Ah, yes, I’m in Germany. Well, technically in what my friend Karyn calls "German France". I´ll explain that later. Some of you might not know that I´m no longer in Vietnam, seeing as how I left in such an undignified hurry.
(Christmas lunch at Koto)
The disquiet started months ago, of course. Back in December, when all my close friends had returned home for Christmas. It´s the nastiest time to be in Hanoi, when the cold bites into your bones, particularly on a motorbike. While your skin is dry, your body still feels the damp. The blankets and clothes are, as always, moist and mould continues to grow on your shoes. Meanwhile you´re stuck in a high ceilinged house with stone floors and no insulation, shivering in front of a small radiator. And alone!
(With Michele on Christmas Day)So I spent Christmas Day with friendly acquaintances...although I did get one precious visitor – Sabine – who flew in from Thailand for New Year´s. Amid this I remembered that I had another 18 months to go, in a job that filled me with moral disquiet. In a country that I had very ambiguous feelings about. I didn´t HATE Vietnam the way I did when I first arrived – but because there are so many horrid things that happen here amid the brilliant connections and self-discoveries – it was a love/hate relationship.
(Why do so many Westerners eat less meat in Vietnam? It´s a mystery!)However, December and January were the months where my Vietnamese really began to take off. I´d given up learning German, and there were less opportunities to speak English. Life became a little easier and I felt slightly less alien.
And Hanoi, with the rest of my contract stretched before me, became the only existence I could remember. It reminded me of this kundalini meditation I did on a retreat in my home state of Victoria when I was 19. It was winter in the mountains, and we had to get up at 6am and shower outside...in the snow. Well there was a bit of snow, anyways – we´re not used to that kind of thing in Australia. And then after this, the meditation. The kundalini is the serpent coiled at the base of your spine in Hindu spirituality. It is the base chakra, red, which governs sex and rebirth and primal energy.
Not that we were “getting jiggy with it”, I promise you. It´s all about getting the flow of blood through the body and stimulating the mind. As I´m already sufficiently alert, this meant that after meditation I was like a cat chasing its tail.
Anyway, the “active” meditation basically involved jumping up and down to music for 40 minutes. Well after about 20 minutes of jumping, you did some free-form dancing, and then...some more jumping. I don´t know if any of you have done something like this, but for me, it was as if I´d been jumping all my life. After a while, the activity became inevitable. This became what I was, all I was. I couldn´t remember anything else. It makes sense: I´ve always been intoxicated by the present. It´s the only thing that protects me from worrying about the future.
So Hanoi became all that I remembered, and leaving it was not even an option.
(With my arch-nemesis, MSG)
Fast-forward four months, to April. January and February were pretty chill, thanks to a 3½-week trip through Laos and Cambodia. But once the bliss of my journey wore off, I began to feel trapped. My new housemate, Nancy, told me that I didn´t have to stay in Vietnam if I wasn´t happy, that I could break my contract. What was I getting out of the experience?
Professionally, I needed to stay a year at Radio Voice of Vietnam, which brought me up to June 27. Personally, my writing was blooming thanks to being a country where the native language was not English, and due to being kind of...miserable. Not that life sucked completely. But I was over the expat culture, and not terribly interested in Vietnamese culture. I wasn´t inspired by the art, the music, I was allergic to the food. My hair was far more unhappy than the rest of me, and I was beginning to get really ticked off that I´d sacrificed what Nancy described as my “Rapunzel hair” to propagate propaganda and be harassed by hawkers and sleazy xe om drivers who were desperate to marry my passport. To always be an object, for despite how much language I learned, I would never be more than a “thing” in Vietnam.
(Celebrating my birthday at the Barracuda Bar - in true expat style)
Even driving through Hanoi at 3 am in the morning after a tankful of Cuba Libras with my best friends du jour, all of us revelling in our relative youth and beauty, was really getting stale. In Australia, let´s be honest, would I go to a place like the Barracuda Bar? Uh uh uh. It´s way too Kuta. But in Hanoi, that was it. So you´d go, weekend after weekend, and be thrilled to see your pals that you only saw at the club and had little in common with, and drink beer (which I don´t even like) and dance to “Gasolina” and tracks by the Black Eyed Peas. That was it. That was as good as life got.
OK, what actually was better were the long discussions with my friends, the writing workshops we ran, where we talked about all the challenges and lessons that Vietnam had to offer us.
But as Suzi said, if I didn´t have a specific lesson to learn from Vietnam, then why was I there?
(The essential Suzi: spontaneous, eccentric and very, very opinionated)At the end of April, burned out from working very long hours, I went to Thailand to celebrate Suzi´s birthday. The poor thing was stuck there for six weeks trying to get a work visa and return to Hanoi. As expats living in Vietnam know, visas are getting more difficult to obtain, but Suzi´s case really is the worst I know of.
As always with Suzi, our several days on Ko Samet and in what Australians call “Bangers” were intense, but creatively rewarding. We shared confessions, wrote dirty little stories, swam and argued with equal enthusiasm. And I returned home hoping that I could, once again, be inspired by Hanoi.
