Emma McCarthy and Mary Hartnett - Hanoi, Vietnam
Vietnam’s Patient 17 is a 26-year old woman. She’s an heiress and a socialite, and therefore not a stranger to star-studded events (she attended the Met Gala twice). She was at London Fashion Week, and then Milan, and then Paris, where she met up with her sister who also tested positive for the virus. By the time fashion month ended and the pair came home to Vietnam, the coronavirus outbreak in Italy was already fully established.
A photo taken by Mary in Hanoi less than a month before leaving Vietnam
Emma McCarthy, who moved from Ireland to Hanoi in September 2019, has an intimate knowledge of patient 17’s movements, from the first cough to when she got her results. Not because she knew her personally, or because they ran in the same glamorous circles, but because her private information spread like wildfire on Facebook.
“I can tell you her name, her Instagram account,” Emma tells me. “People published the police documents of where she’d been and who she met up with. The information just went insane.”
People were angry. After Patient 16 recovered, Vietnam was clear of the COVID-19 outbreak for a few days, before Patient 17 brought it back. Then came the vilification online. People blamed her upper-class background and jetsetter lifestyle, her visiting various European countries at the same time that the number of Covid-19 cases were exploding. “How dumb could a rich daddy girl be,” one tweet said. As more and more cases in the country came from people who had travel history in Europe, anti-foreigner sentiment in the country became more and more apparent.
“Because I live where a lot of expats are, there isn’t a lot of that,” Emma explains. “But if you go into the touristy area, I’ve heard my friends saying that they were told to get out of the shop, just to leave. They would be screamed at.” This sentiment was one of the factors why Mary Hartnett, Emma’s best friend, chose to leave the country, while Emma stayed behind.
The pair first came to Vietnam nearly two summers ago, when they were travelling around South-East Asia. They were immediately charmed. “It was our favourite country that we went to,” Mary says. The people, the food, and the sights were enough for them to consider moving, but the good pay and the rich expat community in the country made them stay. The following year, apprehensive about jumping into a masters course, the two followed the magic back to Hanoi. Mary found a job as an editor for a law firm, while Emma is an English teacher, both in a language centre and as a private tutor to a businessman.
A photo taken by Mary in Hanoi less than a month before leaving Vietnam
It was with this businessman that Emma first heard rumblings about a new coronavirus in China. Two to three times a week, the pair would read news articles, mostly to practice the businessman’s fluency. In January, she began noticing that the headlines have shifted from news about Trump and Brexit, to what we know now as the Covid-19 pandemic. She saw the headlines jump from the papers to her reality when she was coming back from Phu Quoc, an island south of Vietnam her and her friends visited at the end of January. “Going through the airport, a lot of people were wearing masks. Mostly white people. Asian people didn’t seem to care too much. Now, it’s the complete opposite. If I was walking down the street and not wearing a mask, I guarantee, a Vietnamese person would shout at me.”
Emma says that she initially didn’t believe the official numbers coming from the government until the explosion of Patient 17’s information on Facebook. “I thought there was no way Vietnam has had 16 cases in 6 weeks, that’s ridiculous,” she says. Although there are a lot of restrictions on the media in Vietnam, Emma says that “when there is news, it’s very difficult for the government to keep it quiet. It might not make the big newspapers, but it’ll be on Facebook.” Indeed, Vietnam is the 7th country with the most Facebook users in the world. Emma acknowledges however that it’s not a fully reliable source of news, and many times she’s had to discern between accurate and false information: “There’s a lot of false posting on Facebook. But there’s usually a grain of truth in there somewhere, so you just figure it out.”
Emma might be able to tolerate this spread of misinformation on Facebook, but for Mary, this added a layer of doubt to already difficult times. Eventually, knowing she could continue her job as editor from abroad, she made the decision to return to Ireland, a full 6 months before she was supposed to. “I left on the Wednesday night. I decided on the Monday night, around 48 hours before I came home,” Mary tells me. “I’ve been quite steadfast in my plan to stay all along, but at the same time, I was listening and entrusting what my parents were saying here [in Ireland].” The deteriorating situation of the pandemic in Europe, the lack of reputable news sources, the changing life in Vietnam, the uncertainty surrounding visa applications; like Emma, Mary didn’t feel ready to leave Vietnam behind. But, she says, “I would have to leave sooner rather than later, and if the [official] advice is to come home at the end of this week, I might as well make the decision quite quickly.”
Emma and Mary, on Mary’s last day in Vietnam
“I definitely don’t feel ready to go and I definitely wouldn’t have left by my own accord at this time,” Emma tells me. “It was always my plan to stay until August.” In the beginning, there was anxiety over whether or not she would be able to support herself through the crisis. “Initially, I freaked out. I was like, I’m going home, I have no job,” she tells me. Her friends were losing their income, with language centres going back on their word that their employees would be paid throughout the crisis. “Suddenly, everyone’s gone and I’m the luckiest out of the bunch, so I’m really grateful for that,” she says.
Emma has held onto her life abroad, refusing to relinquish it to the virus. Watching events unfold at home without her friend's company hasn't been easy however; seeming to be more real to her than any anxieties about Hanoi. “It was kind of hard to see that everyone was extremely stressed,” she says, “but it was like, well, there’s nothing I can do and it wasn’t like there was anything I could do if I was back in Ireland, but it’s a weird thing to be removed from it and watching it unfold and watch everyone panic.”
At the time of writing, Mary is back in Ireland with her family, settling in a life so removed from the one she had known for the last six months. “There’s the process of going through the fact that I have to leave my life in Vietnam, leave my friends, leave Emma,” she says. “I’m mourning that loss of time that I had there.”
On Mary’s last day in Vietnam, sad to be leaving the country a lot sooner than she expected, Emma comforted her by saying that “it’s kind of like going home for Christmas.” “You almost feel like you’re missing out on this some kind of collective experience happening in Ireland,” she tells me. “In the same way that it’s difficult, you can see everyone coming together to support each other, and you’re not part of that either.”
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