, in some ways, like simplified humans, naïve, repetitive, unpondering. They have no fear of stating the bleeding obvious, of looking stupid. None of them spent their teen years experimenting, questioning, rebelling. They never had the solitude required for it. I conceive their personalities as smooth, unfurrowed things.
My personality flaps around in the crosswinds of perception, frayed ends everywhere. Like many Westerners, I’m partly unstuck from the full context of my own history and culture, and this very fact is also what makes me cynical, overly analytical, inconsistent.
Single White Female in Hanoi Page 32
