I’m meeting Natassia and some mutual friends for dinner later but I’m not in a hurry so I pop up the road to visit Nga. I know she’s unhappy at the moment. She doesn’t get along with Tuan’s mother, which is the classic Vietnamese family drama. Of course, as the daughter-in-law, Nga has to live with her husband’s parents and keep house for them, and, seeing as how she hates them, she’s just not in the mood.
She’s in the downstairs room watching TV with her toddler, Dao, and looks delighted when I appear at the open door. She can talk to me in English without the in-laws following a word, which is as good as a holiday. She offers me some fried silkworms and a cup of lotus-scented tea. I accept the tea and we sit together on the couch.
‘Who’s home tonight?’ I ask Nga.
‘We home,’ she gestures to herself and Dao, ‘and Tuan parent,’ she adds in a whisper, indicating the next room in the compound.
‘Where is Chang?’
‘My daughter?’ Nga always seems surprised when I mention Chang. ‘Oh! She is upstair. In her room.’
Chang is ten, beautiful, immaculately-behaved and roundly ignored. I’ve began to realise that gender differences here are fostered from birth. From my observations, a boy is likely to be pandered to more than a girl, fondled more, given wildly different playthings, encouraged to vocalise more and to urinate anywhere, and he’ll notice from infancy that he’s served and doted on by females. It all helps to explain the apparent lack of ‘Sensitive New Age Guys’.
I ask after Dao, who’s still coughing. He’s been sick for two months.
‘Not so good,’ Nga admits. ‘He don’t like to eat.’ She points to the plastic bowl of uneaten food on the table. It’s fish porridge. I wonder whether I would have been the same if I’d been a Vietnamese baby. Nga herself is looking thin too and her skin is poor. She needs cheering up so I tell her stories about foreigner antics and she chuckles in disbelief. But after a few minutes she jumps up, plunges her hand into the front of Dao’s pyjama pants and removes his penis.
‘One minute!’ She cries. With her free hand she grabs the plastic tumbler on the table beside the food bowl. ‘I’m sorry,’ is the last coherent thing she says before she directs Dao’s tiny member into the cup and issues the sustained sibilant noise used by all mothers in the country. ‘Schsschsschssch.’ It works. I hear the trickling sound of pee running down the inside of the cup. Whatever cue Dao’s bladder gave was too subtle for me.
‘Is it like this in your country?’ Nga turns her head to ask me, mid-stream.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do the mother do … like this?’ she looks hopeful. She’s just had a moment of cultural self-awareness – perhaps her first – and it’s made her self-conscious. I shake my head and suppress a grin. I cannot lie.
‘No. They do not.’ I consider telling her about nappies, but decide against. It’s too complicated.
Dao has just completed his performance when Tuan arrives home and sits himself down heavily at the table by the door. He’s tall and good-looking enough that even a couple of my Western girlfriends have commented on it. But he seems different tonight. His face is red and his eyes are sly. Nga gets up and crosses the compound to the kitchen to get his dinner, leaving me alone with him. He lights a cigarette and leers at me in an unfamiliar way, saying nothing. It’s very surprising. Tuan has always been perfectly polite to me, if perhaps a little indifferent.
As it happens, tonight my hair is washed and I’m wearing a short skirt over pants with high heels and a little make-up. Damn it, where I come from I would probably turn heads, but not in Hanoi. It’s flattering to be noticed by a Vietnamese man but this isn’t the ideal context. I’m relieved when Nga gets back. She sits herself back down beside me and Tuan speaks to her with long emphasised tones. She laughs.
‘What did Tuan say?’
‘He say he think you look attractive tonight,’ she tells me smiling. ‘It’s true! Tonight you look … young.’ Tuan adds another comment, and Nga seems to agree with him. She turns to me.
‘What?’ I say impatiently.
‘I’m not sure! I think, maybe he is … drunk.’ Nga whispers, clearly amused. I look back at Tuan. His dark eyes are shining at me lecherously. It’s perfectly obvious to me that he’s drunk, randy and wearing beer goggles with lenses so thick that even a Western woman in her thirties looks alluring. It’s unsettling, and so is Nga’s lack of concern. I realise, almost with regret, that I pose no danger at all. It’s just an amusing aberration on Tuan’s part, as threatening to their marriage as a hard on caused by the vibrations of a motorcycle engine. I want to leave.
‘You know,’ Nga pipes up suddenly, ‘I think maybe you can still find a husband! But you must try to wear more make-up.’