Salty Chicken and Bamboo Shoot Broth

6

Photo by Vy Huynh, Unsplash.

Looking for Duras weaves three strands of memoir into one: my lifelong infatuation with the French writer Marguerite Duras, a journey through Vietnam and Cambodia tracing her footsteps, and a musing on mothers and melancholy. (Read prev chap here).

6.

Mr TF is back at the desk and I ask if I can use the phone to call a local number. Hoping not to be a complete tourist on this trip, before I left Sydney I had put the word out for local contacts and came up trumps. A close friend put me in touch with the Vietnamese born, Sydney theatre director, Binh Duy Ta. I’d seen his work so he wasn’t a total stranger and I was thrilled when he told me his mother-in-law, who lives in Hanoi, is a well-known poet, playwright and film director.

He was more than happy to put us in touch and asked if I would deliver a gift for his nephew — a flashy pair of sparkly red Nike shoes. Taking charge of the package before I left gave me a feeling of being a little more intimately connected with his country.

After a few rings, Ngat answers the phone. She speaks in broken English with Vietnamese intonations and hearing I am on a tight schedule, asks if I will come for lunch. As it happens she is free today, would that suit? Of course I accept.

I head back upstairs to gather up my things to transfer to another room as Mr TF promised. It doesn’t take long and soon I am well ensconced with a balcony view over a jumble of neighboring terracotta tile rooftops. The room, like the rest of the hotel is tiny and yet somehow everything seems to fit.  I sit down on the heavy wooden stool at the small round carved table and get out my notebook, which I notice is nearly full. My eyes land on a piece I wrote sometime ago, written in third person when I had gotten sick of using the ‘I’ voice.

         ‘Her melancholy pervades her, hanging about like a morning mist before the sun's rays warm up the day. Like a cloak she wears when things become too uncomfortable, she wraps herself in its soothing mantle, burrows down into its comforting darkness, just like her mother did.

          ‘It's never allowed to become full blown depression, must always be kept in check, there is not enough room for two depressive divas in one family; she could never go down that road, never give in to facing the wall. So she keeps it low grade: a respectable ennui, a salute to her mother's illness, a pledge of solidarity.

          ‘So while she occasionally makes visits to a lady shrink, a bespectacled therapist who nods off when her stories get boring, she refuses suggestions of drugs or medical intervention. Instead she tries other things: like eating six almonds before bed, swallowing tinctures of St John’s Wort, St Mary's Thistle, walking, yoga and whistling. Perhaps these measures soothe her briefly, or perhaps the fact that she is taking some kind of self-nurturing steps is responsible for putting a skip in her step for a time, but sooner or later the melancholic mist rolls in, seducing her once more, luring her into its false salve.’

        Underneath I’d written the Merriam Webster definition of melancholia: ‘A very serious a mental condition, a manic-depressive condition characterized by extreme depression, bodily complaints, and often hallucinations and delusions.’ *

It’s as if I’m reading this definition for the first time, for now it makes me sit up straight. Surely that’s not correct, it must have been updated since I last looked!  I’ve always viewed melancholia as a lightweight, old fashioned, somewhat romantic term, as in ‘oh she’s just feeling a little melancholic, a little sad — it will pass.’ I’ve always used it to describe a fleeting state not something so darkly permanent or fully blown. But have I been mistaken? Have I ignored, even denied my mental states at my own peril. Was I not able to give them full attention out of fear I would follow in my mother’s footsteps?

     I used to call my depressive tendencies ‘The Thwarting’. I knew it wasn’t the big guns — not the big Black Dog my mother suffered from. I was clever at keeping it hidden, tucked away behind my writing room doors, but it certainly felt dramatic enough to have at times affected my relationships, my kids, my career.  A feeling that things would always be against you, that bad luck would always came around, or as my friend Philip once wrote as a repeated refrain in one of his witty songs ‘ Come on, Come on, most things will always turn out wrong.’

        Like the time I travelled all the way to Italy for a music festival. The rehearsal with the Italian jazz pianist went so well, all the other musicians in the room congratulated us and said how wonderful our music was. On the night there was a great crowd in the village square, pressing up to the front of the outdoor stage — nonnas and nonnos, mamas and papas, young people, kids and grand kids. The act before us got a rousing reception and just as I began singing, it started to rain — lightly at first, then a little heavier. The crowd scattered, and even though I knew rain was the reason, I was left with the feeling that they’d just turned their backs and walked away. By the end of the song there were only a few people left. Later, one of them, an important person in the community and a highly accomplished musician, told me he was moved to tears by my music. Sadly, I didn’t really hear him, my shoulders sagged and I thought, yep, there it is again, The Thwarting.

        Too much thinking too early in the day, I decide as I settle down to write up my morning’s activities.  While flipping through the Adler biography to double-check for any mention of Hanoi street names, I come across the account of an incident that occurred in Hanoi in young Marguerite’s life. MD was four years of age when an eleven year old boy attending her mother’s boarding school invited her to visit a secret cubby he’d built with bits of wood down by the lake. When they got there he took out his penis and asked her to hold it. It was soft and warm and together they stroked it until suddenly he stopped.  She wrote that rather than feel shame, she felt curious, but after innocently telling her mother, he was expelled from the school. Only then she felt guilt. Her mother told her to forget it ever happened. MD didn’t forget, she just didn’t mention it again.

This wasn’t the kind of detail I’d gone looking for and certainly deflates the innocent fantasy I’d indulged earlier of Little Miss Marguerite out for a walk with her nanny. 

        The green and white striped balcony awning flaps in the breeze. A crow hops about on the roof next door. Cooking smells waft up from the street reminding me how much I am looking forward to lunch.

       

Nguyen Thi Hong Ngat picks me up in her little red car and we drive for about twenty minutes through the traffic-filled streets to her house. Born in 1950, the same year as me, Ngat has short dark hair and a gentle but business-like demeanor. She tells me she has written and directed numerous films and I find out later she was a former director of the Vietnam Cinematography Department and heads up her own film company. She has also written plays and published a number of poetry books. I am already in awe of this softly spoken dynamo who apologises that she has only just received her driver’s licence. She handles the traffic chaos like a pro and when we arrive in her neighbourhood, parks her car in a small street so we can walk the rest of the way through narrow laneways to her tall gate.

          We step into a small courtyard shaded by a single leafy tree with a spindly trunk. A skinny, three or four storey house towers above a wide, many-shoe-adorned entrance that opens onto a high ceilinged living room with heavy carved wooden furniture and a low coffee table. Off the living room is a simple kitchen and in the other corner, steep stairs wind heavenward.

        I hand over my package from her son-in-law in Australia. Her nephew isn’t there today but when he is I know the sparkly Nike shoes will dominate the line up near the door. With Ngat’s minimal English and my non-existent Vietnamese we still manage to communicate and she has invited her daughter over to keep the conversation flowing.  Chi, who is in her early 30’s, is also a film writer and director. Married with two small children, she has the fine-boned beauty of Vietnamese women and while she doesn’t really need to work (she also writes and directs), has kept her job as a stewardess for Vietnam Airlines. Later she tells me she likes the independence and the time out it gives her from domestic life. Like mother, like daughter, for when her children were still young, Ngat went off to study cinema in the Soviet Union and was gone for seven years. Chi and her siblings lived with their grandmother until she returned.

        We keep talking over a tasty lunch of salty chicken, dipping the pieces in fish sauce then rolling them in salt while sipping on bamboo shoot broth. Ngat’s husband, also a writer and a literary critic, has sent his apologies — he is not feeling well, and a tray is dispatched to his study at the top of the house.

        After lunch Ngat asks if I am sleepy and would I like to take a nap. It strikes me as an odd offer until I realise, of course, it’s siesta time. I decline, but she excuses herself and Chi and I settle into the carved chairs in the living room and continue talking. Although we have just met and our age difference is vast, our conversation moves effortlessly across many topics —writing, work, love, marriage, children, creativity —it feels just like catching up with an old friend. Ngat phones again from high in the house asking if I am tired yet. I am, but insist I am fine. Chi and I talk on into the afternoon, sharing intimacies you might with a stranger on a plane, promising to stay in touch but knowing soon we will be gone to far flung parts of the world.

         Later Ngat reappears, refreshed and energetic, ready to take me back to my hotel. We put our shoes on and are heading through the gate when her husband calls out, waving cheerily from a window high above. If I’m not mistaken, even from a distance, I sense a twinkle in his eye.  

        We drive back through the late afternoon traffic. The streets around my hotel are busy again with vendors setting up for dinner-time. The air is filled with the scent of aniseed, roast duck, fresh coriander and mint. As I get out of her little red car Ngat says,

‘Let’s meet again soon, there are some other writers I want you to meet.’ 

          I thank her for the delicious lunch and I tell her how thrilled I was to meet her and her family and be invited into their home.

         ‘ I’m thinking of taking a tour to Halong Bay,’ I tell her, ‘ but I would love to meet them on my return.’

       Back in my room a late siesta seems like a good idea now. I settle down with the books Ngat has given me. Most are in Vietnamese but one is a bilingual anthology — The Defiant Muse, Vietnamese Feminist Poets, From Antiquity to the Present, with a foreword by American short story writer Grace Paley, another of my literary heroes.

Paley was a mother, writer and dedicated anti-war protester who wrote short stories of everyday life in New York City. The titles of some of her collections might tell you why I love her work: The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Later the Same Day, Leaning Forward. In 1986 Paley was part of a Pen International Conference (and protest) in New York that MD was invited to, but didn’t attend. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall if they had met.

This collaboration between American writer, Lady Borton and The Women’s Publishing House in Hanoi is an impressive undertaking. Ngat has a poem in the anthology and from her bio in the back I learn that she is as well known for her poetry as for her films. In 1968, the same year I was acting in an anti Vietnam War musical called Viet Rock by the American playwright, Megan Terry, Ngat started her career as an actor performing for North Vietnamese troops in cheo theatre, an informal style of musical folk theatre that dates back to the tenth century. She began publishing poetry in the 70’s before her long study stint in Moscow.

        While I was writing plays and musicals for touring community theatre companies (one about women farmers toured rural Australia), she published short stories and novels about the problems women face in Vietnam. Her most well-known play, Flying to Paradise is a modern drama that deals with heroin addiction and has had over 400 performances by theatre troupes all over Vietnam. While Ngat’s career has been far more illustrious and public than mine, I find it so interesting that from such differing political and cultural environments we have taken similar paths, writing across a number of genres on contemporary issues facing women.

          I drift back to the conversation I had with Chi and find myself imagining a dialogue, maybe a play or film script about an older French woman (a Duras-like figure or even Duras herself), who takes a flight from Perth to Paris via Vietnam.

In the depths of the night she can’t sleep and becomes demanding of the young Vietnamese stewardess. When all the passengers are comatose, mouths gaping, legs tangled, the stewardess sits down in the spare seat next to her. They get talking and share secrets as dark as the night they travel through. * The set would be simple, just a line of airline seats, MD sits in the middle, another person who has the window seat sleeps through the entire play. The stewardess takes the aisle seat and has to get up every so often to attend to various passengers. The dim lighting of an airplane cabin at night, occasional puffs of aircon vapour, the slow steady drone of the engine noise — I can see it all.

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* When MD flew she always liked to talk to the person sitting next to her. If they spoke back, it made her feel safe. (Practicalities, p105).