Breakfast with the Queen Bee

In the café on the ground floor of an apartment block in Ho

Chi Minh City, you order a coffee and open your laptop.

You are ready to get a start on your working day but you

are quickly distracted by a woman in her mid-30s on the

other side of the room.

She is speaking in a northern dialect, quite loudly. She is

over-dressed in glitzy clothes (it’s not even 9am). She has

jewellery on every finger, wrist, ear, neck. She is wearing

make-up seemingly just to have breakfast with her family

although no one is actually sitting with her (they are buzz

in her vicinity). She’s talking the ear of someone on the

other end of her fancy phone. You keep trying to make

yourself concentrate on whatever it is that you should be

doing, but now you can’t; instead, you watch her,

thinking, Jesus, look at this God-awful woman, who thinks

she’s the all-powerful Queen Bee of her little hive.

Her bowl of pho arrives but she’s busy making things

happen on the phone, too busy to acknowledge two young

smartly dressed, service providers arriving with a contract

that needs to be signed. Or maybe they’re just beneath her.

She eventually signs the papers without ever looking at

them while they dạ, vâng, kowtow and go.

She hands a brick of dong that looks like it would add up

to a six-figure-sum in US dollars to her pijama-clad nanny,

who seems to know what to do (and looks like she knows

how to handle herself in a dispute). She heads in the

direction of the front door where you guess some worker

bee is waiting in a car to collect her and deliver her and the

brick elsewhere.

In her absence, the woman’s mother takes over dealing

with her two-year old grandson who is dressed in an old

fashioned-newsboy cap, waistcoat, shoes and corduroy

pants like he’s about to tee off in a golf tournament for

toddlers in 1920s America. Lifting him with one arm and a

single raised hip, the mother runs away with a spoon and a

bowl of porridge.

The woman’s brother or husband (it’s hard to tell) arrives

but he seems keen to not sit directly beside his sister/ wife.

He sits at the table beside her and faces another direction

as if joining invisible companions for iced tea and

coffee. And here comes her father, who has another

contract in his hand and he has a look on his face that

says, "I am way out of my depth with this. Please don’t tar

my head off." His daughter is just about to start

her pho, but her father mumbles whatever the problem is,

and she puts her chopsticks down. She grabs the contract

he’s holding and glances at it; she tells him to call out a

number and calls the person that he’s too useless to call in

person. She resolves the situation, whatever it was, in

seconds.

Next, she thinks about starting

her pho, but instead she picks up her phone and enjoys a

quick brag to a friend and enjoys a short chuckle. Her

mother returns with the kid. Spying an opportunity to

escape, the brother/ husband whisks the kid away to

practice walking down the fairway on the 18th hole.

The woman finally starts her pho. Her mother tags out to

make way for her other daughter, the woman’s sister, a

more modern, younger, trendier, ditsier looking individual,

who clearly has no head for business but a fine line in

frivolous gossip. She natters away for a little bit but what

she says is of zero interest to her big sister, who stares only

at her spoon and chopsticks as she slurps her way to the

bottom of the bowl. The sister eventually leaves the table

without saying goodbye.

The woman eventually polishes off the dregs of her

broth, grabs a toothpick, works her molars, and after a

quick phone call, she summons everyone over and declares

they are done. The family swarms around the table, gathers

its belongings and heads for the exit, where a large car

awaits to ferry them to their next collective destination

(most likely their new enormous cream-coloured villa).

As she clicks-clacks her way past your table, you want to

nod your head in admiration at this woman, who you have

suddenly found yourself admiring—she doesn’t think she’s

the Queen Bee of her little hive, she knows she is—but she

doesn’t notice you. You are drone from another

inconsequential hive; you are of no use to her and her little

colony. As she leaves the café, your wife calls and asks

what you are doing this morning. You figure watching a

very wealthy Vietnamese woman boss her family around

isn’t what she wants to hear. Instead, you say, “Did you

know that drone bees have eyes twice the size of the queen

bee, yet they cannot sting, or that the word ‘drone’ comes

from dræn, an Old English word meaning ‘male honeybee’,

which in the 16th century was used to describe an idler or

lazy worker, as male bees make no honey?”

She says she did not know that. She says she is not

surprised. She says she has things to do and hangs up

without saying goodbye.