Fracture
Seven months after Linh died, David Whitaker still has her photograph on his lock screen. He is a clinical psychologist. He knows exactly what that means.
Whitaker came to Đà Lạt in 2017, seconded from the University of Adelaide for a year that became six. He met Linh at a nuns' pagoda in his first weeks there. She taught him Vietnamese, sat in on his classes to trip him up, and told him how to buy a mango: green and hard, because if it is soft, it is already dead.
Now it is the wet season in the Vietnamese highlands. Her cardigan is on the back of the chair. The emails from Adelaide have gone from gentle reminder to final notice. And in the pine forest above the city, Whitaker has started to hear her voice.
He does what he was trained to do. He takes a history every morning, names each symptom in two languages, and keeps the notes in careful capitals. What he cannot do is say, in plain words, what happened at the provincial hospital in February.
Around him the city carries on regardless. A landlady who runs the café downstairs and answers to nobody. A monk at Linh Sơn Pagoda who talks about rice and means something else. A stranger who picks him up off the market floor, walks him home, and once could not look at mangoes either. A health officer and a policeman who knock one morning with a clipboard and leave having been told, by the landlady, that the professor needs to eat.
Fracture is the first novel of The Expat Psychologist, a nine-book series set in a city of fog, pines and rain, with Whitaker's own poems threaded through the prose. It was written in Đà Lạt by a counselling psychologist who lives there.
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