The Beauty of Humanity Movement

by Camilla Gibb

  Hng could scarcely believe the girl was real.

  While he felt moved to thank his new friends and neighbours for their gifts, at least part of his motivation to repeat the feast the following month had been desire. He wanted to feed the girl and feel her near.

  For that second feast he speared and threaded water snakes onto a spit; he grilled small, ugly fish with ancient mouths over the fire; he boiled tiny birds’ eggs in salted water; he marinated layers of those eggs in the juice of fermented berries; and he boiled snails and crayfish, offering crunchy, sliced bamboo shoots on the side.

  The woman next door thanked him with a deep bow of gratitude. “It was dignified and so delicious,” she said, then pushed her granddaughter forward by the small of her back.

  “Thank you, sir,” said the girl, her eyes lowered to the ground.

  “This is Lan,” said the older woman.

  Lan. She was the orchid of her name, as elegant and rare. Hng looked to the ground himself, not wanting to sully her virgin whiteness with the impurity of his gaze. “Hng,” he said with a cough. “Just Hng, not sir.”

  The gift-giving continued, his neighbours bringing him pieces for the interior of his house: assorted single bricks, strips of soft bark from a eucalyptus tree, a woven grass mat, a pot someone had fashioned out of clay, tins once discarded by the French army, coconut shells from the beautiful Lan and her grandmother for ladling water, drinking broth, serving tea.

  He made tea from artichokes—their hearts dried and cut like leaves—luring the grandmother and the girl with this brew, drawing them over from their shack to his, where it became something of a nightly ritual for the three of them to sit together on a grass mat under a starless sky. They said little initially. Sharing stories of the past, tales of where they’d come from, seemed an unnecessary expenditure of energy when survival in the present demanded such effort.

  All around them were thieves stealing ration coupons, hawkers selling whatever they could, parents pressed into selling their daughters into prostitution. Hng tuned his senses for early detection of those overdressed men who came prowling through the shantytown. As soon as he caught a whiff of hair oil he would call out to the girl and her grandmother: “Come and keep me company on this dreary day, will you? I’ve got another story you might like. Something that will put a bit of sun in this grey sky.”

  It was the fear of losing Lan to traffickers or, if he is honest with himself, simply losing her to another man that led Hng to instigate conversation, entertaining the girl and her grandmother with anecdotes about the men who used to gather in his shop.

  “I once knew a man who could look at the most ordinary sky and see such beautiful things hidden there. A river, a pagoda, a mountain, a man and his buffalo, a pair of sisters dancing in the sun.”

  Hng, Lan and her grandmother would look to the sky just at the very moment the men in suits were snaking by, and Hng would say, “Hard to imagine it now when it is such a grey blanket, but that line there between the clouds, can you see it? It looks like the tail of a turtledove, don’t you think?”

  “I can see the dove,” Lan would say, her mouth hanging open. “The whole dove, not just the tail.”

  “This man would describe what he’d seen in the sky and then someone like my friend Ðạo might find himself inspired and spontaneously give birth to a poem.”

  Admittedly, Hng elevated his own status in these stories by referring to Ðạo as a friend. He knows he was never the man’s equal. Hng had spent years in awe of Ðạo, who, despite being five years his junior, had been something of a mentor to him. Ðạo took an interest in Hng’s aborted education, encouraging his desire to read and engaging him in the debates of the time. He had shown Hng a respect to which he was unaccustomed.

  “My friend Ðạo believed everyone had a right to an opinion,” he told Lan and her grandmother. “Wherever he came from. Or she. ‘Let’s hear what Hng has to say on the matter,’ he used to say.

  “The men seated at the table with him laughed at first. Laughed and pointed at me. Why was this learned young man they all looked up to soliciting the opinion of a simple country boy turned cook? they wondered.

  “‘Stop it,’ Ðạo would say, batting his hand in the air as if he was swatting at flies. ‘I think his perspective could be useful here.’ I remember him turning to me and asking, ‘What do you think, Hng? Should all things cost the same? One pair of shoes, one watermelon, one bowl of ph?’

  “They were all staring at me, waiting for an answer,” Hng told the girl and her grandmother. “I did not know what Ðạo expected of me, so I simply said what I knew to be true. ‘You come here for some reason. There is cheaper pho.’

  “‘You see?’ Ðạo raised his finger and smiled. ‘We are hypocrites where it suits us. We will always be willing to pay the difference for a superior bowl.’”

  Lan laughed like a bird might laugh, a giddy twitter she stifled with her hand.

  Lan’s enjoyment of Hng’s stories made Ðạo real again, leading Hng to feel both the pain of Ðạo’s absence and the simultaneous relief from that pain. The girl was a balm to him: both her desire for his stories and her improbable beauty. Even though much of the latter was concealed by the government-issue black pyjama bottoms and shirt she wore, when she was bent over washing pots in the pond, her spine, as delicate as that of a fish, pressed into the back of her shirt, he would think how much better she deserved—an áo dài of luxurious silk to grace her frame, gold for her elegant wrists and fingers, a pearl necklace, a garland of jasmine for her hair.

  Hng prayed she was old enough to understand her impact, though he guessed her an innocent of no more than eighteen. She called him Uncle, but Hng’s feelings toward the girl were not those of an uncle. He was almost forty then—a middle-aged man in love with a girl half his age—an ugly man, a poor man, a man in love for the first time in his life.

  Although the girl’s grandmother would often fall asleep while they sat on the grass mat together, her dreams whistling through her nostrils, Lan would remain bright, nodding, asking questions in a voice as soft as silken tofu, causing Hng to forget the squalor that surrounded them and transporting the two of them to some alternative plane.

  “Tell me about the Hundred Flowers, Uncle.”

  “Teach me why you prefer poems that do not rhyme.”

  She would lie on her side, her heart-shaped face resting in her upturned palm, her perfect feet moving back and forth against each other according to some internal rhythm.

  Tell me. Teach me. Poetry and politics. In the absence of both, she had made him feel he still had something to give. These had been exquisite moments: a brief respite from life on earth, a journey to some faraway Buddhist heaven. But it is not a place he has visited ever since. He has neither the means nor the desire. He turned his back to her long ago, and his heart became a stone. They do not even acknowledge each other, have not done so now for over forty years.

  She has lived alone in the hut next door since her grandmother died, refusing to move. Whether this is motivated by a deliberate wish to torture him or rooted in some more benign and practical reasoning, he really cannot say. The effect upon him is the same, regardless.

  There is a particular bird that sings in the same register as her speaking voice, but he has managed to so thoroughly block out the song of this bird that it may as well belong to a species extinct. He even finds the cataract that began to cloud his vision a couple of years ago something of a blessing. It limits his peripheral vision so that he can’t see her shack when he retrieves the apron he leaves to dry outside over the handle of his cart. Why then does he find himself glancing briefly to his left this afternoon as he reaches for his apron? Why has he been thinking of her at all? It is because of the girl who came for breakfast. A beautiful girl, imploring. Maggie Lý, the daughter of an artist, Lý Văn Hai. Tell me, she might just as well have said, teach me.

  Lan is hunched over a wicker basket now, picking dirt and stones out of a bushel
of rice, or perhaps shelling peanuts for sale, or maybe she has been lucky enough to find a cluster of tree ear mushrooms from which she is brushing dirt.

  Hng shakes his head to be rid of her and looks to his right instead, toward his neighbour Phúc Li, a man who, as a boy, lost his legs to a land mine and perhaps a bit of his mind as well, sitting as he does with his hand cupping his genitals, his old mother trimming his hair.

  The legless Phúc Li waves to Hng, grinning like a child watching fireworks. His mother snaps the rusty shears shut over his head. “Do you want me to do you next, Hng?”

  “I’ll give it another week,” Hng says, running his hand over his few remaining strands of hair.

  Hng crouches to enter the door of his shack, lays his dry apron down on his straw mattress and roots for the needle and thread he keeps inside an old rubber boot. He stares at Ðạo’s framed image on the altar as he digs around in the toe. The picture is all he really has left of Ðạo, having forgotten all his poems over the years. It was drawn for him by a woman who had come begging decades ago. “Look, we’re all poor here,” he had said to her as she stood on the threshold of his shack. “I’m sorry, but I have nothing to give you.”

  Much to his horror, she unbuttoned her shirt then and tossed it to the ground, revealing a bony, scabbed chest. “Stop that,” he reprimanded, picking up her shirt and tossing it back at her. “Cover yourself. What do you think you are doing?”

  “You can lie with me and do what you want,” she said. “Pay me anything.”

  “Woman,” he said with disgust, “what did you do before life came to this?”

  The woman said she had been a tea lady at the art school.

  “And did you learn anything of art while you were there? Did you learn to draw, for instance?”

  She nodded once and cast her eyes to the ground. But Hng had no paper. The only thing he could think to do was tear out one of the endpapers from Fine Works of Spring, the journal Ðạo and his colleagues had published a few years earlier. And so Hng had squatted beside the woman as she laboured her way toward some likeness of Ðạo, using a piece of charcoal from Hng’s kitchen fire.

  He attempted to describe Ðạo to the woman as best he could, but found a simple physical description of the man could not adequately capture his spirit. Once she had a basic outline of his face, Hng interjected, “His eyes were set a bit farther apart, almost as if he had a wider view than an ordinary man, that of a visionary.”

  Ðạo had made references in his poetry to tragedies that had not even befallen them yet, as if he could intuit the future. He had sought to warn people of what was imminent, hoping to inspire them to action. And Hng had marvelled at his ability to do so in such few perfect words.

  “He was fearless,” Hng told the woman. “He had a scar, just here, a mark of courage that ran two inches across the bone of his cheek.”

  Hng had offered the woman his bed for a week as payment, while he himself slept outside. The frame for Ðạo’s portrait—that, he hadn’t been in a position to make for years, not until he found a way to sell ph again and someone paid him with a piece of glass.

  Hng notices a spiderweb glistening at the edge of the frame now. He can picture Bình as a boy, his face contorted in concentration as he counted the silk rings of a web. The fate of those on earth depends upon honouring the ancestral spirits, and Hng has kept Ðạo’s memory alive for Bình, whose father disappeared when he was only six years old.

  Hng peels the silken web away with his forefinger, lights a stick of incense and offers up his hands in prayer. He wishes Ðạo well on whatever higher plane he now inhabits and he prays that they will know each other in the next life. But there are things Hng must impart before he allows the spirits to take him on that journey. At a minimum he has a recipe to pass on. “The taste of home” is how an artist had once, long ago, described his ph.

  My God, thinks Hng. That someone. His hungry eyes hovering above a bowl. The man had been travelling; he had come by ship from America and his legs were still wobbly. He was carrying his belongings in a sack and he said he hadn’t had a bowl of ph in years. Hng had wondered how the man could still be standing.

  The man’s name was Lý Văn Hai, Hng is sure of it. He must tell Miss Maggie Lý that he did once meet her father, if only briefly. He will make his way to her fancy hotel tomorrow and do just that, he thinks, patting the card in his shirt pocket.

  “Ðạo,” he says to the portrait in front of him, “do you remember Lý Văn Hai? Eating ph in my shop one morning? You must have been there too.”

  He needs Ðạo’s help. There is simply too much for one old man alone to remember.

  New Dawn

  Maggie had deliberated about returning to the old man for breakfast this morning. She doesn’t want to push, but she’s impatient. You left him your card, she reminds herself. He knows how to get in touch if anything comes to mind.

  She stops in the kitchen to thank Rikia for directing her to Hng yesterday, then battles her way into her office holding a cup of coffee at shoulder height. The room is a bit of a disaster, crammed with pieces of art she has pulled out of storage leaning four deep against each wall. She has to tear through a forest of cardboard and brown paper just to reach her desk, spilling half her cup of coffee as she does.

  She’s eighty-five per cent of the way through cataloguing the hotel’s collection—an incomparable body of work from the colonial era found stashed in the bomb shelter beneath the hotel. The art had survived both the war and the decades of the hotel’s service as a Communist Party guesthouse, during which the building had deteriorated into a rat- and bat-infested dump.

  The story of the collection’s discovery had reached her through a colleague at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. “There’s a real opportunity there,” he had said, and Maggie had known this to be true in her gut. A hidden vault of art in her father’s city. The opportunity to bring its contents to light. Her mother no longer alive to dissuade her. And Daniel’s feelings no longer a consideration before her own.

  Maggie came up with a proposal, which she pitched to the French management company undertaking the Metropole’s refurbishment, to open a contemporary gallery in the hotel. Her timing couldn’t have been better. Interest in contemporary Vietnamese art has surged over the last decade—having a gallery at the hotel made sound business sense. So did having a Vietnamese-speaking curator with a master’s degree in curation from the Art Institute of Chicago who could do the work of preserving and cataloguing the original collection.

  She spent her first month and a half in Hanoi below ground in a metal chamber with a flashlight. Her first weeks were all cool surfaces, taut canvases and a pounding heart. She pored through work that spanned the five and a half decades from the hotel’s opening in 1901 to the expulsion of the French in 1954—her father’s era, the world into which he was born, the one in which he drew, grew up, painted.

  She was hopeful then. But that hope grew heavy, canvas by canvas, sheet by sheet, until it hung above her like a leaden cloud. And then finally a sliver of light. An old man. A ph seller. Mr. Hng.

  Maggie lifts a black-and-white painting and props it on the arms of a chair. A string of barbed wire made up of Chinese characters runs across the canvas. She was looking for this piece yesterday; it’s by the Hoa artist she represents. Maggie is a collector of lost sheep: artists like this one who fall between cracks. In Vietnam, her Hoa artist is not recognized as Vietnamese, but in China, where he spent his adolescence after his people were expelled from Vietnam, he isn’t recognized as Chinese either.

  Maggie can relate. While she might look Vietnamese, this only gets her so far. She has had shopkeepers quadruple their prices as soon as she opens her mouth, people mock her accent, gossip behind her back and treat her with a great deal of suspicion. They call her Vit Kiu —some watered-down and inferior species of Vietnamese—a sojourner, an exile, a traitor, a refugee. However people might regard her, Maggie has to content herself with the kn
owledge that her roots are here, the family stories, as remote and inaccessible as they might be.

  Maggie’s mother was not a storyteller. She revealed very little over the years, and it was only after suffering a stroke two years ago that she offered anything unprompted. “Your father didn’t feel entirely Vietnamese,” she said one day from her hospital bed. “His experience in the U.S. changed him. He felt it had made him a better artist and a better person, and he wasn’t going to let anyone take that away from him.”

  They had been speaking about apples just the moment before; she was craving the tart juice of a hard, green variety she had eaten as a child. It had taken Maggie a minute to follow: to move from the taste of fruit to this rare mention of her father. She seized the opportunity then, exhaling the question that had haunted her for the thirty years since that day she had said goodbye to him on the tarmac.

  “What happened to him in the camp? His hands?”

  Her mother turned away at the question.

  Maggie sat down on the bed and leaned her chin upon her mother’s silken head. She felt a tremor run through her mother’s body as if she had just exorcised a small ghost.

  The truth her mother revealed to her that afternoon is one Maggie has since kept caged in her chest. There was a time when she might have shared that painful story with someone—with Daniel—but that time had passed.

  “They might have broken Hai’s hands but they could not touch him inside,” was the last thing Maggie’s mother said before she drifted off to sleep that afternoon, the weak sun through the blinds casting prison bars across her bed.

  Her mother died in that bed, suffering another stroke in the night. Maggie felt she had been struck down as well, made an orphan.

  The phone rings once, twice, three times before Maggie makes a move to answer, bending at the waist and prostrating herself over the corner of her desk in order to reach it. There’s some kind of problem, though the young man at the front desk is having difficulty articulating precisely what it is. From what Maggie can make out, it seems someone has been involved in an accident in front of the hotel. But why would they call her?