大咖福利影院

The sound of silence

Hanoi is never quiet. By the time I wake, the motorbikes have already begun their long argument with the morning, the street sellers are calling, and somewhere below a neighbour is doing something loud and cheerful with a hammer. I have lived here almost ten years now, and I love it. The noise is the sound of a city utterly, gloriously alive.

And yet, if you asked me what I miss most about home, I would not say the sunshine. I live in more sun than I know what to do with. I would say the silence.

Not silence exactly 鈥� the gulls would have something to say about that 鈥� but the particular hush of our house in Wales, the one that faces the beach. The sea doing its slow work in the background. A quiet so complete it is almost deafening 鈥� the kind you can hear yourself think in. I did not know, when I lived inside it, that I would one day stand in a hot Hanoi morning and ache for it.

Robert Browning wrote his Home-Thoughts, from Abroad while sitting in the Italian sun, longing not for somewhere grander but for the ordinary, drizzly English spring he had left behind. I understand him rather better now than I did at school. Home, it turns out, is rarely the postcard. It is the small, unglamorous, particular thing that happens to be yours.

For me it is the Lake District every year 鈥� usually, it must be said, in the rain. We go all the same. There is a certain British genius for enjoying a holiday while being quietly soaked through, and I would not swap those grey, dripping walks for all the blue skies in Asia.

Because here is the thing I have slowly come to understand, sitting this far from it all: I do not really miss the places. I miss the people who are in them. The beach in Wales matters because of who is in the house. The Lake District matters because of who is walking beside me, complaining fondly about the weather. The silence I long for is really the quiet of being among my grandchildren 鈥� a peace that has nothing to do with how loud the room is.

That, I think, is what no one tells you about living abroad. You imagine you are leaving a place. You are not. You are leaving a set of people, and carrying the shape of them with you wherever you go.

So where is home now, after all these years? The honest answer is that I belong a little to both and entirely to neither. Hanoi is my life. Wales is my heart. And I have made a sort of peace with being a man with his feet in one country and his memory in another.

If you are reading this somewhere in Vietnam, far from wherever your own silence lives, I suspect you know exactly what I mean.

More next month.

Brian Harrison Spence

Financial Advisor to the Hanoi Expat Community