How to live in Hanoi - a dated story set in 2002AD
On renting a house in Vietnam's capital the old fashioned way.
MY FRIEND AND I JUST WANTED TO RENT A HOUSE.
We figured it’d be a straightforward affair.
But the real estate agent, a French expat, wasn’t convinced.
Convinced by us, that is.
We weren’t exactly fresh off the boat in Hanoi.
I mean, my housemate and I.
We knew the drill.
Which was:
A Vietnamese member of staff would soon give us a tour of oddly furnished houses, frequently and generously referred to as villas that have been carefully or not so carefully chosen according to your budget and preference for location (“Didn’t I say ‘no to places near the Daewoo’?”, “Yes sir, but this is a very beautiful villa…”)
Now, we weren’t quite bottom-of-the-barrel clients.
We were the next level up.
That’s probably why we weren’t ushered into the still-plush-enough French period villa, where the expat-run agency operated.
Instead we were invited to enter an adjacent room, a room with no air-con, and very basic furniture – a desk, a set of chairs, and… nothing else.
It was more local People’s Committee in its aesthetic, if you know what I mean. A little more [lowers voice to a whisper] communist...
That didn’t bother us.
We knew we weren’t to be getting the UN-salary treatment.
All we wanted to do was rent a house for the princely sum of $400 ($450 tops).
As I already said, this would be a straightforward affair in our minds.
But the agent, well, he needed assurances.
Did we know how to live in Hanoi?
I mean, he didn’t say that exactly.
What did he say?
We thought he was just making small talk at first. Killing time while his assistant fetched a printout, so our tour of oddly furnished abodes could begin.
The agency’s reputation was always a concern for him, I remember him telling us — he also mentioned his commission-based salary, while casting a wary eye over our ragtag attire, as if he were going out on a limb for the likes of us.
Without saying anything to each other, my friend and I had the same thought.
“Are we being screened?”
And we kinda were.
We were also to be schooled.
You see, renting a hypothetical Hanoi house in a hypothetical Hanoi neighbourhood, where a proud, if imagined community, awaited us was not a straightforward affair.
Not in the eyes of the agent anyway.
Sure, we wouldn’t be able to blend in, but we had to make an effort to coexist.
Like a theatre director talking to a pair of amateur thesps, he explained how we’d play the role while miming certain actions for emphasis.
We’d have to smoke cigarettes and imitate local facial expressions at the nearest tea and pipe stand to our hypothetical house.
While sat there sipping on a bitter green tea we didn’t want, we’d befriend the anh (older brother), chú (young uncle) and bác (older uncle), trading cigarettes and how-are-yous. But we wouldn’t say ‘khoẻ không?’ (how are you?); no, no no. We’d say ‘ăn cơm chưa?’ (have you had lunch) or, if night had fallen, ‘các bạn say chưa?!’ (Is everyone drunk already?!).
By morning we’d walk the hypothetical laneways and greet the ông (gramps) and bà (grandmas) with polite hullos in the local vernacular.
We’d breakfast at the nearest phở place and compliment the cô (aunty) on her cooking.
Generally, we’d just respect the local culture and frequent the local businesses.
I can’t remember what we said to all of this.
Thinking back now, I wish one of us had said, “So what I think you’re saying is we shouldn’t move in to this hypothetical neighbourhood and behave like a pair of unfriendly arseholes?”
But we probably just nodded our heads, and said, “sure, sure, sure”, “yeah, yeah, yeah” until the agent appeared satisfied that he had fulfilled his duty by informing us of our social contract and obligations as foreign renters. With the ‘leçon de Civilisatrice’ complete, one of the agent’s Vietnamese colleagues arrived with a freshly printed shortlist and the usual tour of oddly furnished villas began. (“Um, em oi, why are we driving to the Daewoo?”).
If memory serves, later in the same week my housemate – channeling his inner Del Boy (he was from a town nearish London) – ended up revisiting the only half-decent gaff we were shown that day to get a better deal. The landlord would save money in the short-term (because there would be no commission, usually one months rent) so he readily agreed.
My pal also had one request. He asked the landlord to move the family altar from the top floor of their adjacent-but-connected house, so he could sleep right beside a large rooftop terrace – this also enabled us to sublet the extra bedroom to seven different people in a year, never telling anyone it was the noisiest room in Hanoi.
I know, right. What a pair of arseholes.
But it all turned out to be pretty straightforward.
That was the main thing.