White Rose by Genevieve Flintham

The women are thin. Their arms are all sinew and lean stuffing. They use deft thumbs to whittle a rose from a spod of wet, ground rice. They fill it with mutilated prawns and coriander. In the West, we sometimes detest coriander; I saw an article in the free newspaper on the tube about anti-coriander tattoos. They were growing in popularity.

People are very passionately anti-. Next to the offending herb were garbs about marmite. The marmite-haters don’t ink their skin as much.

They’re making White Rose dumplings.

It’s a delicacy in Vietnam’s port city of Hoi An; droves of camera-wielding tourists mingle under weeping lanterns in the alleyway outside, glad to avoid a spot of warm rain, shuddering when a leak drips from a lit crimson balloon. The birds delight and cause smiles, even though they’re caged. We look away from the bars as if they’re inconvenient for us.

I’m wearing black trainers. They were a mistake. Sweat climbs between my toes and clings onto the dirt that lingers there, delighted to find something more porous than skin.

Birdsong can make you as happy as a pay rise. That’s something else I gleaned from the free newspaper. I would sit on the dusty underground seats all day, sometimes. I consumed all of the free news that I could find. When I patted the arse shape on the faded orange felt, clouds of skin would rise, nearly enough to make a new human.

A lady looks up at me. Her face is hard. The older women have harder faces here; they’re a product of war and heartbreak, the latter a pithy descriptor. A war that they won, and yet. Distress is rolled carefully into layers of skin and pressed firmly with two wet fingers: seal it in, don’t let it leak from the mouth.

It’s the eyes that escape.

I once read that the human face is capable of 7,000 different emotions. I was finally on the way to a job interview and it seemed like a sign from the lightning bolt in the sky; don’t forget to control your face, control your emotions. I sat, unyielding, below spotlights that threatened to rip me apart, making bold claims, rejection already leaking from my eyes. My face might be hard as nails, but eyes are the great, twin betrayers.

I wondered whether apathy was one of the 7,000. I wondered whether psychopaths owned the ability to shirk the natural facial currents. I turned my eyes into the glossy glass magnets that are sewn onto the front of puppets.

My interviewers watched me carefully, their seats a foot taller than mine, their eyes looking down the barrel of my nose. They thought I was impenetrable. I have the job.

She looks away. Her lips press together, unimpressed.

Another lady makes vegetarian dumplings. She has it easier; her comrades scoop pulverised crustaceans with their bare hands, their fingers never pale, their skin stained orange right up to their wrists. When the lady with the eyes wipes her hand on a tatty cloth napkin that’s been strewn across her lap, the terracotta of her fingernails cracks.

The vegetarian dumplings require no such sacrifice; purple and white coleslaw is heaped into cases and twisted closed. A tinge of aubergine lifts her palms. Prawn entrails litter the table around them.

“How… what hours do they work?” I ask, hesitancy causing me to act like a fool, covering my embarrassment with a self-effacing smile that doesn’t reach my eyes.

The smell is overwhelming. Do they go home smelling like this? How do you scrub such odours from curtains, from bedding, from clothes? Or do they just concede; smelling like day-old shellfish is the last of their worries, perhaps.

“13 hours a day,” is the prompt response from the madam. She’s been in the business for sixty-five years; she looks at me under the white feathers of her eyebrows. Bules, they called us in Bali. I don’t know whether the Vietnamese have a nickname for tourists. I once read in the paper that the Cornish refer to tourists as ‘Emmets’.

‘Emmets Go Home’ was written on banners outside of Padstow one summer. They were willing to sacrifice tourism for the phenomena of community, even if it destroyed their local economy.

The queue outside is yielding.

“We’ve been waiting for twenty-odd minutes,” an American drawls to the madam. He has a look of apology; he doesn’t want to be a bother, but twenty minutes is twenty minutes.

The women sense a mood change in the madam before I do. They work slightly faster, their supple hands a malleable flow of waxen cases and mashed innards: stuff and close, stuff and close. They make over a thousand White Rose dumplings every day. Around us, small wooden tables overflow with tourists who were lucky enough to get seats, who stuff their gullets with delicately steamed flesh, who open and close their mouths too quickly.

She ignores him.

“And… and do they work every day?” I ask, swallowing. I don’t want to ask; I want to pretend that I’m not standing above them and watching them sitting on floor cushions, and I also want to pretend that I didn’t find the toilet a disgrace; no toilet roll and a small hand towel with long stains, creating a brown watercolour map of Africa. I imagined retrieving some cleaning supplies and cleaning the tiles myself, scraping off a decade’s worth of fish-scoffing visitors, feeling useful, perhaps garnering a look of gratitude from the lady with the hard lines and the napkinned legs.

I swallow. I realise that I am parched. I look around; nearby is a fridge filled with gaudy, bright cans. The glass of the fridge is speckled with condensation; drips run down the door and muddle the bright Western warnings.

I look back at the women. The lady stuffing the vegetarian dumplings raises a coated hand to her face. Wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. They are all glazed.

“No, just 6 days a week,” the madam says. She narrows her eyes and I worry that I’ve given her ideas.

A few of the women glance at me; they understand the basic premise of my questioning, even though I’m lumbering along in English in a country where I’ve learned only ‘Hello’ and ‘Delicious’. I can’t manage either very well. ‘Delicious’ is ‘Ngon’, said through the nose, which is unfamiliar and difficult for me. I have been substituting it with ‘Non’, which, given Vietnam’s history of French colonialisation and their surprising continual dabbling in the French language, serves to get me in trouble.

“How is your food?”

“Non,” I say, struggling.

“6 days a week, 13 hours a day.” My tongue summarises this, only serving to repeat what the madam has said, but it sounds different coming out of my lips. The words carry no weight in her dialect; they become Westernised and horrific in my throat. I want to stuff my tongue down my gullet and swallow until it turns to mush.

The madam doesn’t have time to think me a moron. She glances at the money in the street, where expensive Japanese cameras are being damaged under drips from lanterns brought over by the Chinese, where American men complain about the wait time while leaning against the crumbling French architecture.

“You want to buy or not?” the madam asks, putting a future on my head that I can’t try and imagine.

I scroll through the Economics sections of past newspapers, trying to work out whether my motive is a ‘good’ thing. What is ‘good’? Importing and selling Vietnamese-produced White Rose would make a killing in the nice restaurants, in the expensive supermarkets. Much like champagne, it means nothing if it isn’t made here; it is one of two delicacies that are famously from Hoi An. The other, cao lao noodles, are staged for my return later in the year. For now, I have only one job, and my throat is dry and my face is wet and my toes have developed needles in their bed of salt water.

The ladies don’t sing. I wish they would. The air is filled with foreign accents and the rustle of notes: one million Vietnamese dong provided for a dish that only costs forty thousand. The madam doesn’t like giving change; she shouts at the customer in Vietnamese. He looks at me as if I am the manager. I look away.

“So?” The madam wants an answer from me; she sees me as an opportunity for a new way of life. The big businessman with my hard face and my soft hands, my credit terms and my impractical shoes.

My boss didn’t send me over to answer questions. I was a bold young face intended to haggle. The Balinese had conceded family recipes under my gaze, made up of perhaps only 5 facial expressions. That was going to be easier; we could reproduce the Balinese recipes closer to home. It wasn’t as feasible with the White Rose dumplings: provenance. Provenance, my managers constantly exclaimed; profit over provenance, but certainly, provenance where the price is right.

They speak in italics, a lot.

I am not supposed to engage in reasonable chatter; I am not here to answer questions.

Questions are owned by the madam; I am only an empty shell, stuffed with newspaper fodder and a desire to look away. I think of my new bedroom in my shared house in Wandsworth. Finally, I have a bed.

“Yes, but we need to talk price,” I say, my tongue not mine, the birds pecking it until I sound as if I have a lisp. They are not canaries but dainty things, with long black tails. There is a bird’s nest in the actual restaurant, a clog of brown mug and black guts. Every so often, a large mother bird sweeps through the restaurant, past the cages, to feed her young. Tiny beaks emerge, grateful to live another hour.

“I’ll give you a very good price,” the madam promises.

“I’ve got some figures in mind,” I mumble, wishing that we could move. My shadow causes a thick line of darkness to split the production table in two; the wood is so low that even my legs are visible. I sway slightly and notice that I can overtake the bowls of pulp, the careful blobs of dumpling dough, the flat palms of the ladies who turn the snowballs into pancakes.

“How much you want to pay?” the madam says, and I slip my hand into the innards of my jacket, where everything is damp. I wonder briefly if it is blood. My hand is shaking; I’m too dehydrated. This job isn’t good for me. It is impossible to dress acceptably in hot countries; I wish I could wear a vest and shorts. My arms are too scrawny though; everyone would laugh. The women in front of me have sleeves that are pushed up; some show biceps that gather and flow.

“Show me.” The madam takes the folded paper from my hand. The paper is translucent on one side; printed figures reflect backwards atrocities as she opens it. I have let my eyes grow wide; I snap them back into position.

My rent is affordable. I had to lie about having an address when I got the job, but I let HR know the lines of my new residence on my first payday. I had to use my friend’s computer to edit a few bank statements to get the address. I had to steal a few bags of clothes from the charity shop door early in the morning, to have something to wear. I discarded the sweaty frocks and tattered bras.

I was paranoid about smelling. I visited Boots in the station every morning, to spray testers onto my striped shirt. The lingering smell of the previous owner’s laundry powder kept me going for the first week, and I would press each plastic button through the embroidered buttonhole feeling, for the first time, powerful.

“This is not enough,” the madam says. I knew she would. I lift an eyebrow; we have a series of looks that we learn at work. None involve the lips unless it is to press them closed. The women in front of me start muttering to each other. They look up at me as if I have become interesting.

Unnerved, I maintain a pasty-faced disinterest. The American man has finally been given a table; he shouts a drinks order at the waitress. The fridge is opened; a blast hits us. One of the women shuts her eyes, briefly.

They are wearing earthy tabards and cotton pumps. Apart from the lady with the battle lines, the lady who has trained herself to show no emotion, they do not have napkins. They wipe stained hands upon their legs. Their tabards sever their necks from their heads with neat red stitches.

“It’s this price or nothing,” I say to the madam, as I perch in the cage. The mother bird returns to feed her chicks. The other birds pierce my skin. I let them.