Single White Female in Hanoi by Carolyn Shine Page B

invitation, I stand up and relieve her of the last 30 minutes of class by giving the young students a lesson about Australia.
    After the class we have a quick chat, during which I discover her true nationality – Swiss – and mentally amend ‘prim’ to ‘demure’. She smokes two cigarettes back to back, and runs off, but by then Owen has arrived. He takes me to the teachers’ room and tells me I’m to observe another class tomorrow morning with a different teacher.
    The buzz of taking a class for a while and a dramatic decrease in temperature have enlivened me and I’m feeling sociable, but it’s nine-thirty and the school is being closed for the night.
    As I walk out of the staffroom, I pass a desk with an immense Australian guy half-reclined in a chair behind it.
    â€˜No, really. This restaurant is amazing,’ he’s telling the small audience gathered around him. ‘They’ll bring you bear meat, or any other illegal meat you want. They don’t advertise. You have to know how to get there or you’ll never find it’.
    â€˜You et bear meat?’ A small Ukrainian man chimes in. He’s an English teacher. The staff, unable to hear his deadpan, trilling accent, believe he’s American.
    â€˜Sure, dude. It’s delicious. These guys’ve got any endangered animal you can think of. But here’s the best bit – ocelot meat! You order an ocelot, and the waiter goes out the back, returns with a live ocelot, and kills it right there in front of you. It’s fucking awesome.’
    The fat man’s patter is a train of the most offensive material imaginable. For his next topic, he boasts of how he can bargain the locals down below local rates for meals on the street. I examine him in disbelief. He’s a barbarian. How come anyone listens to him? I scowl and head home, disturbed.
    Outside, the rain has started with renewed vigour. I see a couple of passing motorcyclists carrying an umbrella in one hand. The rest are wearing plastic raincoats. But while commuters are big on protection from the elements, they don’t seem too fussed about road safety. Motorcycles often carry entire families of five – mum, dad, two kids and baby arranged in ingenious formations I would never have thought of. And no one is wearing a crash helmet.
    The month I arrive marks the beginning of a new law making helmets compulsory for motorcyclists across the country. But the new law is not enforced, and is almost universally ignored.
    My earlier observation about Vietnamese invincibility on the roads was optimistic. Over the course of this year, 10,500 people will die in motorbike accidents on Vietnam’s roads – nearly thirty people per day.

Going global
    My enchanted days of waking up at 6.30am are coming to an end. It wasn’t a promising new lifestyle change, just jetlag.
    Unfortunately, the rest of Hanoi wakes at first light, so the first class of the day at most language schools starts at 8am. This morning I’m heading off to ‘Global’ for an 8am class observation.
    Showered and dressed, I open my bedroom door and head across the landing to the living room, which I keep locked while I’m asleep. Hanging from the door handle is a plastic bag full of baby eggplants. Xuyen strikes again.
    In her late fifties, visibly worn out from a lifetime of hard work, Nga’s mother works tirelessly for the benefit of others. She heads out at dawn every morning on a bicycle to work on a meat stall at a nearby market. The rest of the time she’s looking after Ba Gia (pronounced ‘bah-zah’) – her long-widowed, childless aunt, who’s 84 .
    She’s estranged from Nga’s father, and lives with Ba Gia , which means ‘old grandma’, in a single-roomed cement dwelling just outside the gate to my compound. The room has a wooden loft, accessed by small metal rungs driven into the wall. Xuyen climbs up there every