On the west side of the Han river, facing the promenade, there is a drinking den where all Danang employed westerners flock to saturate their souls in fermented barley, hops and chinwag with others who feel a little bit of the same. Some of these folks can be seen here nightly, after a short day of hard work teaching children their English ABCs or concocting some sort of “business” I have yet to comprehend.
Though I do not frequent the Peacock bar on a nightly basis (I must savor every one of my remaining brain cells) I have been there a couple of times to assure myself that I can still speak English fluently. You see, when you spend a majority of the day in silence or sloppily mouthing a language other than your own, you begin to wonder if the capability to palaver in your native tongue is still part of your vocal chords.
The owner of the Peacock is a lovely woman named Tien. She is thirty, and unlike most Vietnamese women her age, is unmarried, without children and lives by herself in the country just twenty minutes outside of Danang. She also happens to speak English, flawlessly, with an Australian accent. Tien is my current Vietnamese hero. She is up against a massive cultural barrier fighting for her own ladytruths. Tien’s mother is begging her to get married, to settle down and have kids, but Tien (though fiercely beautiful, talented and highly praised by men) refuses. In Vietnamese culture, women have little choice (as I have said before) and must get married. Having been exposed to western ways, Tien knows she does indeed have a choice, but her choice to remain unmarried is beginning to destroy the relationship she has with her family, a consequence that is clearly disgruntling to her.
In my first visit to the Peacock, I avoided talking to westerners. A bit of self-consciousness takes place if you haven’t spoken to your own kind in a while. You have to be in the mood to divulge your story and sometimes you just want to blend into the walls. Last Tuesday, my mate and I were craving conversation with strangers, so we made a trip to the peacock.
We sat at one of the outside tables observing the scene adjacent to us. Five drunken men quaffed a bottle of Vietnamese rum. One man from England slurred undecipherable sentences and attempted to grab Tien as she placed glasses before them. His actions were challenged by a large Australian man who threatened to throw his “British white ass” into the river. The British man slumped back into his seat and sulked for a few long minutes until the rum had erased all his short term memory. The rest of the group included three American men and one dapperly dressed Vietnamese man.
Who are these people? What are their stories? These are questions I often have pondered in regards to strangers everywhere, but now that I am living abroad in a city where westerners are few and far between, the questions have more weight.
One of the American men spoke impeccable Vietnamese to the Vietnamese man. More westerners arrived: a boisterous dredlocked man from Australia, two Australian women visiting from Australia and an American woman visiting from Thailand. Our tables merged and naturally we all began to chat.
Three of the five men who had arrived earlier were English teachers and each had Vietnamese wives or fiances. These three men were the most inebriated of all the westerners, so there was very little I could gather from them in regards to their lives, save for the large Australian man, who had been in Danang for seven years teaching English. He will soon marry a Vietnamese woman and is interested in me potentially officiating (I am a reverend; a title I earned not through religion, but the back of Rolling Stone magazine. I have married both my mother and my best friend to their main squeezes.) the service to add a bit of western flare to the ceremony.
The rest of the night I spoke with a more sober American man called Matt who is from my mother’s land of New Jersey. He had lived in Danang for a year a few years ago to teach English (a task he decided was not his forte) and went back to the states to concentrate on his marketing career. He lost his job at the beginning of the recession, and because he didn’t want to wallow in unemployment misery, came back to Danang to see his old friends for a few months. He is staying with an American woman and her Vietnamese husband (a recently new, but common phenomena) just around the corner from our home on furniture street.
Because Matt spoke Vietnamese so well, I asked him to clarify something that had triggered my curiosity:
“In the last few days there have been young children, teenagers and adults dressed up in garish rock and rock garb. Substandard bubble gum pop rock has been playing from the bowels of every speaker and headphone. I know there is some sort of concert coming up because my students mentioned “Most famous Vietnamese rock band coming to Danang!” but that is all the information I could collect from them. Do you know what is going on?” Unaware as to what this was all about, but equally interested, Matt asked the Vietnamese man (his friend, a doctor in Danang) for answers. I listened enviously, trying to grasp an inch of vocabulary for my own paltry Vietnamese exchanges.
“Oh yes” Matt said laughing from one side of his mouth. “It’s a very famous band, and the concert is tomorrow at the stadium. It’s free to anyone. Sounds like a publicity stunt. There are even people who are trying to sell tickets. It’s sponsored by a mobiphone (the Vietnamese equivalent to Verizon) and starts at 7pm.”
The doctor then asked Matt if I was interested in going. I was indeed. How often do you get a chance to see Vietnam’s most famous bad band?
“Of course, but I have to teach tomorrow night until 9, so I can’t. Are you going?” Matt translated. The man shook his head and chuckled.
“Not your favorite?”
Again, the man shook his head and chuckled.
The night ended late and we bicycled home along hushed streets. There were no crackheads wandering around looking for their next fix, no lunatics barking at the foggy moon, no domestic disputes blazing from windows or hungry dogs chewing on the corpse of a rat. The night was at rest and Danang, the most innocent 3 am city I had ever seen.
hello.....hello,
Kudos to Tien to make her way alone in a man's Vietnamese world! Good to hear that you're venturing out to the local pubs. Miss you kiddo, but enjoy the writing immensely.
Posted by: tom fenton | 01/15/2009 at 02:23 AM