‘You’ll still end up old and sexless, Kez. We all will. Question is do you want to spend the years before that living under gloomy grey skies married to some depressed former-merchant-banker with mummy issues, or here where there’s sun and dragonfruit and occasional sex with well-built imbeciles?’
‘Those are the only two choices, huh?’
‘Those are the worst-case scenarios.’
‘You know Reba from my office? She’s got this fella, gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous American, absolutely besotted with her. She broke up with him for a couple of days and the poor sweetheart sent her a bunch of flowers twice a day until she took him back. Just once in my life I’d like to have someone that mad over me. Someone who calls at three in the morning because he can’t sleep from thinking of me, and who almost starves because he’s spent all his money on roses and diamonds and champagne. I want to be someone’s obsession, you know?’
‘Be careful what you wish for,’ I told her, thinking of hours spent justifying a facial expression Glen had found hurtful, nights wasted listening to him lecture me on how properly to demonstrate my gratitude for his adoration, of red eyes, sore throat, aching bones, constant weariness. ‘Obsession can be terribly tedious.’
My phone rang. ‘Mischa? It’s Cal. Um, did you get my message?’
‘Yes, hi. I was about to text you back.’ I pulled a face at Kerry. ‘I can’t find the book anywhere. I must’ve lent it out and forgotten. But listen, there’s an English-language bookshop on Hai Ba Trung, just down from the corner of Bà . You should be able to find it there for a couple of bucks.’
‘Oh. Sure. Cool. Um. Thanks. Okay. So. I’ll see you later.’
‘Bloody keen on that book,’ I said as I hung up.
‘Oh, Mish, look. Oh, bless.’
I joined Kerry at the kitchen window. Cal was on the street below, his too-white running shoes picking their way through the scattered washing buckets, plastic stools, cooking pots and parked motos.
‘Crap. He didn’t say he was here. Now I feel awful. Should I call him back?’
‘Nah. He’ll be embarrassed. Let him think you didn’t know. Funny kid.’
‘Yeah. He’s heading the wrong way for the bookshop. I should’ve given him directions. I forget how easy it is to get lost here. I should go after him.’
‘Oh, he’ll be right. That’s the best thing about being his age. Getting lost in a strange city is fun instead of terrifying. He’ll probably meet half a dozen other lost wanderers and end up getting shattered in some dusty dive and shagging some hot backpacker behind the hostel.’
‘Sounds like your perfect night.’
‘God. It actually does. So sad.’
In my previous life I worked as a receptionist. I never cared for it, and was pleased that my inability to speak or understand Vietnamese ruled out that kind of work for me here. Of course, my lack of language skills and experience at anything other than answering phones and typing ruled out almost every other kind of work as well.
Most of the expats in Hanoi teach English, although very few of them are English teachers back home. Only the elite schools for the children of foreigners require their teachers to have actual English-teaching qualifications. A few of the better private colleges, like the Australian-affiliated one where Amanda worked, expect their teachers to have a degree in something (anything), but most will take anyone who is a native English speaker.
So it was that my first week in Hanoi I managed to get a job teaching English to tourism students despite having no experience in either teaching or tourism. My training consisted of a ten-minute run-through of the series of 1980s textbooks and tapes that I was to follow unswervingly. The classes were held in a three-storey tube-house with no air-conditioning and only one desktop electric fan per classroom. There were nine classrooms – three on each floor – and the walls were so thin that whenever I paused for breath I could hear the teacher in the next room as clearly as if she was standing by my side. I taught six 45-minute classes every day. Each class had between twenty and thirty students who seemed to have been grouped randomly. Any given class could have absolute beginners and almost fluent English-speakers. When I tried to talk to the director about reorganising the classes he pretended not to understand me even though his English had been excellent when he’d hired me. I lasted three weeks and was never paid a dong.
Matthew found me an editing job with the weekend magazine put out by the newspaper he worked for. That I had never worked on a magazine nor edited anything didn’t matter. I could read and write English and that was enough. The office was on the second floor of a French-colonial mansion five minutes from Hoàn Lake. The outside of the building was magnificent, if slightly faded, but the inside had been gutted and ‘refurbished’ in standard Stalinist grey. The editing department was on the second floor, furnished with twelve desks, every one of which would have been dumped on the nature strip for council collection back home. In the centre of the room was a shiny linoleum-topped table on which was placed the department’s sole English dictionary – a 1983 Abridged Oxford which was missing most of ‘P’.
It turned out that ‘editing’ meant rewriting whole articles that had been written in Vietnamese and translated very badly into English. ‘It’s hellishly frustrating, I’m afraid,’ the Canadian girl sitting beside me said on the first day, and it was, but I found I was good at it. Each story loaded onto my screen was a puzzle to solve. The meaning was in there and if I was persistent and creative, I could unlock it.
And the stories were almost always worth unlocking. Of course there were the typical propaganda pieces about new housing developments and immunisation schemes and silver medal winning athletes, but most of the stories were about ordinary Vietnamese people, their lives and traditions. It wasn’t hard news, but it was important, I thought. Stories about Agent Orange victims growing up to be doctors, or elderly village women learning to read, or elephant hunters being retrained to work as wildlife rangers. Feel-good stuff, we’d call it back home, but when your history is as desperately sad as Vietnam’s, feel-good stuff is essential. People here believe in destiny and stories like the ones we published helped them to believe that theirs is not one of uninterrupted suffering.
Three years into the job I was made unofficial head of the editing department. Unofficial because only Vietnamese nationals were allowed to be managers. Still, I got a token pay rise and the authority to decide which of the four editors worked on any given story. I always chose the longest and most convoluted stories for myself. I loved the challenge and it saved me having to put up with too much bitching and moaning from the others.
I also got first pick of the ‘special projects’ that came in from time to time. Special projects were books that would be sold or given away as magazine promotions. Vietnamese Traditional Music, North Vietnamese Cuisine, : A Brief History of the Imperial Capital and so on. Most of them were slightly reworded Wikipedia articles spread out over fifty pages of glossy Vietnamese Tourism promotional photos, but the one I was working on around this time was different.
Women of Vietnam was a pet project of the director’s wife, Mrs Lam. She had spent years collecting historical and mythical accounts of heroic Vietnamese women and had then commissioned journalists to interview hundreds of female war veterans and party members and street vendors. The result was three thousand pages of Vietnam’s history and culture as written and spoken by its women. Endless raw pages of Vietnamese to be turned into a few hundred publishable pages in English through the efforts of whatever translators Mrs Lam could bully into working on it, and me.
I did not need to be bullied. I would have dedicated all my waking hours to it, if I could have. The reluctance of the translators meant that I only received a dozen or so pages a week. The massive file of untranslated text taunted me every time I opened my PC. Over the years I’d become used to the glacial pace of the Vietnamese business world, but this project pushed me to the limit of my patience. Not that I would have expressed my
frustration to Mrs Lam or my colleagues. Vietnamese history is full of tales of fierce women, but for a foreign lady in modern Hanoi, tongue-biting was mandatory.
Late-afternoon, one day in mid-September, having spent the day rewriting a magazine piece about two deaf-mute cousins who ran a bun cha restaurant in Ha Long City, I found a newly translated book chapter had landed in my work folder. I read it hungrily. The translated text was typically clunky, but the story itself was wonderful. In 1306, seventeen-year-old Princess was given to the King of Champa in exchange for a couple of new territories for her brother to rule. She wasn’t particularly pleased about this, but she became downright furious when, soon after their marriage, her husband died and she discovered that she was expected to immolate herself on his funeral pyre. Luckily, the Princess’s brother sent a commando force to rescue her; even more luckily, the commando in charge was her former lover. What should have been a three-month return journey took a year and the still-teenaged widow Princess arrived home smiling.
I had barely finished the first read-through when my screen went blank and the fan over my desk stopped whirring. A collective groan echoed through the office. Electricity cuts were not unusual, but it was the third of the day and the sixth or seventh this week.
I stared at the blank screen. It could be minutes or hours before it came back on. It was just past four pm. ‘Fuck it,’ I said to Julian and Mario, the only other editors scheduled that afternoon. ‘Let’s call it a day.’
‘Brilliant,’ Julian said, packing up his desk. ‘Shall we go for a beer?’
‘Grog Hut?’ Mario suggested.
I waved them off. ‘Not me. I’m taking the opportunity to make the bank before closing. I’ve needed a new cash card for months.’
‘Righto. If you feel like it later on, we’ll be at the Hut until . . .’ Julian looked to Mario who shrugged charmingly. ‘All fucking night, probably. Unless we pick up.’
‘At the Grog Hut? Yeah, good luck with that.’
Walking up towards the Old Quarter I had the thrilling sensation of wagging school. The tiny bonfires lining the streets added to the festive feeling. I thought that I might just nip back and meet the boys for drinks after all, once I was done with the bank. Or maybe I’d detour along Silk Street and treat myself to a dress.
As I rounded the southeast end of Hoàn Lake, I saw ahead a crowd gathered in the centre of the road. Traffic was almost at a standstill; every few seconds a single bike mounted the footpath and bounced along until it hit the intersection, where normal madness resumed. I stayed lakeside, but the cluster on the road grew with every stopped bike and I soon found myself part of it.
Over the tops of thirty or so heads, I spotted the heart of the matter. A young woman was bent, her ponytail caught in the fist of a man who was tugging her towards his moto. He released his grip; she stood straight but did not look up. He barked something, pointing toward the bike. She shook her head and took a step back. He raised his hand and slapped her cheek.
Fast fingers of panic fluttered in my throat. I might have turned and run, if I hadn’t heard the words, more confident than they had any right to be, ‘Back off!’
There was an angry wave of voices through the crowd, then he pushed forward, taller and broader than the men shouting around him, his eyes wide with outrage. The crowd moved back and fell silent, taking a collective breath. I took one too, then called his name.
He looked up, blinking, as I pushed my way through to him.
‘Cal! Come with me. Now, please.’
‘Hey, ah, can you tell him – tell him to – he hit—’
‘,’ I said to the man, making a prayer steeple with my hands. ‘.’
The man nodded, his eyes murderous. The girl beside him continued to stare out at the lake. Around us the crowd murmured and heaved.
I nodded at the man, reached out and took Cal’s arm. ‘We need to go, okay?’
‘But, the—’
‘No.’ I stepped toward the lake and to my relief he followed. I didn’t look back and hoped to hell he wouldn’t either. I walked on, keeping hold of his forearm, until we’d rounded the corner and were heading west along the south end of the lake.
‘Ouch.’ He rubbed his arm, like a toddler.
‘Sorry.’
‘That’s what you said to him.’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t get it. Dude was an abusive fuck.’
‘I know.’
‘That’s okay with you?’
‘What I think of it is irrelevant.’
He let out a mocking snort. The sound and the fluttering fear in my throat reminded me of Glen and I walked faster as though I could sweat the memory out.
‘You late for something?’
‘No.’
‘Can you slow down then? I feel kind of sick.’
I slowed and risked a glance at him. He was breathing hard and his fringe stuck wetly to his forehead. ‘Let’s sit.’ I led him to a nearby stone bench shaded by a weeping willow. ‘Breathe,’ I said.
As soon as we sat down a postcard boy approached. He looked to be eleven or twelve but might have been as old as Cal. He sat beside me, grinning. ‘Hello, hello. Where you from?’
‘America,’ I told him. ‘But I live here now. Where are you from?’
‘You live in Hanoi! So cool. Me, I’m from Haiphong. My family very poor. I come here and sell postcard. See?’ He thrust the open shoebox towards me.
‘Yes. But I don’t need any postcards, sorry.’
‘What about your friend? He from here?’
‘No,’ Cal said. ‘I’m from Australia. Do you know Australia?’
‘Sure, sure. G’day mate. Kangaroo. Yes?’
Cal smiled. ‘Yes.’
‘You buy postcard, please.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We don’t want any.’
‘I do.’ Cal stood and pulled out his wallet. ‘How much?’
The boy jumped up and began to lay cards out on the bench. ‘Very cheap.’ He laid out Ha Long Bay and the Temple of Literature, girls in áo dài riding bikes, old ladies in nón lás squatting over baskets of vegetables, a motorbike carrying a buffalo. ‘I give you all these for five dollars US.’
I tutted. ‘He’s Australian, not stupid. Cal, they’re worth about 5000 dong each. A dollar for the lot is too much.’
‘Oh, you tough lady!’ The boy shook his head, grinning. ‘Okay, so, more cheap. Four dollar only.’
‘Okay,’ Cal said, pulling notes from his wallet.
‘That’s ridiculous.’
The boy smiled at me and danced on his toes. ‘No. Very good.’ He scooped up the postcards and handed them to Cal, taking the five-dollar bill Cal offered. ‘Ah, I get you change or you like more postcard?’
‘Keep the change.’ Cal shoved the postcards into the pocket of his baggy cargo pants.
‘Thank you, kangaroo. Here, free for tough lady. Make you nicer.’ He handed me a picture of a bicycle laden with baskets of flowers, nodded smilingly at Cal and ran toward a grey-haired couple bent over a tourist map.
‘You were ripped off.’
‘No. I chose to overpay.’
‘Out of charity or because I said not to?’
He smiled a little then and plucked the postcard from my hand. ‘This is a good one.’
‘Keep it. Are you feeling better?’
Cal nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘Are you sure? Because I could call your dad or—’
‘I’m okay. If you need to go, then go.’
‘Okay. If you’re sure.’ I stood and looked north towards the bridge.
‘Where you off to anyway?’
‘The bank. Very exciting.’
‘Can I come with you?’
‘To the bank? If you like.’
He stood and we began to walk. After a minute he said, ‘How come you told that guy you were American?’
‘I am.’
‘You’ve got an Aussie accent.’
‘Yes, I suppose I do. People
rarely notice that here. It’s enough to find someone who speaks the same language.’
‘So you are Australian?’
‘Originally, yes, but I haven’t lived there for nearly twenty years.’
‘How old were you when you left?’
‘Old enough to have my accent set for life, it seems.’
‘Ten? Twelve?’
‘I was seventeen, Mr Nosey. Any other questions?’
‘Yeah. Why did you drag me away back there? I can look after myself, you know.’
We had pressed through the tourists milling around the bridge entrance, but the path was still busy with travellers, merchants, scam artists and locals going about their business. I stopped walking and nodded towards the lake wall. We leant against it, looking out over water the colour of overcooked peas.
‘You’re not in Sydney, Cal. You can’t interfere like that.’
‘Sydney or not, hitting women is wrong.’
‘It’s not a question of that. It’s about how things are handled. You need to trust the Vietnamese to deal with men like that one.’
‘But they weren’t dealing with him! They were standing around watching like it was a footy match.’
‘No. They were witnessing. They were waiting until it was over, making sure he didn’t seriously hurt her, making sure he knew he was being observed. They’ll leave when it’s over and they’ll tell everyone they know. Maybe someone will tell the police, but more likely someone will tell that young man’s mother or the father of the girl he was abusing, and he’ll have to answer to them.’
‘Or maybe no one will do anything and he’ll go home and belt her a little bit more.’
‘Maybe. But your intervention wouldn’t change that. If anything it would make things worse for her. No man likes being shown up in front of his girl and you being a makes it that much more humiliating.’
A breeze rushed past our backs and we sighed in unison. I smiled at him but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the stone wall, picking at it with his fingernails. I noticed the display on his watch and said, ‘The bank closes in a minute.’