Single White Female in Hanoi Read Online Free PDF Page A

café’.
    At the mention of coffee, my spirits pick up immeasurably. I drank my last espresso in Sydney, and my addiction has raged on unattended since then. In my mind’s eye we’re already sitting in that café. The chair is upholstered in red velvet. The glass windows seal off the foulness of the street. The aroma of fresh coffee fills the air.
    I’ve written the address down meticulously to show the xe om driver. I’m a long way from having the language to say ‘I want to go to…’ In fact, I’m still a long way from being able to pronounce Pho Yen The – the name of my street . Xe om drivers stare blankly at my efforts until I write it down for them. It takes me about two months of dedicated work before I can pull it off. There are tricky tones to master, strange prosody and vowel sounds that are foreign to English. The slightest blunder and comprehension is nil.
    Today, as I cock my leg to get onto the motorcycle, I notice that the muscles I use to do this are sore. I’ve jumped onto so many motorcycles in less than three days, I’m developing new muscles – an unexpected health bonus.
    On the minus side, though, the risk of carbon-monoxide poisoning is ever-present, I muse a minute later. The xe om driver has slammed on the brakes to avoid colliding with a pile-up of traffic, and we sit there gagging on the fumes of a hundred exhaust pipes. At the front, an elderly woman is struggling across the road carrying bamboo baskets fully laden with eggs and fruit.
    Yesterday’s rain has stopped but the sky is still overcast. I notice most of the women riding motorcycles are wearing cloth masks, which strikes me as a sensible precaution against the pollution, but I’m at a loss to explain the elbow-length gloves. Is it a strange local fashion?
    I’m yet to learn of the photophobia suffered by young Hanoi women. They shy from the sun like moles, terrified of darkening their skin. Faces and forearms must be protected at all cost.
    The obsession with white skin doesn’t stop at outdoor protection. My first attempt to buy moisturiser in Hanoi will be a disturbing failure. I won’t find a single product on Nam Bo ’s well-stocked shelves that doesn’t boast of additional skin-whitening properties.
    Around Hanoi, the rising affluent classes often have skin as fair as mine, while poorer individuals, especially peasants, are darker. At first I put this down to an incidental effect of gene pools aggregating in socio-economic groups. An ironic one, too, since it’s obvious to me that the white-faced people look unwell while the darker ones number among the city’s jaw-dropping beauties. But it turns out the locals and I don’t see eye-to-eye on this count. Dark skin is a handicap, apparently, and equated not only with the outdoor labour of the rural peasant, but with actual ugliness. At dinnertime across Vietnam, mothers scare their children into eating with threats of abduction by an ‘ugly witch with dark skin’.
    The attitude of Hanoians towards people of African descent is even more worrying. There are relatively few such individuals living in Hanoi, but their social circles don’t tend to include locals, who generally shun them, too disturbed by their appearance to interact. A dark-skinned Vietnamese friend of mine will tell me one day: ‘Vietnamese people think dark skin is dirty and ugly. They think black people have AIDS. The African countries are poor and don’t have enough to eat, so the people are not respected.’

    Richard Moss’s new language school is across town in a former hotel. As I pull up, I can see there won’t be any work for me there for some time, since it’s still being rebuilt. I enter a gloomy foyer area, stand under an ostentatious chandelier, and pause as a tall, cadaverous man emerges from the murky depths of the corridors ahead and walks towards me.
    â€˜You must be Carolyn.