"Hanoi runs on motorbikes, egg coffee, and a Kitchen God who reports every minute"
Linh Tran is a Melbourne locksmith's daughter, a lockpicking YouTuber and a green belt on r/lockpicking, and she has flown to Hanoi for Tết carrying her late father's photograph in a red silk pouch, so he can come home to his mother's altar for the first time in thirty-five years. Her grandmother has bought a new blanket and wants her to be the family's first foot of the new year. Linh has told everyone her flight lands on the twenty-ninth. It landed a week early. She is hiding four streets away, in a hostel, trying to get Vietnamese enough not to cry on the doorstep.
The Hanoi Hustle Hostel is a slice of building seven storeys high, run by the formidable Chị Hằng, whose mother sells silver and lì xì envelopes on the ground floor and whose one-eared ginger cat Sếp sleeps on the family altar and is widely believed to be her grandfather. Things started going missing in November, when the smart lockers went in. AirPods, envelopes of New Year money and a bag of cashews have all gone, then a Rolex box. Brad Cutler, a very large Arizonan with a green Submariner and nine-figure deals to talk about, forms a Neighbourhood Watch and decides the thief is Aleksandr Petrov, a quiet Russian who translates pump manuals and does chess problems by the window. Linh saw something orange run off with that box. Nobody asks her.
Linh proves that the military-grade lockers open with a hairpin, and starts to suspect that the cat feeder's chime and the lockers' chime are the same three notes. Tomás, a Chilean chef who won't talk about Patagonia, cooks through all of it, and an off-duty police inspector from Goa, supposedly on holiday, takes a quiet interest. None of it slows the mob. Brad's viral videos accuse Aleksandr of theft and cost the translator the one client he has, and then Brad tears his coat on the roof in front of the family altar. Meanwhile the Hub has scheduled a Giao Thừa rooftop countdown, the bánh chưng drum is boiling all night, and forty-three people are climbing to the roof to watch the fireworks over the lake.
Age: 26
Type: Locksmith's daughter and lockpicking YouTuber
Fatal Flaw: Rates every lock out of ten, whether or not anyone asked
Role: Protagonist
Age: About 30
Type: Arizonan serial entrepreneur and full-time nomad
Fatal Flaw: Treats a playground rhyme as a business philosophy
Role: Victim
Age: 34
Type: Russian translator of industrial pump manuals
Fatal Flaw: Answers every accusation by turning a page
Role: The accused
Age: 38
Type: Owner of a forty-bed hostel three and a half metres wide
Fatal Flaw: Pressed Schedule it, because it was a good idea
Role: Host
Age: —
Type: One-eared ginger cat, possibly a reincarnated great-grandfather
Fatal Flaw: Likes red. Likes shiny. Likes yours
Role: Hostel cat
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Lost & Found"
At 2:13 in the morning, six days before Tết, Nguyễn Văn Dũng was asleep at the reception desk of the Hanoi Hustle Hostel with his cheek on a laminated map of the Old Quarter. He was dreaming, as he usually did, that he was stuck at a red light.
In the dream it was the big junction by the Opera House. He was on his Honda Wave with a passenger on the back, some Australian girl with a backpack the size of a refrigerator, and the light was red, and it stayed red, and the motorbikes kept arriving, filling up the space around him the way water fills a bath: a thousand of them, two thousand, horns going, a man with a whole peach tree strapped upright to his pillion, a woman carrying a cage of ducks, a family of five on a single scooter all eating bánh mì, all of them waiting, all of them edging forward, the light never changing, and his phone buzzing in the holder on his handlebars with a Grab notification that said, over and over, Your passenger is waiting. Your passenger is waiting. Your passenger is waiting.
He woke with a jerk and the whole map stuck to his face.
The lobby was dark. It was always dark at this hour except for the blue glow, and Dũng had worked the night desk at the Hustle for eleven months now and had got used to the glow the way you get used to a noise in your fridge. It came from the ceiling, from a small white disc above the door to the stairs, round and smooth and about the size of a bánh dày, with a soft blue ring of light around its rim. It had been installed in November by two men in polo shirts from the booking company, who had drilled into Bà Tư's ceiling without taking their shoes off and had then been chased halfway down Hàng Bạc by Bà Tư with a feather duster.
Bà Tư called it Ông Táo.
The Kitchen God. The little household god who lives by the stove all year and watches everything a family does: every argument, every lie, every bowl of rice dropped on the floor, every uncle who pretended not to be home when a debt collector knocked. And on the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, one week before Tết, Ông Táo climbs onto a carp and swims up to heaven and reports it all to the Jade Emperor. Which is why, on that day, every family in Vietnam buys three live carp and a paper hat and a pair of paper boots, and burns the hat and the boots, and lets the carp go in the lake. You give the god a good ride. You put something sweet on his lips so that his report is sweet too.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Hanoi Hustle Hostel, quoted from the book.
☠ "locker rebalancing complete. 48 assigned. 1 pending." — @HostelReaper
☠ "peak season is a time for sharing. not everyone will share. exposure: moderate." — @HostelReaper