Fishing for Tigers Page 3

  ‘Have you tried shrimp paste?’ asked Collins.

  ‘I’m Vietnamese,’ Cal said, exaggerating every syllable.

  Collins laughed. ‘Oh, are you? I thought you just arrived from Australia.’

  ‘Yeah, we have shrimp paste there. We have lots of ­Vietnamese food there. Because of all the Vietnamese ­people. Like me.’

  ‘Of course. Silly me.’ Collins patted Cal’s back. ‘You’re probably an expert on Vietnamese food.’

  Cal shrugged him away. ‘Hey, Dad? Is this green stuff from our roof?

  ‘Teenagers,’ Collins said to me and winked.

  While we ate, the heat set in. As one, we inched backwards until we were each shaded by the banyan’s branches. The relief was minimal. I leant against the trunk and wiped my face with a refresher towel. Kerry, Henry and Collins argued lazily about airline frequent-flyer programs. Cal held his book – it was The Beach – by the spine and fanned his face. Matthew snored softly near my feet, a line of ants trekking over the half-eaten roll in his hand.

  A child dressed in a bright yellow jumpsuit walked around and around the nearest gazebo, one hand held by each parent. Watching them was a man so old that his peaked military cap could have been a personal memento from the French war, and beside him were a stout, grim-faced woman of middle-age and a teenaged girl nursing a swaddled baby. At their feet, a figure in pale pink pyjamas squatted over a steaming tin pot. I guessed that they were four generations of the same family, escaping the dank heat of their narrow tube-house. I wondered what they would make of our little group. We could be a family, too, if you didn’t look too closely.

  Cal slumped beside me and pointed to the red roof peeking over the stone wall on the other side of the park. ‘We walked past the front of that place on our way here. Busload of Japanese pouring out. Dad said it’s a temple of something?’

  ‘Temple of Literature – . First university in Vietnam, though now it’s just a tourist attraction. Or mostly a tourist attraction. There’s a Confucian altar that people still pray at. It’s almost a thousand years old, or at least the vague outline of it is. Most of it’s been built up and knocked down and re-built and added to over the years. Still worth a wander through, though.’

  ‘Cool. Come with me?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Why not? This is boring.’ He jabbed his foot into ­Matthew’s side. ‘Dad, Mischa and I are going to check out the temple thing.’

  Matthew half sat. ‘Oh, Mish, you don’t have to. Cal, it’s only shrines and stone turtles. We can see it later.’

  ‘Go back to sleep, old man. You’re a crap tour guide, anyway.’ Cal stood and held out his hand to me. I took it and he yanked me to my feet.

  ‘As long as you really don’t mind, Mish.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. Nice and shady in there, at least.’

  ‘Righto.’ Matthew lay back down.

  ‘Are you going somewhere?’ Collins said, rising to his knees.

  ‘Nah. Just a walk,’ Cal said, and still holding my hand, set quickly off towards the wall.

  At the gazebo near the park entrance two girls in pristine white áo dài were taking turns photographing each other. Cal jogged over and offered to take a photo of them together. The girls said something in Vietnamese and giggled behind their hands, but the one with the camera handed it over to Cal and then she and her friend posed like fashion models while Cal clicked off a dozen shots. I was reminded of what Henry said about the áo dài: covers everything, hides nothing.

  ‘Gorgeous, aren’t they?’ I said when Cal re-joined me.

  ‘A bit young for me.’

  ‘I meant the outfits. But the girls were beautiful, too. And around your age, I’d guess.’

  ‘Nah. They were kids. Fourteen, fifteen tops, I reckon.’

  ‘Teenagers look and act younger here. Photos in áo dài is a graduation tradition. I’d bet they’re eighteen at least.’

  ‘Seriously?’ He looked over his shoulder, grinned. ‘Okay, in that case, yeah, they’re super hot.’

  ‘If you’d like to go back and talk to them . . .’

  Cal brushed aside my offer with the back of his hand. ‘So, Mischa, tell me about yourself. What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m taking my friend’s son to visit a popular tourist attraction.’

  ‘Yes, very nice of you. But what are you doing in Hanoi?’

  ‘I work as an editor for an English-language magazine. Occasionally I get to work on books, too. There’s one I’m working on at the moment. It’s about women in Vietnamese history. I’m finding it fascinating.’

  ‘You know what else is fascinating? The way you’re deliberately misunderstanding me.’

  I faked a laugh, badly. ‘Not deliberately, I swear. I thought you asked me what I did here.’

  ‘No offence, but you’re kind of thick,’ he said and I laughed for real. ‘What I was asking,’ he went on, ‘is why have you, a non-Vietnamese person, chosen to live in Hanoi as opposed to any other place in the world?’

  ‘Oh, I see. That’s easy. I love it here.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you love about it?’

  ‘Oh, heaps of things. The food, the colour of the sky before a storm, the smell of , my friends and workmates and neighbours. But that doesn’t really explain it. It’s just that I feel happy here, I suppose.’

  We had reached the ticket window. I bought two entry passes and laughed away Cal’s offer to pay me back the 90 cents they cost. Cal ran his fingers over the stonework of the entrance archway.

  ‘Do you have kids?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you did. If you had a kid who lived in, say for example, Australia. Would you still live here? Do you love it that much?’

  ‘Oh, Cal.’ I took his arm and moved him through to the first courtyard. We sat on the low wall surrounding the pond where streaky lily-pads fought with frothy grey scum for surface space. ‘Look at this,’ I said. ‘Smell it!’

  He inhaled and gagged. ‘Smells like arse.’

  ‘Yes. Now I can’t speak for your dad, but for me, personally, even the foulest smelling pool of fetid Vietnamese water is more appealing than living in Australia. Especially with a kid.’

  His mouth opened wide. ‘I can’t believe you said that.’

  ‘Just being honest, buddy.’

  ‘You’re kind of a bitch, aren’t you?’ I smiled and he pinched my cheek and said, ‘I knew there was a reason I liked you straight away.’

  Amongst the expat community in Hanoi, expressing enthusiasm for anything listed in the Lonely Planet is about as acceptable as eating at the KFC or wearing a conical hat, so I’d always kept my love of the temple to myself. I loved it before I loved the city it represented, when I was barely cognisant of my surroundings and craved only anonymity and the right to sit still. In those first months, when there were days I could manage nothing more than buying an entry ticket and inching my way through the courtyards, was my sanctuary and then my saviour. The cobblestones and dragon engravings and stelae leached me of self-pity, gifted me with perspective. What was my small, sad story compared to thousand-year-old stone?

  I had visited the temple grounds dozens of times, but I had always been alone. Walking through with Cal I felt hyper-alert and oddly excited. It was like the moment before a confession.

  ‘I’ve seen that before,’ Cal said, pointing at the ornately carved pavilion at the far end of the second courtyard.

  ‘Yeah, it’s a postcard favourite. It’s called .’

  He gave me an amused look. ‘Vietnamese pronunciation is hard, huh?’

  ‘Very. Do you speak it?

  ‘Nah. My grandpa’s tried to teach me, but Mum goes nuts if she hears him.’

  ‘She doesn’t want you to learn?’

  ‘She doesn’t want me to be Vietnamese.’ He squatted, peering at the characters engraved at the base of a pillar. ‘What’s this writing? Is it Chinese?’

  ‘Yeah
. The original complex was based on a temple from Confucius’ birthplace in China. These carvings would have been done much later – probably nineteenth century – but every rebuild and renovation has retained the Chinese influence.’

  He stood and ran his palms over the lacquered pillar. ‘Weird. You’d think they’d want to get rid of anything that reminded them of a conquering force.’

  ‘It’s not like that. The only way this city’s survived for a thousand years is by taking what the occupiers and invaders and colonisers have left behind. Only a weak, insecure people would feel the need to trash everything and start again each time it defeated an enemy. Everything you come across here – the buildings and food and ideas – all of it might have started out as Chinese or French or American or Russian, but they’ve ended up Vietnamese, and that’s the point.’

  ‘Wow.’ Cal looked at me as though I’d told him the secret to eternal life. ‘Did you just make that up or is it a quote from, like, The Official History of a Millennium of Glorious Victories of the Strong and Noble People of Vietnam over their Ideological Adversaries.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve read that one? Well, you know enough to guide yourself then.’

  ‘Snap.’ Laughing, he passed under the gate to the third courtyard.

  At the Well of Heavenly Clarity, three heavily made-up Japanese girls in tiny skirts asked Cal to take their photo. I sat on the side of the pond and watched them arrange each other’s hair and try out poses as Cal shouted compliments and encouragement.

  ‘Hey, Mischa! Can you take a pic of all of us?’

  Cal had the girls kneel on the ground so he could sit on their shoulders, and then stand and form a hammock with their arms. Clusters of tourists stopped to watch and my laughter made it difficult to hold the camera steady. I stood nearby and smiled like an indulgent mother, while the four of them punched numbers and email addresses into their phones and promised to meet up for a drink by the end of the week.

  ‘Nice girls,’ Cal said when he returned to my side. ‘I probably won’t call them, though. My ex is Japanese. She was an exchange student. Broke my heart.’

  ‘Long-distance relationships are difficult.’

  ‘Nah, it wasn’t that. She’s still in Sydney. She dumped me because I wasn’t ambitious enough. Like she’s still in high school and leaving the country at the end of the year, but hanging with me was holding her back somehow?’

  ‘That does seem harsh. Anyway, you don’t lack ambition. You’re going to be a journalist.’

  He pressed his palms flat against the brick wall and leant over the pond until his fringe was almost scraping the water. ‘Crap.’ He straightened. ‘That reeks.’

  He moved off towards the stone turtles and I followed, explaining that the stelae on their backs recorded the names of every student to pass the mandarin exams here. He stopped and read a brass plaque on one of the inner walls and then cackled.

  ‘ “Pavilions for preservation of stelae erected by Ministry of Culture and Information with support from American Express.” A communist government sponsored by American Express. Classic.’

  ‘I think “Socialist-oriented Market Economy” is the current term.’

  ‘If Mum could see this . . . She hates communists, for obvious reasons, I guess. I don’t really care one way or the other, I just find it funny. I expected Hanoi to be so, so, grim, you know? I thought there’d be, like, one brand of soup and one brand of juice and every shop front would be grey. But, I’ve been here, what? Five days and I reckon I’ve had more people try to sell me more stuff than in six months on the Gold Coast which is, like, tacky tourist capitalist heaven.’

  ‘What were you doing on the Gold Coast?’

  ‘A mate got a job managing a surf shop up there and since I wasn’t ready to start uni straight from school, I went and worked for him for a while.’ Cal moved along a row of turtles, stopped, apparently at random, and squatted to examine the engravings. ‘But then I met Nicki – she was up for a week with the cultural exchange program – and we hit it off and I’d had enough of that scene anyway – you know, Asian dude in a surf shop, jokes get old fast – so I moved back to Sydney and the only job I could get right away was delivering pizzas, and I had to get a job right away because the main condition of Mum letting me defer uni for a year was that I earned my keep.’ He patted the turtle’s head and stood. ‘And then, well, Nicki wasn’t impressed with the whole pizza boy thing and she dumped me and I was such a miserable bastard that Mum took pity and said I should spend a couple of months travelling before uni started, which she regretted as soon as I said that I’d like to go to Vietnam. She’s like, “No, go to Europe, go to India, go somewhere good”, but it was time, you know? See where Dad lives, where Mum was born. See what all the fuss is about.’

  ‘And what do you think so far?’

  Cal shrugged, looking out towards the courtyard. ‘Hate to be obvious, but what I think so far is that it’s bloody hot and bloody loud.’

  ‘Terribly obvious, but that’s okay, you haven’t been here long. I’ll give you a week and then I’ll expect something a bit more insightful.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  I had to think. ‘It was six years last month.’

  ‘Did you love it right away?’

  ‘No. I thought it was bloody hot and bloody loud. It took a little while before I noticed anything else.’

  ‘So there’s hope for me yet,’ he said and stepped out from under the shade of the American Express pavilion.

  When we passed under the Thành Gate and into the final courtyard, Cal sucked in his breath.

  ‘Impressive, huh?

  ‘It’s like something out of a Bruce Lee movie.’ He struck his forehead with the heel of his palm. ‘Please forget I said that.’

  ‘Said what?’

  ‘Nice. So, wow, those are like actual Vietnamese people back there. Must piss them off all the tourists carrying on and taking photos while they’re trying to pray.’

  We walked closer to the shrines occupying the open-fronted temple at the back of the complex. A dozen or so Vietnamese lit incense and bowed, while twice as many ­Japanese and Korean and German tourists circled them with cameras. Cal seemed reluctant to go inside. I palmed the top of my head to check the sun hadn’t burnt right through the crown of my hat.

  Cal said something, but the chatter was too loud and I had to ask him to repeat it.

  He put his mouth very close to my ear. ‘I thought communists weren’t supposed to be religious.’

  ‘Not officially, perhaps, but most people here manage to be both. They have their own thing going on. Communism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism all mixed up with ancestor worship. That’s oversimplifying, of course, but you get the idea. Then there are the Caodaists, but you only really find them down south. And the Catholics of course, but not many of them are left here. Are you religious?’

  ‘Nah. My mum and aunties are kind of Catholic and my grandpa is kind of Buddhist, but none of them are really much of anything. Dad’s Church of England, I guess, because that’s what I was christened. The Confucian thing is weird, though. Isn’t it all feudal and stuff? Like the opposite of communism?’ This last bit was barely audible.

  ‘You don’t need to whisper; we won’t be arrested for speaking about religion.’

  ‘I know that. I didn’t want to offend anyone.’ He turned and stalked away, back towards the entrance. I followed, equal parts amused and ashamed.

  ‘You’re right to be sensitive,’ I said when I caught up to him. ‘I’ve obviously been hanging around with crass insensitive sods for too long.’

  He slowed his pace, but did not respond.

  ‘The way I understand it,’ I said, ‘Vietnamese belief systems are like Vietnamese architecture and food. They take the bits that work for them and leave the rest. So, like, from Confucianism they take the idea of obligation to others: duty is very important to the Vietnamese. That flows into the ancestor worship thing: your family is forever, dea
th doesn’t lessen your obligation to them, it just changes the form it will take. That would conflict with shoot-your-family-if-they-betray-the-state style communism, but that’s not what Vietnamese communism is like. It’s more about national pride, which family worship fits with quite comfortably. And then Buddhism, that’s all about non-attachment and transcending the material world. When you’ve been through the stuff these people have, well, I suppose that’s a valuable philosophy.’

  ‘You know, Mischa, I strongly suspect that is an enormous pile of made-up-as-you-went-along bullshit.’

  ‘Hey, I’m not claiming to be an expert. It’s my interpretation, as an outsider.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He smiled. ‘Like I said.’

  I’ve never kept a diary and the emails I sent my sisters were of the colourful reportage genre, so I have nothing but my memory which I know is corrupted. In retelling that day at I find myself picking out moments that barely registered with me at the time, but which now seem significant. If things had turned out differently, there would be other moments to choose. Or there would be none; the day would be like any other, barely worth remembering at all.

  You can’t tell a story forward, not really. The most important thing about our walk through the temple is something I could not have recognised as important at the time. It’s that I felt with Cal as I imagined I might feel with my similarly aged nephews if they ever visited me in Hanoi. I enjoyed sharing my knowledge and found his questions and observations invigorating. I thought he was bright and pleasant and that his parents must be proud. I was content in his company, and I was innocent.

  When Cal and I returned to the park, Matthew and Henry were preparing to set off for a bar on Paint Street. Kerry, Collins and I protested that it was barely 2 pm, far too hot for beer or walking the unshaded, concrete streets. Matthew nodded towards Cal, who had immediately curled on his side under the tree, and was already snoring into the curve of his arm. ‘When you lot do decide to join us, be sure to drag that one along with you.’

  ‘Will do, mate, will do,’ said Collins, pressing his back against the tree trunk and closing his eyes.