Eye On Hanoi
Reflections on Life in Hanoi
So long Hanoi
28 November, 2009
Voom!
Over! C’est fin! Het roi!
Goodbye! Adieu! Tam Biet!
Moving like this always scares me. The suddenness of the final act and the craziness of a new life in your destination leaves one so vulnerable to quickly forgetting what you have left behind. I guess it is why many claim that moving is often harder for those left behind. They are the ones left with the hole. They are the ones from whom the child they have cared for has been taken, from whom the drinking and rugby watching buddies have disappeared, from whom the loved colleague and boss has been redeployed, from whom coffee times, smiles on the street and in the corridors have been vanquished. For the one moving, the new destination provides it’s own excitement and challenges that occupy ones mind, and it is this craziness, the business of the new life, that leaves one so vulnerable to moving on too quickly from ones past. And being the nostalgic type, I do not like that. It scares me. I do love change, but that is not to deny that letting go can be pretty tough at times.
For me, the feelings in departing Hanoi were not the same as those feelings I felt leaving Singapore three years ago. Nor leaving New Zealand ten years ago. On both those occasions there was always the knowledge that I would return one day to see friends, family, and country again. Leaving Hanoi however … I do not know. I hope that I shall return. But I do not know. And because of this uncertainty, leaving Hanoi held a greater degree of sadness. Furthermore, many of the friends I made during the tour live the same kind of roaming lifestyle as ourselves which results in everyone being scattered all over the world.
Dare I say it, but I am a man who does shed a tear from time to time. My emotions can at times be a fight between the flamboyant Italian genes trying to open the floodgates, and the ‘stiff upper lip’ anglo-saxon genes trying to dam them up. I can stand with the best of them, holding a lump in my throat at a funeral … but only for a while, after which the gates finally open. So, alas, armed with this bloodline, I knew without a doubt that the final days would see me with a few wet eyes.
I made so many close friends during my time in Hanoi. 
Friends that I will hold dear for life. And I shed a few tears for those that we were leaving behind. Our buddies from the expat community – the Kiwis, Singaporeans, Aussies, French, Argies, Yanks, the Brits, the Irish, Thais, Malaysians, the Indonesians, Sri Lankans, Indians, Israelis, Malagasies, South Africans, Canadians, Japanese, Austrians, Chinese, Italians, Koreans, Filipinos, Swiss. Our Vietnamese friends – those who looked after us at our apartment, the seminarians and priests of St. Joseph’s Cathedral and the archdiocese of Hanoi, colleagues, fellow tennis players, people who ran the stalls at the markets, the staff at the supermarket, the restaurants, cafes, shops and galleries, the regular faces I smiled at and waved to on a daily basis as I walked the streets, wandered around our apartment tower, ran around Hoan Kiem Lake and the Citadel. So many that I was sad to leave behind.
People make a place. If you have a good base of friends then you can survive anywhere. In fact, it is often the case that the harsher the locations, the more wild and weird and fun people’s social lives become. And, sad to say, those who do not enjoy a new location are often the ones who have not been able to establish a strong network of friends. Not saying that Hanoi was a particularly harsh place to live. In general it was very easy. But the strong network of friends that we established during our time there certainly made our stay most memorable.
In my final weeks I met a Vietnamese friend over a coffee one morning, and she asked me a question about an aspect of my time in Hanoi that had bugged me for a while. During the seven years that I had lived in Singapore prior to moving to Hanoi, by far the majority of my close friends had been Singaporeans. In fact, I only had about three close expat 
mates. To a degree, I had not wanted to get too involved in what is sometimes a superficial expat lifestyle – something distinct to the local population. In Hanoi, however, this aspect of my life was turned totally upside down. My friend’s question to me was “do you have many Vietnamese friends?” to which my response was “no, not too many”. I mean, I knew a lot of Vietnamese, but only a handful could I call close friends. And a good number of those whom I was close to were friends, spouses, or colleagues of my expat friends. And this used to bug me. Here I was, in a foreign country, and I had fallen into the expat lifestyle. Before I discuss this any further, let it be known – I enjoyed the lifestyle I had in Hanoi. After a dearth of Kiwi and expat exposure for so many years in Singapore it was nice to be drinking, watching rugby, and generally socializing with ‘my own kind’. So much so that, with my return to Singapore I do want to mix it up a bit more and get more involved in some of the expat activities here.
But, as I said, not having cracked the Vietnamese social scene as much as I would have liked to did bug me from time to time. And I have my theories as to why I was not so successful in making too many close Vietnamese friends. First of all, I was working from home. Me-lady was our raison d’être for living in Hanoi, and I had managed to secure work that essentially involved me running my office from home – so I never had that most natural of ways to meet people, which is through your job. There was not much that I could do about that, lest I threw my business in and got a job working for ‘the man’. The second point that I think is relevant is language. English is not that widely spoken in Vietnam, and those who do will often struggle with our accents and we will often struggle with their pronunciation. And while you try, when you are unable to communicate easily it does make socializing difficult. Not impossible, but difficult. Sometimes, after a long week, you just want to banter with someone who understands your humour and your colloquialisms. There are other factors that come into play in cross-cultural buddy making, but these were the major stumbling blocks for me in Hanoi I think.
The whole expat integration topic actually raises an interesting point that I used to notice in my university days. As a young lad at Canterbury University I could not understand why the large majority of foreign students all hung out 
together, lived together, ate their native dishes together, and did not mingle that greatly with the New Zealand population. It was not until I lived overseas myself that I discovered that, while one is exploring an exciting new world, there is a massive comfort factor in speaking with ones own kind in ones own language and colloquialisms and eating ones own food from time to time. Alas, I could go on about this topic for a long while as I have many ideas on it, but it’s relevance to this farewell journal is perhaps … irrelevant!
But before I move on from this topic, leaving you with the assumption that I was an ignorant foreigner living a life totally out of touch with the local populace, I would like to stress that my point here is about relativity. I have left a great deal of Vietnamese friends and acquaintances behind, and I miss them dearly. My point is that, unlike my experience in Singapore, there were a number of barriers that made it a little harder to establish close Vietnamese friends and the result was that my closest friends were expats.
As I mentioned, there was a great deal of sadness involved in leaving so many good friends behind. There was however one person for whom our departure was particularly sad and deserves a specific mention. For the first two years of our wee girl’s life she knew three people more than any others. Two of these people are obvious – her mum and dad – me-lady and I. The third was her nanny. When you do the numbers, it’s a pretty even contest between her nanny and us as to who spent more waking hours interacting with our wee girl. (Though, it’s dead clear who spent more time attending to her in the horrid morning hours of those early months ). Hence the bond that developed between our wee girl and her nanny was understandably very strong. And the bond between the nanny and me-lady and I was very strong as well. Here is someone who comes into your home 5 days a week, who cares for the wellbeing of your child, helps tidy your house and prepares your meals. Our wee one’s nanny was a part of our family. Leaving her behind in Hanoi was absolutely tragic. We love her dearly, and will make all efforts to ensure we are always in touch and that our wee girl, especially, remembers her fondly.
It makes one realize that it must be pretty heart-wrenching for the many heroes the world over who help raise children as nannies or au pairs to build intense bonds with their charges, only to have to end it all after a few years and then start all over again with a new family. We asked the nanny to be with us on our last morning in Hanoi, so that she could share in our last hours. In the mad rush of the final weeks we never really sat down and told her how much we appreciated her, but I am pretty sure she knew. And even on that last morning, life was somewhat hectic. As we ran around making final checks, receiving final good wishes, I heard some sobs coming from our wee one’s bedroom. On stepping into the room, I found her nanny leaning against a wall of the room in which she had spent so many hours with our wee one playing, rocking to sleep, reading, laughing, and so forth. She was crying like I had never heard someone cry before. I then went to pick up our wee one and bought her in so that the three of us could share a very tearful hug in these dying moments.
You know, the other tragedy of this farewell of course is that at a little over two years old, the wee one really had no idea of the permanence of this trip to the airport, nor the reason for our tearful farewells.
But, anyway, this is life. Farewells, I mean. And an important part of life that adds to making it the beautiful thing it is. Without the movement of different characters in to and out of our various life’s stages, the world would be a duller place.
Here’s an interesting insight for those not in the know. There are two types of expats in any expat centre. When I talk about expats here I am talking about foreigners in general. There are those who are doing the three or four year stint. The diplomats, the UN and NGO employees, the foreign representative of multi-national companies and many more. And then there are the long termers. Those who have decided to call this foreign land home. Whether they have married 
someone locally or have simply fallen in love with the place, they have chosen to spend a larger portion of their lives in another land. And while the two groups may share the same culture and language, there is a divide that is perhaps too subtle to be noticed by outsiders. The long termers know this town. They have long term friendships established already – generally with long termers like themselves. The short termers, like myself, are the fresh grads. Fresh off the boat, we are out to do all we can, to do what we need to do to prove we are ‘one’ with our new environment. And then three years later, we zip off back home or to some other foreign land. Soon after I first arrived, I was quite taken aback when a long termer advised me that he would rather not get to know me, as I would be gone in three years time, like all the other short termers. It was not until toward the end of our time in Hanoi that it dawned on me what he was on about. It’s an energy thing – why put so much energy into nurturing something that you will have to say farewell to in three years time? I mentioned this to a close long termer friend of mine in my final month. He had arrived in Hanoi not long before I had, and so we were both relatively fresh of the boat in those early days. But now with long-term roots in the country, he says he understands the feeling more and sometimes feels a certain reluctance to go out of his way to meet new kids in town. I was lucky enough to become friendly with many long termers, but I get where they are coming from now. And maybe being back in Singapore now I will begin to understand it more personally – though as I mentioned earlier, already many of my friends in Singapore are Singaporeans or long termer expats as well. Maybe that is my point.
Anyway, I have dragged on about farewells a bit long. Might I just add one final point though? The world is a different place now. With Facebook, Skype, email and texting, it is so easy to keep in touch with friends wherever you are. As soon as you land in your destination and get yourself a connection, you can be bantering away with the same old folks. It reminds me of the days when I was a student in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and the effort we put into writing letters to our buddies over the long summer holidays. And how we used to rush to the letter box each morning to find news from friends scattered around the country. Ah, remember those aerogrammes! Almost 20 years later and with a small family in tow, one does not quite have the time any longer to write such epistles and run them down to the post office - so these modern technical marvels are a Godsend. No, it is not really a farewell anymore, it’s a ‘see you online’.
I have but two regrets about my time in Hanoi. One is that I never technically worked in Hanoi. I worked from home, so I missed a massive opportunity to really get into Vietnam. Working in one’s host country must be the best way to learn about it. But alas, I began my Hanoi days telecommuting to Sydney, and then I chose to run my own business that was not focused specifically on Vietnam. So I continued to telecommute around the world from my humble home office, at times completely oblivious to world outside my window. My second regret relates to the language. I studied Vietnamese for almost a year, maintaining around 4 hours of class time per week. So after one year I was doing alright, but I certainly needed to do more. Alas, with the arrival of the wee one into our lives, and my professional energies working long hours on my business, something had to give – and the language it was. While I maintained much of my vocabulary, I did find over time that my pronunciation became lazier and lazier to a point where people were understanding less and less of what I said. These two regrets were the result of higher decisions for which I have no regrets, hence missing the opportunity to work in Vietnam and not taking the language to a point where I was fluent were “calculated collateral damage”. Que sera sera.
For some, Hanoi is a town they are happy to leave at the end of their posting. For myself, there is much that I am sad to have left behind. For a town of 4 million people (and rising fast), it somehow has a small town feel of it. Certainly within our social group we would bump into friends all over town, and there is something really nice about that. I will miss that. I loved the cafes. Picking up ones laptop and heading down to work at such places as Mocha, La Place, Hapro by the lake, Highlands, Papa Joes, Jojo’s, Puku, Avalon, Paris Deli, La Salsa, Trung Nguyen café on Hai Ba Trung 
Street and so so many more. I will miss that. The great restaurants. Green Tangerine, La Badiene, Halia, Quan An Ngon, Hoa Vien Brauhaus, Matchbox, La, Green Mango, Au Lac do Brazil, Luna, Highway 4, Studio, Angelina’s, Jaspas, Al Frescos, and again so so many more. I will miss those. The great family parties at the Aussie Big Day Out and the Minsk Club events at the American Club, and the HIWC Bazaar at UNIS. I will miss those. Wandering around the art galleries, the video stores, the trinket shops, and the general chaos of the Old Quarter. I will miss that. Drinks at numerous bia hoi’s around town. I will miss that. Life in Hanoi is much less competitive and more relaxed. There is less ‘he does this’, ‘she does that’, ‘her husband is a lawyer’ – you know what I mean? As a good long-termer Hanoi friend commented in our closing days, “it is so nice here that folks do not seem to be so concerned about ones profession. In many case, people never ask”. There are less egos in Hanoi - amongst our circle, at least. And, I will miss that. After three years of living in Hanoi, there are so many happy memories that I have taken away with me.
Of all our experiences in and memories of Hanoi, there is but one that is stronger than any other and one that will forever bind us to the city. That is the birth our wee one in this town. By being born here, she is able to claim something that only 84 million other people in this world are able to claim – ‘that she was born in Vietnam’. While she does not hold Vietnamese citizenship, she does have a Vietnamese birth certificate, and that is something pretty cool. And with our wee girl having also been baptized here, there will always be a record of her that she can follow up on at Nha Tho Cua Bac (the church she was baptized at). And that’s pretty cool too I reckon.
For the first two years of her life, Hanoi was her home. Hanoi was what she knew. Hanoi is where she made her first friends. And of course, ipso facto, Hanoi was also where me-lady and I became parents. And being a nation of baby-lovers, what a great place for a parent to learn. Even today when she says ‘I want to go home’, I think she is referring to Hanoi. And I hope that we will return to Hanoi in the years to come, and as she grows and father and daughter bond more as equals, I look forward to sharing with her what I remember of those first few years of her life in this town.
And so it must happen. Close to three months after leaving Hanoi and returning to Singapore, I pen the closing words on this journal. In the opening paragraphs of this entry I wrote of the uncertainty of me ever returning. In reality, I harbour many ideas that could see me and my family returning many times over. Like so many others, even though there are reasons to dislike Hanoi, I fell in love with the place. Leaving has left a hole in my heart, and my mind travels back to our life there regularly. From Singapore it is but a three hour flight to Hanoi, and with a bit of competition on the route keeping fares honest, there really is no excuse not to return for an extended weekend of cafes, art galleries, Old Quarter walking, and good friends.
Before moving to Hanoi in May 2006 I read a beautiful book on the life of a French legionnaire living in Hanoi in the years leading up to the departure of the French in 1954. While reading it for a second time in my final weeks, I thought that the book’s title ‘Hanoi, adieu’* would be a great closing line for this journal. The word adieu, French in origin, translates literally as ‘to God’ and in it’s correct sense denotes a final farewell. Having left for a few months now, these words do not portray my inner hopes. They are too final. Therefore …
See You Again,
Au Revoir,
Hẹn Gặp Lại,
Hanoi!
* This book is a fantastic read for those with an interest in the recent history of Hanoi, from a perspective that many of us are not aware of – that of those French people for whom Indochina was also home for many years. The book’s full title is ‘Hanoi, adieu – A bitter sweet memoir of French Indochina’, and it’s author is Mandalay Perkins.
