Single White Female in Hanoi

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Hanoi’s Noi Bay Airport is little more than a shed – grimy and dilapidated. Customs officers, severe and unsmiling, sit before identical portraits of a saintly-faced Ho Chi Minh.

High on the wall above these men in their drab olive uniforms are colourful back-lit screens advertising 5-star resorts and hotels. They have swimming pools, golf courses. I scan the visible flora for lurking hints of Vietnam, but the vistas are inscrutable, universal.

Through the exhaustion, the sides of my mouth flex upwards a little. I’ve done it. On the other side of that wall lies terra incognita – an elongated ‘S’ of land, a beckoning finger of land, a land I’ll be calling ‘home’.

The queues move slowly. Eventually we’re released into the morning heat haze. I jump into an air-conditioned taxi clutching a print-out of Yvette’s email, which includes my new address.

I wonder what Yvette will look like. I’d never heard of her until a fortnight ago, when a woman I’d just met at a party gave me her email address. It was the nick of time. I was about to head to Hanoi without a place to live or a job, and my calm demeanour belied the gathering panic within. The two women had gone to school together in New Caledonia. Yvette was French, I learnt, but lived in Hanoi with her Vietnamese husband.

Vietnamese husband. This phrase lingered, with promise. Not the marriage bit, exactly, but the idea of an inter-cultural romance. With my love life recently derailed, after more than a decade of serial good luck, I was ready to explore a lifelong attraction to South-East Asian men.

Within two email exchanges, Yvette had organised for me to rent her old apartment, near the centre of town. She and her husband had moved further out, to a larger house.

As we head into town I’m captivated by rice paddies, water buffalo, people wearing conical hats. Postcard Vietnam. Then we hit Hanoi and the pastoral view from the window dissolves into complete mayhem. The driver wants the address again. Number 6, Pho Yen The. He shakes his head. He can’t take me there without more information; it occurs to me that I might have to book into a hotel and email Yvette.

My spirits falling fast, I study the email again, and notice some more Vietnamese – the words ‘Nguyen Thai Hoc’, further down the page, barely conspicuous among Yvette’s eccentric English. I point this out, and there’s a grunt of comprehension from the driver’s seat. I don’t know what he’s comprehended, but he now seems to know where to go.

Nguyen Thai Hoc, it transpires, is a main street, and Pho Yen The, a cul-de-sac coming off it. Number 6 turns out to be a compound of several dwellings, deep in the ‘sac’. We pull up at the gate and a sharp shout penetrates the glass window.

‘Nga oi!’ (Hey, Nga!)

A loud ‘Oi’ is shouted back, then a tall Vietnamese man runs to the back of the taxi and starts removing my bags. A slender, serious-looking woman appears at my door and introduces herself before I can reel out, blinking into the steaming air. She’s Nga, my new landlady, and her husband, busy at the boot, is Tuan.

We walk through a decaying wooden gate into the compound, past a mysterious three-foot-high wall enclosing a series of brick cells. We turn right through a wooden door and we’re in a cool dark staircase. My two groaning bags are heaved up to the first floor and through a doorway to the right, and I’m standing in my new living room.

Yvette and her Vietnamese husband Khai are there, with a Parisian friend called Collette. There’s a round of hellos and introductions before a low stool is procured from somewhere and I’m gestured to sit down. Everyone looks larger than life, which I ascribe at first to my exhaustion, before realising it’s because we’re all lit by a large fluorescent tube high up on the wall.

I look around. The room is small and not-quite-square. None of the walls are parallel, none of the corners 90 degrees. A massive whirling green fan occupies most of the high ceiling. There’s some bamboo furniture, a low glass coffee table, and a desk, above which is a window overlooking a neighbour’s rooftop laundry area, providing little sunlight. The remainder of the light in the room blares down from the fluorescent tube. In the far corner is a noisy refrigerator.

Noticing the shining faces around me, I look down and see, to my surprise, that sweat beads have formed across my chest. I’m surprised because, for reasons I’ve never known, I don’t tend to sweat at all, not even in a sauna.

Had I researched things a little more thoroughly, I would have learnt that arriving in Hanoi on the first of July has put me right at the start of the monsoon season.

Tuan hands me a small bottle of a lurid orange fizzy drink, and then to my relief, offers me a cigarette. Common ground. We sit smoking in the wet air. The fan blows ash all over the room.

‘’Ow was your journey, okay?’ Yvette.

‘Did you eat yet?’ Khai.

‘Carolyn, how old are you?’ Nga.

‘Do you feel tired?’ Khai again.

The questions continue, both polite and curious. It takes concentration – Yvette’s English is surprisingly patchy. Khai’s is probably better, but his pronunciation makes him harder to understand. Tuan speaks no English at all, and Nga’s English strikes me at the time as very limited.

The finality of what I’ve done to my life now hits me and a feeling of dislocation begins to take hold. I’m in a strange room in a strange country among strangers, but this is now my home, and these are my only acquaintances. The fluorescent lighting and the lack of soft surfaces anywhere underline the foreignness of my new setting.

I try to project my future self in this scenario. And I fail. I have a brief image of my friends and my apartment in Sydney, my cat, my piano, my Van Gogh prints, my music collection, my plants, then, with a blink, I’m in Hanoi – even the name is still strange to me – and there’s nothing I relate to. Perhaps sensing my plummeting mood, the congregation departs.

‘I come back with Khai in one hour,’ Yvette tells me before heading down the stairs, ‘and we take you for the lunch.’ I hear a chorus of roars outside as my welcome party rev their motorbikes out of the compound. The sound fades into the general din. My heart is pounding.

Alone, I wander the apartment. Attached to the living room is a tiny windowless kitchen with a small basin, a cupboard and an electric stove. It’s unstocked and looks barely useable. On the other side of the landing is my bedroom, which adjoins a small balcony and an en-suite bathroom. The bathroom has a sink, shower and toilet, and is paved in well-scrubbed white tiles. Definitely useable, although the shower is unenclosed, so the room will get soaked whenever I use it.

Everything is clean, and high, stuccoed ceilings and terracotta floor tiles give the apartment a nice, if deceptive, spaciousness.

I unpack a few things. A friend had flown down from Brisbane, on the eve of my departure, to help me pack. I now see the prudency of her decision to make me bring white things and cotton things. I’m not so sure about the ten or so pairs of fancy nylon tights though. There’s a large, ugly wooden wardrobe in the bedroom with a stiff drawer in the base of it. I hang a few garments and put others on the shelves. I throw the nylon tights into the drawer (their extraordinary fate is some way away). I put some familiar things in the bathroom and grimace at the kitchen. I set up my CD player and two little speakers my mother lent me, and put on the Rickie Lee Jones album ‘Pirates’. Her sweet voice bounces agreeably around the room, mixing with the sounds of kids playing in the street outside the gate. The panic has subsided, and now a restless excitement is gathering inside me.

A place of my own.

Over the next days, weeks and months, I’ll discover that ‘a place of my own’ is a loony Western concept not applicable in Hanoi. Nga and Tuan have keys to the apartment, as does Nga’s mother, which also gives access to Nga’s younger brother, who lives somewhere in the compound.

Things will start to appear in my apartment. One day I’ll find a second phone in the bedroom; another, that the furniture has been rearranged in the living room and an antique table added. Occasionally I’ll come home to find that tradesmen have taken over my living room or bedroom. They’ll yell at each other in Vietnamese and drop cigarette ash everywhere. They’ll stare at me and make amused remarks to each other. Nga will refer to my apartment as her apartment.

One weekend I’ll go away and return to find Nga and Tuan putting the finishing touches of varnish on all the wooden doors.

‘Oh. We think you come back next week!’ Nga will exclaim by way of greeting. ‘This smell very strong. Not good healthy. Maybe you must not sleep here tonight.’ She doesn’t offer me another option.

On the landing between my two rooms I notice a strange smell gathering. It’s the smell of rotting animal. I sniff a few times and walk back into the living room. The smell is there too, insinuating itself greasily into the air. In the bedroom, it’s worse. Disconcerted, I set myself to the task of arranging my CD collection.

I’ve just finished this when Yvette, Khai and their friend Collette return and call me down. At the bottom of the stairs I step through the wooden door into the compound and find a stout middle-aged woman at my feet. She’s squatting over a wok, which is on a gas burner. Lunch. She stirs the grisly-looking ensemble with long chopsticks, but her attention is on me – focussed into a forbidding stare. Her dull black hair is short, apparently dyed and apparently permed, and she has the face of a gargoyle from a Peking opera. I smile and nod at her, but her expression remains as stony as a basilisk, and I eventually look away, shocked.

‘Don’t worry about her,’ Yvette says, touching my arm.

But a great part of my shock has come from the realisation that the contents of her wok are the source of the smell that nearly sent me fleeing from my apartment. It’s my first encounter with Nuoc Mam, the local fish sauce.

Yvette rides with Khai, I climb onto the back of Collette’s motorcycle and we take off. No one wears a helmet, so conversation and smoking can take place. Yvette tells me about our destination from her pillion seat – an up-market French-owned café on a historic street near the city’s Old Quarter.

When we arrive, my escorts hand their bikes over to a man on the street, and I wonder if the vehicles were hired, and are now being returned. I don’t yet know that bikes must be supervised at all times when parked in Hanoi. All businesses employ someone to Trong xe (‘mind vehicle’) on their patch of sidewalk.

Inside the café we join a large French crowd. In an unlikely twist of fate, the first meal I eat in Vietnam is a delicious Indian curry, with homemade buffalo cheese in it.

The French folk are friendly but prefer to speak their own language. I decide I’m going to have to brush up on my French, which has two decades of rust clinging to it. But this turns out not to be necessary, since after a couple more polite invites, the French crowd drop me like a hot pomme de terre. At the time I wonder if it’s something I said – or rather, did, since as a non-French-speaker, my presence at their gatherings is mostly decorative, but later I learn this is the normal procedure with non-French-speaking add-ons to the social circle.

The social scene for expats in Hanoi, I’ll learn, divides roughly into two groups: French-speakers and The Rest, whose default language is English.

Until my fall from grace, however, Yvette, is a model of hospitality. She’s in her mid-twenties and, with her fair hair and glasses, quite unassuming. She dresses very casually and wears no make-up. But she’s warm, and once you begin to notice her, very attractive, with that cosmopolitan charisma I’ve often found in young French people.

Later in the afternoon, Yvette arrives to take me shopping at a supermarket just up the road. This seems perfectly normal. I’ve no idea that this is one of only five, relatively new supermarkets in the entire city. Hanoians don’t shop at supermarkets. They buy their groceries in the street, without getting off their motorbikes. Eight months after my arrival, Hanoi’s first shopping mall will open, but after a dangerously crowded opening ceremony, business will be scant. Most of the people milling around will be families who have left the rice paddy, travelling many hours to see first-hand the legendary ‘moving stairs’ – Hanoi’s first public escalator.

Yvette and I spend nearly an hour and about US$50 at the supermarket buying kitchen essentials, such as plates, pots, and pans – replicas of things I threw out of my Bondi apartment 36 hours earlier.

I while away the rest of the day setting up the place a bit more, then, just before 7pm, I fall into a sleep so deep that I don’t surface for twelve hours.

Baptism by soup

There’s something to be said for being in new places. Accidental death notwithstanding, it extends your life. Subjectively, that is. When you go to a new place, your brain has to make so many new neural connections that, experientially, time elongates. Maybe that’s why time passes so slowly when you’re a child, too – so much information going in, being laid down like a map.

In Hanoi, most of this initial information is traffic-related.

The morning after my arrival, groggy after twelve hours’ sleep, I venture the 100 teeming metres to the business end of my cul-de-sac, where it meets Nguyen Thai Hoc Street.

I stand for a while squinting at the traffic, a parade of motorbikes several lanes wide – a motorcade, I presume. Transfixed, I wait for the spectacle of the VIP, the dark car, the tinted windows. Minutes pass. Still no dignitary, and the unbroken stream of vehicles continues, honking wildly. Then it dawns on me: this is rush hour. Nguyen Thai Hoc is a one-way street and these people are on their way to work.

My plan is to wander up to the supermarket, called the Nam Bo, to buy breakfast things. But this entails crossing the road. I stand at the shore of this heaving flow like King Canute. After a minute or so it dawns on me, firstly, that there are no road rules, and secondly, that there will never be a break in the traffic.

I can’t see how a person could make it across alive, and yet there are locals doing just that – their pace relaxed and easy. The traffic parts around them. I study a few crossings, perform some mental calculations. Eventually I manage a coward’s crossing, using a street vendor carrying two yoked baskets across her shoulder as a human shield. I find the Nam Bo and buy rice and a tin of coconut milk.

Heading home, I step onto Nguyen Thai Hoc and immediately cop a hard blow to the left side of my body. My field of vision dances a brief jig. I’ve been hit by an elderly man on a bicycle sailing the wrong way up the one-way street. The expression on his face after the impact is chilling. He gawps at me tremulously, his old, red-rimmed eyelids as wide as the beaks of baby birds. He seems to have gone into shock, horrified at having hit a foreigner. It’s probably his first close encounter with one of these exotic beasts, and he’s gone and crashed his bicycle into it.

I place my hand on his shoulder to comfort him, although tears are starting to prick in my own eyes. It’s my first full day in Hanoi and I’ve already had a road accident. My left arm is hurting. I’ve still got the road to get across, and now people are staring at me, making me self-conscious. The fumes, the heat and the strangeness of the place feel overwhelming. I make the crossing, then trudge heavily up my little street, passing the hundreds of people crammed onto the pavement eating breakfast. They freeze, noodles careening from mid-air chopsticks back into the soup below, to watch me. Nobody smiles. I climb the stairs to my flat, strip, and collapse under the ceiling fan in my bedroom.

The humidity’s so intense I can’t think. My attention is entirely focused on the turning of the fan’s green blades – on the sight, the sound and the sensation as they waft air over my skin.

Time passes. My rotating life-support system begins to work its charms. After about twenty minutes I feel humanised again. I’m far enough away from Nguyen Thai Hoc that the horns and the fumes are only a memory. My flat has begun its distinguished career as refuge.

I sit up and reach for the phone: it’s time to ring Flemish Ralph.

I encountered Flemish Ralph little more than a month ago, while trawling message boards on the Internet looking for a teaching job or contact in Hanoi. Ralph had replied to a post, the only person to do so. He’d been living in Hanoi for about ten years and had taken a Vietnamese wife. He spoke pessimistically of the job market, but encouraged me to turn up anyway. He gave me some information on expat rental prices that surprised me. $US500 a month for accommodation would be a bargain, he claimed.

Things were looking so grim that I immediately bought an open return ticket to Hanoi, as insurance against a sudden act of cowardice. Friends collared me with, ‘It’s not too late to change your mind’, but in fact it was – for reasons of pride alone. Pride had dwarfed all fear.

Yet Ralph seemed of sound mind and was my only contact at the time, so I was careful to keep his phone number, even after Yvette materialised with my inner-city apartment for US$200 per month.

A Vietnamese woman answers the phone, but understands me and calls for Ralph. Soon there’s a heavily accented, nasal voice on the other end of the phone. We exchange pleasantries, and he volunteers advice on criminal activity in Hanoi.

‘You have to look out for all sorts of thieving. The people here will steal anything,’ he warns me. ‘Nothing is safe.’

He’s amazed to learn of my living arrangement. ‘You’re paying very low rent. It’s unbelievable you should find something like this in Hanoi. But perhaps there’s some kind of catch. You know foreigners must pay a very high price for electricity.’

‘But my landowners are covering the electricity bills,’ I tell him.

‘Unbelievable,’ he repeats. ‘Be careful. Don’t trust them. Perhaps you are in a dangerous area. Do you have bars on all your windows?’

His voice is monotonous and I find it hard to concentrate on the cornucopia of cautions he’s meting out. He talks on for about half an hour. The call ends after I promise to call him in another couple of days to arrange a meeting.

Midday passes. I feel ready to face the outside world again, and also desperate to send some email. Yvette has told me about an Internet café nearby. I walk back to the end of my street, where the ‘xe om’ drivers hang out, and I catch my first ride.

Xe om translates as ‘motorbike taxi’, but literally it means ‘hug vehicle’. Passengers unused to Hanoi traffic tend to grasp the driver in a rigid bear hug, their face a staring rictus mask – a spectacle that will come to cause me as much delight as it causes the locals.

I can’t ride, but I’m an experienced pillion. During the trip to the café I find myself gaping in dumb horror at the traffic hurtling towards us from every angle. Impact is seemingly inevitable each time, yet never occurs. As we pull up unscathed at the café, I’m truly ready to hug the driver. I’m high on Near-Death-Experience hormones.

But the exhilaration soon dissolves into an hour-and-a-half-long battle with Vietnam’s stupefyingly slow Internet. For every email I send, I mysteriously lose two. My nerves strained, I cut my losses and pay the bill. Back on the street I spot a cartel of xe om drivers on the corner. They’re waving dramatically at me and making woo-ooh noises, but I hesitate, remembering my death-defying trip to the café.

So I make an unwise decision. I decide to walk home.

In most areas, Hanoi’s sidewalks are very poor, with obstacles every couple of metres. These include wandering vendors, stalls, pots of boiling water, smoking bricks of charcoal, shoe-shine boys, chickens in every stage of life and death, concrete pilings, large upended chunks of broken paving, kids playing badminton, and motorcyclists whizzing through the crowd.

Now, at the start of the monsoon season, these sidewalks also become slippery, as rain combines with the patina of unspeakable substances that are spilled, poured and spat onto them hourly. A brown soup, slicked rainbow with petrol, flows along the gutters. Instead of croutons, its surface is dotted with cigarette butts.

It’s into this brew that I slip, submerging my right leg almost to the knee. For the first time I see mouths crack into a smile, but it’s not the smile I’ve been wanting. People on the street are literally slapping their thighs with Schadenfreude. I limp to the nearby UNESCO headquarters, where surly AK47-toting guards supervise me as I wash off under an outdoor tap.

Back home, the memory recedes under the shower. In the kitchen, I cook some rice in a small pot, receiving a small electric shock from my stove as I do so. When it’s ready, I pour coconut milk on top and eat the result under the ceiling fan in the living room. I study my Vietnamese phrasebook, still labouring under the vanity that I’ll master the language in a few months.

The day reaches about 38 degrees, and the afternoon humidity surrounds me like a mandala. I shift rooms, to the comfort of the ceiling fan above my bed, and lie listening to the foreign sounds rising from the compound below. I fall into a surprisingly pleasant reverie. My first full day in Vietnam has certainly been eventful, and I look forward to sharing it with Yvette and Khai, who are due to take me to dinner this evening. The repetitive whump of the ceiling fan becomes hypnotic, and within minutes I’m asleep.

I awake at dusk to a power cut. People are shouting below. Without electricity, the overhead fans have ground to a halt, turning the air into an oppressive syrup. A middle-aged woman, the only neighbour to have returned my smiles since my arrival, appears in my apartment with a paper fan, which I take gratefully.

It will take me a year to learn this woman’s name – Xuyen. She’s the mother of Nga, my landlady. She drops in on me regularly with gifts of food and green tea, and while I’ll eventually attain a level of Vietnamese that permits conversation in general, I can rarely make head or tail of anything she says. I just know that she’s a good woman. It’s clear the other scowling women are not happy about having a foreigner in their compound.

The power cut feels lengthy. I’m going to need candles. In the faltering light, I leaf through the pages of my Vietnamese phrasebook looking for ‘candle’.

‘You’re joking!’ I say aloud.

Camera … canary … capitalism. Whoever put the thing together forgot ‘candle’. I dash back to the supermarket and regale the indifferent staff with a series of attempts to mime one. Useless. They stand around staring at me. I pull out paper and pen and start to sketch one. Before I get to the wick there’s an outbreak of nervous giggling. The girl besides me tugs at my sleeve.

‘Madame, Madame’. With her other hand she points to the condoms on the shelf behind us. We share a chuckle then I hastily add a wick and fulminating flame. The flame throws light on the whole thing.

I walk out with a packet of candles, and a puzzlement I can’t name. There was so much effort involved in communicating the idea of a candle. Gestures that I thought were universal had failed.

Back in the compound I find Xuyen and give her some candles. Her gratitude embarrasses me as, wide-eyed, she bows and nods repeatedly.

It starts raining, and the temperature mercifully drops. Yvette and Khai arrive, finding a ghost drifting from one patch of candlelight to the next.

‘This is the power-cut season,’ says Khai. He explains that the premonsoon dry period leaves Hanoi’s sole source of power, a hydroelectric plant up north, low on fuel for the monsoon. Power cuts will occur every couple of days over the month.

The rain is heavy as we head out to dinner. Yvette and I climb onto the back of Khai’s scooter, and Yvette holds an opaque plastic sheet over us. Blind to the outside world in my plastic tent, I feel the bike veering around wet corners and aqua-planing across chaotic intersections. The cacophony of horns around us is oddly magnified.

We arrive at the Nang Tam, a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant. Khai recommended this place after I confessed I don’t eat meat. These eating places can be found all over the country. Monks and nuns may be vegetarian, and some other Vietnamese Buddhists eschew meat for two days of each month, at the new and full moon, and on days of visiting an ancestor’s grave. On account of the self-denial involved, going a day without meat in Vietnam is seen as akin to fasting.

Khai does the ordering, and dishes soon start to arrive. Lots and lots of dishes. Many of them, in the Buddhist tradition, feature ‘meat’, ‘chicken’ or ‘fish’ that aren’t. I’ve never been a fan of ‘facon’ or ‘notdogs’ or any of the other fake meat products designed for pining ex-meat enthusiasts, but to my relief tonight’s chicken and beef dishes are not trying so hard to resemble the real thing.

‘So Carolyn, you live in a great city,’ Khai begins. ‘We went to Sydney. I love it very much!’ I suspect I know what’s coming next. The question I’ve managed to avoid so far.

‘Why do you choose to come to Hanoi?’

No amount of preparation can help me explain this to virtual strangers, least of all a Hanoian, without sounding like a feckless drifter. Having decided I wanted to try living in Asia for a bit, the rest was easy. A friend had suggested Hanoi and I’d acquiesced as easily as if he’d suggested a glass of wine.

‘Hmmmmm. Good question,’ I say, enthusiastically, as though I’m about to fire up a Power Point Presentation on the subject. I nod at the table for a minute, trying to gather some appropriate thoughts. The silence lengthens.

‘Maybe you’re thinking my life was not so good in Sydney,’ I say, finally. ‘But, in fact, it was very good. Maybe too good. When life is too good it can make a person feel … like it’s time to change it.’ More silence, then, to my relief, Yvette smiles a smile of recognition and sits forward to speak.

‘You are a leetle strange,’ she says.

‘I was living in a fantastic apartment,’ I continue. It’s too late to back out now. ‘The neighbours were also my friends. So we were always cooking and eating and drinking and laughing.’

‘What about your job?’ asks Yvette.

‘Well, I’m a musician. I played in bands, and during the week I taught piano – to very good students.’

‘Yes, it sounds like a very good life,’ Khai agrees.

‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘Too good. No struggle.’ I’m sounding like a tortured existentialist. I should have just confessed to a lifelong interest in Asia.

The fact is, I was wearing a mantle of privilege that I didn’t want to abuse, but I was starting to feel trapped under it. I’d turned 35 and now my life path yawned ahead – a road along which generation after generation of young piano students assembled in echelons as I plodded into the future, shrinking, wrinkling, my keyboard knuckles swelling. I wanted a change of scenery, but moving would entail losing students, most of whom were local. I thought of trying another suburb, and the thought was appealing, but it would mean starting anew, away from my stomping ground of Bondi. I couldn’t muster the motivation.

Finally I’d realised that if moving suburb meant starting again with new students, I might as well aim higher and move continents.

I was single. I didn’t have kids or any other dependents. My cat had recently deserted me for the non-vegetarian neighbours upstairs, who fed him fresh meat and spoilt him rotten. I didn’t have a mortgage or any other debts. I was still young enough to socialise to the full meaning of the word, and old enough to have established firm friendships that could weather a period of absence.

Yvette and Khai are still looking at me expectantly. ‘Well, I always wanted to live in Asia,’ I tell them. ‘And Hanoi is very interesting. I’m excited about being here. I want to learn Vietnamese, and I want to teach English and learn about the culture and the music.’ I feel disingenuous. None of this is untrue, but until a recent Internet crash course on Vietnam, fuelled by the hard fact that I’d just bought a plane ticket to the place, I barely knew more than that there’d been a recent war here. Khai offers me a warm smile. I’ve said the right thing.

The tabletop continues to fill with new dishes for the duration of the meal. There’s a plate of grilled eggplant with chunks of crispy deep-fried garlic that I reminisce about for days afterwards, and I get my first taste of the ubiquitous rau muong or ‘Morning Glory’ – a hollow-stemmed river weed, also fried with garlic. I taste a delicate mushroom soup and a less appealing bamboo soup. I discover that fresh bamboo is the culprit responsible for the rank taste I’d often presumed to be the result of a rotten ingredient in Asian food.

Over the in-house special, melt-in-your mouth vegetable croquettes, I ask Yvette about her diet in Hanoi.

‘Do you cook French food at home?’

‘I don’t know to cook. I never cook,’ she replies.

‘Who cooks?’ I ask in surprise, wondering if Khai’s mother lives with them.

‘Khai cooks,’ she replies. I look at Khai and he nods and smiles.

‘I like to cook.’

‘’E does the ’ousework also,’ she adds.

I look back to Khai. He’s intelligent and blindingly handsome. I’ve now discovered that he speaks English well and can relate to Westerners. He earns good money in IT and cooks dinner every night. I have to bite my tongue to stop myself from asking him if he has an unmarried brother. I hope there’s plenty more like him to be found in these parts.

Appetite gratified, I’m taken to Hanoi’s eponymous Jazz Club. Yvette and Khai tell me we’re now in the city’s famous Old Quarter. I notice the streets are more compact, the shopfronts narrower, the crowds denser. I can’t wait to come back here and explore.

There’s a jazz quintet in full swing as we walk into the club. By the time we take our seat, my gaze is riveted on the young pianist. It’s not just that he’s very good, it’s that while his right hand improvises lavishly, his left hand is holding a mobile phone to his ear and he’s having a good old chin-wag.

During the next set he pulls out what appears to be an illustrated novel, props it up on the piano, and reads it as he plays. The band doesn’t seem perturbed.

Even while talking and reading, this guy is so good that I form the mistaken impression that Hanoi is going to turn out to be one of the world’s unsung jazz capitals. Yvette and I discuss the idea that Vietnamese people are particularly adept at learning musical forms because of the tones of their language. Vietnamese has six tones, which means that local ears are highly trained to hear pitch accurately. This went a long way towards explaining how these people were able to learn to play jazz, we decided – a form of music so utterly different from traditional Vietnamese music.

As I’m to discover, jazz is a relatively new arrival in Hanoi. Until recently it was all but outlawed by the government, who regarded it as cultural pollution from America. It was depicted in Vietnamese films about the war with the US as an obnoxious hullabaloo created by screeching and crashing instruments. Nowadays students at the Conservatorium of Music can study jazz, although the few very talented locals who can really play it have spent their lives clandestinely listening to and imitating recordings of their favourite players from the West.

I