This past weekend the English center where I work, Oxford English UK Vietnam, moved. We moved from 49 Thai Ha Street to #6 Lane 28, Nguyen Hong Street. If people ask me where that is, I tell them it’s near Kentucky Fried Chicken on Huynh Thuc Khang Street, about 2 minutes from 49 Thai Ha. Same teachers, same Immersion English program, but a new building. I’ve moved a lot in my life, and moving is always crazy – hard work, things break, other things get lost, and muscles you’ve been ignoring for a long time get a painful workout.
I’ve been involved in major business moves twice, and I’ve moved my home … wow … more times than I can count. The biggest move, of course, was from New York to Hanoi, but in that move I left almost everything behind – I just packed one big suitcase, since at that time I hadn’t known I wouldn’t be coming back. I still miss a lot of stuff I left behind in New York, especially my books. I had a huge library of books back in New York, and I miss them. The rest of my stuff – desks, and beds, and chairs, and TVs, – was nothing special. For me, the new place is always more interesting than the old place, and I don’t experience much nostalgia for places I once lived and worked.
Moving, I guess, is a little like giving birth. You slowly watch the empty space you’re soon to be occupying transform as the furniture and the pictures and the computers, and finally the people, all start showing up.
People will ask me why we decided to move the school, and they may even suspect that the move was attached to some kind of hardship for me and worry about me. It’s not necessary; the move was entirely my idea, and not attached to any hardship worse than noise. Yep. Noise. We moved the center because of noise, more than for any other reason.
Many people will likely suspect that part of the reason for the move was the expense of maintaining such a large building on a street that’s as popular as Thai Ha and, of course, that was part of it. The rental rates on Thai Ha Street were quite high, and the building could support 12 classrooms (five of which might be unusable, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment). 12 classrooms means you need 12 full-time teachers (or an army of part-time teachers), and finding 12 highly qualified full-time Americans and Brits, especially those who intend to stay in Hanoi for a long time, is a very difficult challenge. One contributing factor to my decision was the expense then, another the staffing issues, and the third, and main reason … the classrooms I mentioned that might be unusable.
Why unusable? Well, first of all it’s true that Thai Ha Street has man problems – the traffic is horrible, it floods in heavy rains, the power goes out often (especially in the summer), and the traffic also generates quite a bit of noise. In fact, though, none of those things really bothered me. They all seemed a part of life in Hanoi. Especially the floods; I loved the floods. Standing on the first floor, watching the water level rise, wondering how all the students would ever escape – that was good, Thai Ha fun! I’ll never forget one occasion when the street flooded to waist height and none of the Dylans and SHs and other big, expensive, automatic scooters could move. I had to drive a student home through waist-deep water on my unstoppable, amphibious, Future Neo. It was like a scene out of a movie, trying to keep the bike upright as water washed over my legs, wondering when the engine would cut out, and having no idea what kinds of holes or bumps or other deadly objects might be in front of me under all of that dark water. It’s a memory I’ll never forget, but we didn’t move because of the floods or the traffic. We moved because of a different kind of noise.
There are now five different shops adjacent to or facing Oxford English UK’s old building on Thai Ha Street that have placed large speakers out front on the street, and those speakers blast music out into the street … and into our center. The noise was especially bad in my office, which was on the second floor and faced the street. For the first five years I worked for the center, those speakers (and those shops, for the most part) weren’t there. Perhaps their appearance represents progress, but it’s definitely the downside of progress. Now, the noise there can start at any time, and when it does start, it hammers any education-oriented thoughts right out of my brain.
Of course, I reached out to the managers of all of those shops, told them our study and working schedule, asked them to recognize that they had a neighbor – with seniority on the street – whose business was teaching and thus depended on peace and quiet for success. They didn’t care. They believed, rightly or wrongly – it’s not for me to say – that the best way to sell the most laptops and mobile phones was to blast music into the street, so that passing motorbike drivers would turn their heads to see where all the noise was coming from, and notice their shops. They didn’t care that their music might disturb anyone nearby who might be trying to read a book, listen to a CD, or try to learn how to pronounce the word “thistle.”
Thus, the classroom on each floor that faced the street in the Thai Ha building was rendered unusable by the noise. And I found that instead of writing lessons or reading new textbooks and journal articles, I was spending all my time trying to figure out the rhyme and reason behind the noise. At what time would the music start? How loud would it last today? How many shops would play their music at the same time? Who chose the songs they were playing, and why on Earth did they choose such terrible music? Why did they think their actual customers, the ones would actually walk through their front doors, needed to be subjected to a virtual wall of noise before being able to do any shopping? And what about the little old ladies and the newborn babies in the houses nearby? What did they think of “Baby Hit Me One More Time” thundering through their windows? I even considered putting on a ninja-suit and running around cutting the wires to all those speakers and trying to escape before the security guards could catch me. Needless to say, that would not have been an action becoming an English teacher.
I actually set up a fan, pointed at my window, that I would leave on the highest power setting, because I found the droning of the fan blocked some of the noise coming through my window. Of course, visitors often thought I was crazy. I wonder how many of my students thought to themselves, “Stupid American. He doesn’t know a fan should point INTO the room.”
As the time to sign the new rental contract for the building drew nearer (the old contract ended on 31 October), I just couldn’t find the strength to sign a document that would subject me to at least five more years of sonic torture, in an expensive building, where three of the classrooms were impossible to use due to noise. And so, in the end, and rather late given how long such things take to arrange and accomplish, I decided to move.
It may not be the wisest business decision I’ve ever made. After all, Thai Ha Street is a major thoroughfare and Lane 28 of Nguyen Hong Street is a tiny, quiet, little-traveled lane that’s much harder to find. But … it seems to be easier to get to, and less likely to turn into a lake when it rains. And, most importantly, it seems quieter.
We’re doing our best to make the new school better than the old school, with classrooms that are more comfortable, a bigger cafe, and a nicer environment for immersing yourself in English. We’re going to be supporting the Vietnam Environmental Protection fund, contributing to the fight against global warming through charitable contributions, recycling, etc. I think it’s going to be a great place to work and hang out, and since I spend pretty much all of my time at the school that’s a good thing for me, too. Last week, I saw a toad hopping along the street. There are no toads on Thai Ha Street. They all moved away, because of the noise.
In the end, I guess I believe that we will be more successful at the business of teaching English in the new location than we ever were in the old. Only time will tell if I’m right. Still, I think that it’s the teachers and the education program that make a school, far more than its location.
If you happen to live near Nguyen Hong Street, don’t worry. You’ll never wake up at 8 a.m. in the morning, or have your dinner interrupted, by huge speakers blasting the announcement, “Oxford English UK’s Immersion English training is now located at #6 Lane 28, Nguyen Hong Street!” followed by endless repetitions of the earth-shatteringly bad song, “I’m so lucky, lucky, lucky.” I would never do that to you.
I’m sure that there will be times when I miss the old school on Thai Ha Street, especially when a young student unaware of all the factors I discussed here looks up at me and says, “Why did you move? Thai Ha Street is a big, famous street.” Change is never without some pain, but change is also a big part of life. And if my life experience is any proof, then it seems that change is always for the better.
