Xuan is a handsome teenager who can be seen from our hotel lobby for most of the day. He smiles constantly for his brain is quite damaged from dioxin, as are the brains of his uncle and sister who live with him down the lane. Xuan paces, stares at the unending traffic, turns around and faces another direction, still smiling and then gets ready to pace again. He has remembered me and waves each time before turning back to stare at the cycles and cars, still smiling with a secret delight.
Vietnam has well in excess of a million or so similarly affected by dioxin. Huge areas in the middle of the country are still contaminated, where having a deformed child is the risk with each pregnancy. Hanoi's streetscene is the living museum to dioxin and to the resentment felt towards Westerners. The smiling Xuan is my outstanding memory of Hanoi, forever delighted by the sight of moving traffic.
We walked past Xuan last night and into the jam-packed streets in order to see the water puppets. When Janet has recovered from her trauma, she may write about them. On the way home, at the crowded market, someone slit open her cotton shoulderbag and relieved her of the burden of carrying an Oroton wallet, credit cards, cash and prescription glasses. We did not notice the loss for about five minutes, at which point, Janet came close to being sick from the shock.
Today, the cards having been cancelled last night, we had to attend the police station responsible for the night market area, in order to report the loss. This took over four hours as we visited one police station after the other, each pushing us towards a different station. Nobody could be bothered with us - tourists were trouble.
At the last police station, ironically the closest to our hotel, the captain was playing draughts in the squalour of the station, which possibly doubled as a garbage bin when unoccupied. He scowled, leant back in his collapsible chair and barked in Vietnamese to the poor cyclo driver who had brought us to him. Someone from our hotel had to appear to fill out the forms in Vietnamese. The cylo driver hung his head and nervously wrung his hands. The captain was not pleased at having his game of draughts interrupted by stupid foreigners who could not look after their belongings. We felt the anger.
A petite girl from our hotel arrived by scooter about 20 minutes later and, with remarkable bravery, strode in and showed no fear as she took instructions from this bad-tempered uniformed man who was as unpleasant a man as ever I want to meet. Later, she confessed, it was close to terrifying for her, as the poorly paid police are renowned for corruption and they now had her name and address. It's the wish of all Vietnamese to be invisible to authority and we had unwittingly exposed her to police attention.
An hour passed and finally all the documents were done and stamped. Janet was left in a fragile state and we walked back to our hotel with the petite girl. In all, the exercise took most of today, lots of talking last night until the early hours, and much soul-searching for what had gone wrong. We were disturbed by it all. Xuan would have just smiled and turned to check out the traffic again, not comprehending a thing. In fact, I'm not so sure I understand what happened myself.
