Christmas in Hanoi

I had planned to eat Christmas dinner at the Green Mango. Several of my colleagues had tentatively committed to doing the same. But when the time came, I just couldn't summon the appetite or the energy. I walked past the entrance and kept on going until I found myself at the supermarket, where I replaced my stocks of bottled water and tissues and headed home again. I spent most of Christmas day in bed, fully clothed against a clammy chill, preparing to teach a Friday night class. In the evening I heard party sounds spilling down from De's penthouse apartment two floors above me. The party apparently had migrated to my building from the Green Mango. I expected somebody to knock on my door at any moment, but I dozed off and when I woke up everything was quiet—except for those two cats that fight a grudge match outside my bathroom window five nights out of seven. The Vietnamese have eaten all the birds in Hanoi—the only ones I've seen so far have been in cages—so I don't understand why they've allowed these two cats to live.

Whether it's my advancing age, my body's unfamiliarity with a new virus, or the ineffectiveness of Vietnamese cold and flu medicine, this flu has been the worst of my life. I'm lucky it struck at such an opportune time, when my light teaching schedule was even lighter due to holiday breaks. Most of the past two weeks I've spent lying in bed reading, dozing, and watching the predictable but exasperatingly slow evolution of my symptoms. Only twice did I have to pedal through gray, gritty streets in suit and tie, book bag on my back, to arrive at class with a sweaty torso, achy head, stuffy nose, and cottony mouth and try to give a roomful of hopeful students their money's worth.

I haven't minded being in what you might consider a Christmas backwater during the holidays. I've had my fill of the aggressively commercial form Christmas assumes in the US. For me the best part of Christmas is the heightened fellow feeling of the season and that feeling appears to be widespread all year long in Vietnam. Although they aren't Christians, Thanh offered to give me his bicycle as a Christmas gift, Thu gave me a beautiful pen and a box of green bean cakes, Van gave me a magnificent scarf to guard against the winter chills, Nga gave me bananas, tea, coffee, and vitamin C, Huong, Mai, and Linh offered to help me learn Vietnamese, and two restaurants this week have given me free pots of tea with my meal.

Bac on line

Bac—the Vietnamese word for 'uncle'—is what Thu, my Vietnamese tutor, calls me. More about Thu, later.

When I left off blogging back in October, Hanoi had gone from hot and humid to mild and humid. Now, six weeks later, it's even milder here and somewhat less humid. The locals call this season mua dong (winter) and dress accordingly. Everywhere you look you see people in sweaters, hats, mufflers, warm coats, sporting the traditional layered look of mid-December. In fact, Christmas decorations are going up in the bigger stores and hotels. Shops all over my neighborhood are bursting with artificial Christmas trees, ornaments, and plastic battery-operated Santas dancing the hokey-pokey. All in all, there's way more of a yuletide look than you might expect from a tropical Buddhist country. The thing is, though, the daytime temperatures here are still in the seventies (between 21 and 26 Celsius). It's currently 77F/25C in Hanoi. At night, the mercury drops no lower than 52F/11C. I'm still going about in my shirt sleeves, eliciting comments from people about how strong and healthy I must be to withstand the cold weather without a coat.

Now that the weather has relaxed its sweaty grip on me, I can truthfully say I'm settling comfortably into my apartment in Luong Van Can street, and into my life as an expat English teacher in Hanoi. Yes, as many of you have guessed, I've begun my teaching career. I have a six-month contract with Language Link and have taken over two corporate classes from a departing teacher named Patrick.

Corporate classes are contracted by Vietnamese companies who want to give their employees an opportunity to improve their English. Theoretically, the emphasis in these classes is on language that will be useful in the work place: 'Could we reschedule our meeting for Monday?', 'Put together some sales figures and fax them to me', 'markup', 'conference call', 'glass ceiling'…that sort of thing. In reality, most classes—my classes, at any rate—are at a much more elementary level: 'How old as you?', 'I am very happiness to meet you', 'We will sightseeing a sunset.'

Since the company pays for the class, corporate students are less motivated to attend than students who are paying their own fees. One of my classes meets Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 5 to 7 PM. The students come to Language Link straight from work on their motorbikes. Not surprisingly, only four or five of the 20 enrolled students show up on an average day and it's rare that anybody arrives on time. The other class meets from 2:30 to 4:30 Mondays and Fridays in one of the company's own conference rooms. Since the class is during office hours, you'd think most of the 20 enrollees would jump at a chance to miss a couple hours of work and still get paid, but only three or four show up for this class and one or two of those usually get a call on their cell phone halfway through the class and head back to their office to put out a fire.

I have to say, though, that the ones who show up are delightful students—warm, cheerful, cooperative, and eager to learn. I enjoy being in their company and I enjoy the challenge of finding creative ways to improve our communication together. In the next few weeks, I'll try to paint a more detailed picture of what our classes are like.