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Published: January 28th 2009
When I return to Ireland and my mother uses her favourite catchphrase ‘What did your last maid die of?’ I shall reply ‘She didn’t die, she’s alive and well in Vietnam to the best of my knowledge.’ Yen (pronounced ‘Ying’) has arrived on the first day of her New Year to clean my apartment. She can’t clean her own house as sweeping the floor on such an auspicious day is considered bad luck. You may sweep out hidden money which would be a disastrous omen for 2009. Before all of you call me a lazy good-for-nothing expat for hiring a personal slave, consider first Yen’s magical abilities. I have been banished to the study while she hides the beer bottles, removes the crumbs and coco pop residue and miraculously returns the apartment to its original, immaculate state. That’s great. But to be brutally honest, I won’t mind if she came and read magazines all day, I’d still pay her. When Vera and I first moved in we spent three days having cold showers. Our internet didn’t work. And although ordering food from local Indian’s and Italian’s has become our way of life, we couldn’t understand how to operate the gas cooker.
(Or we convinced ourselves it was dangerous to guess). Additionally, we kept getting notes written in tieng Viet that could have been deportation orders to us. (They turned out to be regular apartment charges).
And then Yen showed up on fine Monday morning back in November. From the moment we met her we knew she was a keeper. Yen had apparently texted Vera, my housemate, to ask when to call in. It being the ungodly hour of 6am, Vera texted her back at around 8am telling Yen to come after we had woken up. It wasn’t until Yen started gently knocking on the front door at 9.30am that we realised she had been waiting patiently outside out the apartment door for over two hours while we ‘woke up’. Within 30 minutes Yen had solved all of the above problems, mostly by finding trip switches, ringing the relevant authorities and more or less treating us like the lost puppies we were. She can buy us fruit and vegetables for a fraction of the price Vera or I could get them for as foreigners. In fact, that first week in November, she bought us meat for a week, 8 oranges, a
park near buu dien thanh pho/ central post office
this is where i was sitting reading when i was propositioned for god knows what and for english conversation practice...ah the life of a teacher is never dull...watermelon, carrots, chillies and garlic for the equivalent of about 1 euro. She discovered we were being overcharged on electricity by about 20 times the going rate. She has just taken one look at my mosquito bites and informed me that they are actually ant bites and I should stop eating all over the apartment because ants love crumbs. She’s full of interesting facts. It’s like she’s an insider to government plans; what developing districts are good investments, why there are always floods in certain areas, general traffic rules you can ignore. She’s the living and breathing incarnation of the Vietnamese capacity for hard work (literally) 365 days of the year! When we aren’t here she leaves us poetic notes about what she did for us and gives out to us in an endearing way about not eating the fruit she bought us last week, writing,
‘Watermelon the, perhaps it not so good to keep it in the fridge
it pains your stomach after so long. Found money pocket the jeans,
not so good when washed…See you next week, Yen.’ The rest of this blog entry was meant to be about my travels up north in December and
a couple who came to park to pose for photographs
the women is wearing a more modern looking ao dai - very common around these parts - very beautiful but impossible if planning to ride motobike yourself January. But as so often in Vietnam, just when you think you have something exciting to tell your readers about the country, the present moment offers up so much more potential revelations. Yen is so engaging that half the time I want her to shut up so I can write it down and half of me wants her to talk forever as if I don’t have you guys to think about! My rationale in writing this blog is simple. I spent four years studying university modules with the titles, ‘Media and U.S. foreign policy’ or ‘US foreign policy and the Vietnam War.’ I’d swap all the 3567 hours of it for the four hours I listening to her this afternoon, asking stupid questions, as she scrubbed my kitchen floor. Yen has good conversational English and although she mixes up tenses occasionally, it makes her life before and after 1975 seem like now. There is a sense of immediacy and urgency to everything she says, even if it happened over thirty years ago. At certain times while she is telling me her stories I infer my own interpretations of what she is trying to put across to me so I apologise
in advance if I miscontrue her lively but sometimes sobering anecdotes.
It all starts quite innocently as she sits on her haunches, squatting astonishingly for over 30 minutes, as she soaks my living room in cleaner. She asks ‘Can you hear the drums?’ I must have outwardly groaned and muttered something like ‘Bloody drums beating all morning couldn’t get back to sleep for my mid-morning nap’, because she laughs and tells me that at her house they have drums all day. They not only endure continuous drums, but they have a tradition known as Mua Lan (Dragon Dance). Essentially, people dressed in a dragon outfit and smiling masks march through your house, collecting their payment that you have hung off the ceiling and walls. This is meant to be good luck for the following year but to me it sounds completely sadistic, especially for your neighbours. I tell Yen my thoughts on such cruelty and she replies without hesitation, ‘Why you think I’m here?’
Yen is washing the dirty plates in my sink. I am looking over the balcony twenty floors down. I ask her to explain what the crowd of men and women are doing below. They
have been sitting around what looks like a ‘twister’ plastic mat for two days now. Incense burns everywhere. Yen glances over the edge, squints and asks, ‘Are they pass around the cards?’ I look over again and sure enough they seem to be constantly dealing cards. Apparently, this is a card game akin to the game 21 but it is played ‘just for fun…In a few days the police will come and stop the game.’ I’m indignant immediately. Why stop an innocent game of cards? Yen answers, ‘Most of the time the card games are for money, motorbikes or maybe houses. For Tet, it’s just played for fun and the police allow it.’ She explains that all forms of gambling are illegal. Although the government have an official lottery, there is a black market kind where players have better chances of winning. So it’s very popular. And obviously, very illegal. In fact Yen tells me of a neighbour who printed and sold these types of lottery tickets and is ‘now in the prison’ on the final year of her three year sentence. To me, having witnessed Irish corruption tribunals that pre-exist my birth and yield very few results, this all
this sounds a bit harsh over a few lottery tickets. Yen tells me that the women only went to prison after being caught three times. The first time she had to pay the police 30 million dong (approximately 2000USD$). The second time she, like most people involved in shady business, flushed the evidence of printed lottery tickets down the toilet and stripped as if to take a shower. Her husband told the police that they couldn’t see her as she was naked so the police searched the sewer for any washed up tickets. Finding none, they had to wait until their third raid of her house before charging her. (Police apparently don’t need a search warrant here because they are ‘like the mafiosa, like family’ to the residents of each quarter.). Her jail time starts to make more sense when Yen explains that the women had leant the profits to the poor with an interest rate of 30% each month. If you didn’t pay, the women could take your house and rent it back to you. These must be the people who shop in the plazas then.
As Yen empties the kitchen bin she tells me of the people
she has cleaned apartments for. One western man had a string of Vietnamese girlfriends who all thought he was about to marry them. Everyday that Yen cleaned his apartment she would meet a different women who she had to pretend was the only girlfriend she ever met. She tells me how one women whose apartment she cleaned wanted to write a book about Yen’s life but had to move to another country. I’m curious now because most people are modest when it comes to people writing biographies of their lives. Yen seems so confident that it would be a bestseller. What would the book tell everybody, I ask. Yen looks at me as if I should already know. ‘I have seen two lives, two sides.’ Before the revolution in 1975, she was working for an import/export company and had started studying law in university. Her family were comfortable enough although I get the impression that hadn’t always been the case. After the revolution, her father lost his job. Finding food was a struggle and Yen had to give up university to work selling rice and vegetables in HCMC. Yen was divorced after her son turned one; as she put it
to my housemate, and I’m paraphrasing here, ‘he wanted to be a Buddhist and I wanted to make money!’ She says that they were tough times but smiles when I become speechless and says that many couldn’t take financial ruin and left the country or even committed suicide (she mimes this part) when the ‘communists came south.’ When I ask did she think of leaving, she characteristically replies that her ‘generation can survive anything now’. She grew up being resilient so when her family fell on hard times after 1975, they had survival instincts many didn’t have. I ask her if her son is taught any history of the ‘American War’ and she answers that most of the younger generation don’t know about the South’s perspective. The history taught in schools is about the Chinese invasions and 18th /19th century events. The only reference to the Vietnam war is a ‘surface’approach.
Just before I go to the park, Yen asks me if I have a boyfriend. When I say ‘no’ she says she is surprised. She informs me of a startling fact: I am white and young and western.’ For me, these are facts I have always taken for
granted. To her, these are attributes. I tell her I’m ridiculously ‘difficult and fussy’ to which she says, ‘Ah your destiny has not come to meet you yet…’ , which I think may be the wisest way you can console someone. I ask her, with some trepidation, does she know any eligible Vietnamese men. Worryingly she replies, ‘No, you can’t have the Vietnamese man…unless they are college educated, the worker man of Vietnam feels inferior to white western women.’ I ask her if that’s true for Vietnamese women who meet western men and she laughs and says ‘No, that is different too, Vietnamese women see western white man as rich and as the good life…’ She knows better though having cleaned the apartments of quite a few. A neighbour of hers arranges weddings for Korean businessmen. The going rate is about 1000USD$ for a wife, which even Yen admits is small. But she adds, their lifestyle in Korea will be good. They may or may not keep in contact with their family in Vietnam; it all depends on how well they settle into a foreign but wealthy lifestyle.
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Hi Kate, it's your random blog reader again.
It is quite understandable that Yen mixed up her tenses. Don't know if you are aware that vietnamese does not have verb tense conjugate and plural or singular. Even after learning English for 30 years, I still having trouble with them. I am telling you the English are crazy, they have so many rules. Don't know how you Irish put up with them. Just kidding. In real life, I never met an Irish woman though I had a opportunity to talk to one customer representative in Ireland somewhere. She had a beautiful voice, she talked like she was singing.