Soup and Lice

Across the street from where I work, there’s a café. I often go there for lunch. It’s a nice place; quite well done. Okay, it might not be exactly how you or I might do it, but, nevertheless, quite nice. Like most lunch places, they offer a set menu. So, I have a sit down meal of meat, vegetables, rice, soup, free-flow cold tea and wifi. I know how absolutely ordinary I made that sound, but actually, the food is always really good. And the service is always really good. Again, maybe not exactly how I would do it, but, you know, well done.

After only my fifth visit there, I had the waitress going through my hair looking for bugs. She did this while I ate my lunch. That’s fast, I hear you say. Actually, I just wanted to draw her attention to the mess of a job I had made of cutting my own hair, but she mistook my hand signals for lice or something, so, as I attended to my chicken’s leg and sipped my soup, she spent some minutes going through my hair looking for small animals. We have been pals ever since. It’s just so hard to find service like that in other countries. Actually, there is a restaurant in Bangkok where the (male) diners are not allowed to use their hands to eat. Apparently all the knife, fork and spoon action is handled by the waitress; as are the trips to the toilet. This, I guess, beats my lice-hunting waitress story hands down. Not that the service is necessarily very good in Vietnam. At least not in a uniform-across-the-board sort of way. In fact, it is very hit and miss, and this seems to bear absolutely no relationship to the price of the meal; I’ve had the best service in the cheapest of places.

For me though, this episode illustrates something even more important, something that I find refreshing in the Vietnamese generally: that they tend not to be overly precious about such things as bodies and all the little functionality things that come with having one. I can’t tell you how many times I‘ve tried to get an Australian waitress onto my scalp, to go through my hair, but it’s just no dice (no lice, no dice…as they say). Vietnamese women, on the other hand – I’m assuming this also applies to Vietnamese men – seem nonplussed by all body-related issues; nothing fazes them. For instance, if a Vietnamese woman is menstruating over soup…wait…if a woman that you happen to be out for lunch with, and are eating soup, is menstruating, she will tell you straight out, often working it into the conversation in a completely unexpected way like, “I’m having my woman day today, I think I’ll have the pork.” Sure. Okay.

This is all well and good, but it’s not what I set out to say, and what is missing so far in this little soliloquy, is a gripe. So, here’s the gripe: in this café, while I’m dismembering my chicken and sipping my soup, and the waitress is delving around in my hair and my lunch companion is menstruating, I am listening to a CD which could only be titled Mr. Nguyen Plays Instrumental Versions of All Time Foreign Favourites on an Electronic Piano With Catchy Drum Machine Rhythms. It’s a collection of pretty much every song I’ve ever disliked, but the rhythms are somehow stilted and Mr. Nguyen has worked in little electronic handclaps at every turn. Songs like, Hey Mr. Postman – a song that I particularly hate, mainly because of its chirpiness and the fact that it’s about a postman – done with piano, drum machine and faux brass. Hideous.

This kind of musical mayhem seems to be quite common in cafes in Saigon, which is a shame because, in every other way, they so often tick all the boxes. I wonder if the customers like Instrumental Versions of All Time Foreign Favourites on an Electronic Piano With Catchy Drum Machine Rhythms. I wonder if they care. I wonder if they even hear it. I know that I need to learn to block it out. I know this. The problem is, that it gets between me and my book: “It was on a July evening in 1805 and the speaker was the well known Anna Pavlovna, maid of honour and confidante of…Mr. Postman…look and see…if there’s a letter, a letter for me…”

But, it’s difficult to complain about the music when you’ve just finished a three-course lunch, left seventy-three dishes behind to be washed and have been deloused; all for the very reasonable price of two-dollars.