Green Mango, Blue Tango

I'm not so sure about my new neighborhood. It's ground zero for tourists and the people who live off them--hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops, travel agencies, taxi drivers, con artists, pickpockets, prostitutes, beggars, and itinerant vendors of everything from pineapples to stolen watches. I'm a resident now but indistinguishable from the tourists, so I'm getting approached, pitched, and harangued every minute I'm on the street. It's starting to make me a bit surly. In seven days my response has evolved from 'No, thank you'…to 'No!'…to 'No way, Jose!'…to 'Hell no!'…to the only response that's at all effective but which makes me unhappy I have to resort to it: acting as if the other person is a figment of their own imagination.

On Saturday night I joined Jouke, Imran, and Imran's wife Amy for dinner at a sushi restaurant in my old neighborhood. After dinner we went to a party at the Green Mango, which turned out to be just around the corner from my new apartment. In fact, when I was hunting for incense the other day I walked right past the Green Mango without seeing it. It's another one of those tall, narrow hotels that grow all over Hanoi, but this one is quite posh and deep and it opens up in the back into a big party room with a stage, where on this night a live band was pulling in several hundred of the same people I saw at the American Club the week before. I also ran into Taylor, a Samoan with an Aussie accent who lives in my apartment building and whom I'd met in the hallway just that morning. Hanoi is starting to seem rather a small place in some ways.

In an earlier blog I mentioned wandering around the Old Quarter and chancing upon Hanoi's Jazz Club. The Jazz Club, it happens, is a few doors up the street from my apartment. At one point Saturday evening I decided to sneak out of the party at the Green Mango and wander down to the corner to see what happens on a Saturday night at the Jazz Club.

The Jazz Club is a big cavern fairly open to the street. It features live music seven nights a week with no cover charge. Pricey drinks, understandably, but not too outrageous—about $2 for a beer and $4 for a mixed drink. The place wasn't exactly mobbed last Saturday, but there were a couple dozen people listening to some mellow sounds from a Vietnamese quartet. Not a great band, but altogether more my kind of scene than the high-decibel, standing-room-only crush of the dance party up the street. I made a mental note to come back soon and then detoured toward my apartment to pick up my camera to get some snaps of my friends at the Green Mango.

Suddenly, once again, I'm catching a pitch from a neighborhood entrepreneur—this time from a young woman (in her 30's I think) selling massages. It's about 11:00 and the street has slowed down, but there are still quite a few people about. To make sure I'm not confused about what kind of massage she's talking about, the woman takes the liberty of massaging the front of my pants once or twice. I tell her I'm not interested at the moment (I already have an agenda that involves my camera and my friends at the Green Mango), so she insists on writing her name and phone number for me so I can call her the next day. I tell her I'm going out of town for a few days (true), but will hang on to the number.

She wants to know where I'm going. (Every Hanoi salesperson wants to know this and also what your immediate plans are, presumably so they can show you how perfectly your plans and theirs coincide.) I tell her I'm going home and in fact I'm already there. While she's been previewing the massage, we've covered the 30 paces to my place. I tell her goodnight, try to reassure her I might phone--without making any promises--and slip into the alleyway that leads to my front door. She doesn't need any more encouragement than a dimly lit alley way. Despite my perhaps too polite protests, she follows me to my door, all the while escalating her sales pitch. She indicates, in broken English accompanied by body language that leaves no doubt whatsoever about her meaning, that she's prepared to deliver the massage on the spot and the price is completely up to me. To overcome my sales resistance, she embraces me in a more than sisterly fashion, kisses me on the neck, and unzips my pants--about three times, I think--as I continue to bid her goodnight, assure her that I'll keep her in mind for the future, fumble with my keys, re-zip my pants, check that she hasn't lifted my wallet or cell phone, unlock the padlock securing the sliding outer gate, slide open the gate, check that she hasn't lifted my wallet or cell phone, unlock the inner door, re-zip my pants, step into the foyer, taking care that she doesn't slip inside with me, check my wallet and cell phone again, close and padlock the outer gate, and tell her goodnight as I close the inner door.

The last thing I need is to acquire an STD while living in a place where getting cured of athlete's foot can be a dodgy undertaking. That consideration and perhaps that consideration alone kept this story from having a happier ending. The woman was physically attractive by any objective standard and made more so in my eyes by the sake and beer I had just consumed and the oath I've sworn against exposing myself to any sexual relationship that might be construed as meaningful. The truth is that for the very first time since I arrived in Hanoi I found the Vietnamese sales pitch that doesn't want to take no for an answer to be not unequivocably repugnant and I went up to my lonely apartment feeling a bit wistful.

I waited long enough for her to have latched onto another sales prospect and let myself back out. As I did so, I suddenly remembered the construction workers who sleep in the newsstand. Even with no English, they probably were able to follow the titillating radio comedy that had transpired on the other side of their plastic tarp. I'm amazed none of them snickered.