by Camilla Gibb
Hng thought this quite an enlightened attitude on her grandmother’s part, perhaps choosing to not consider the possibility that she might be looking to relieve herself of a burden by pushing her granddaughter into the arms of a man, even one as old, blemished and poor as Hng.
Hng focused on the matter of education, an issue he took very seriously, having learned as much as he had from Ðạo. Hng had held onto all the poems Ðạo had copied down for him, even though the poet later came to throw away most of his early efforts, dismissing as adolescent and naive his laments for a stolen country with recurring images of weeping mothers and flowers blooming without scent.
As Vietnam struggled toward independence, Ðạo’s poems reached into an uncertain future, contrasting images of Vietnamese peasants in Parisian zoos with those of human pyramids shaped like pagodas; allied Vietnamese workers with hands raised toward yellow skies. Some of these poems were eventually published in Fine Works of Spring, the first publication Ðạo and his colleagues produced.
Upon reading that journal by the bitter melon light of the oil lamp in the backroom of his shop, Hng had felt the words do a perilous dance on the page. The illustrations vibrated with hidden meaning. His skin tingled and his ears burned as he read a poem about the hard times that had befallen the North since 1954. It was a risky topic to raise, one that might lead the Party to charge a person as an agent acting on behalf of the imperialists in the South.
When Hng tried to return the journal to Ðạo the following morning, Ðạo insisted it was his to keep. “Because you are one of us,” he said. “One of our movement to keep the beauty of humanity alive.”
Hng, filled with a mixture of pride and fear, held the inky pages to his chest. He bowed his head. He was humbled by the honour, but with honour comes responsibility. Being part of their movement meant the risk was his to share.
Five years later, in the interest of Lan’s education, Hng found himself sharing the journal with the girl, retrieving his well-worn copy of Fine Works of Spring from the stack of papers he kept wrapped in plastic inside his shack, safe from rats and rain. He handed her the mimeographed volume, wanting her to feel the paper, smell the ink on its pages, hoping she might experience it with all her senses just as he had when he’d held it for the first time.
“But, Uncle, I cannot read,” she said, holding the pages in her delicate hands.
Hng was surprised to hear it. He had left school at eleven, but he was a peasant boy from the country, this was to be expected. This girl was a Hanoian, born and bred, with the sophistication of the city about her despite the indignities of her current surroundings.
“Have you had no schooling?”
“My father was killed in the liberation struggle when I was very small,” she said. “After that we had very little money, only enough for one of us to go to school. We sent my older brother.”
And so Hng began to read to her—the essays, the stories and the poetry—doing his best with the latter to infuse the lines with some approximation of Ðạo’s intonation and cadence.
Hng read the contents of Fine Works of Spring to her, then those of Fine Works of Autumn. She took it all in and appeared to want more, and so he proceeded to read the Nhân Van magazines to her, as well as the poems Ðạo had copied down for him with his own hand.
Through poetry, Hng conveyed to Lan a world of allegory and metaphor, and just as he had once not understood such concepts, the multiple layers of meaning at work, she did not at first understand.
“How can he claim his love for her is so great if he is only willing to feed her one cherry a month?” she asked. “It is very selfish of him to leave her hungry, is it not?”
“But he does not want to overwhelm her,” said Hng, speaking his own truth through Ðạo’s lines.
Where Ðạo described the country as the smallest in a nest of red- lacquered Russian dolls, she recalled a promise her grandfather had once made to buy her a toy from Paris.
She understood things only in literal terms, but it did not matter. He loved her for her innocence, for her sensory appreciation, for the fact that when she heard a lemon described she could taste a lemon. And he loved her proximity. While he read Ðạo’s poetry to her, she would study the illustrations in the journals, leaning in close to him, smelling of the coriander flowers she used, when she could find them, to wash her hair.
“But you are not reading,” she said one day, as she looked up from an illustrated page.
“I have it memorized,” he said of the poem, a favourite.
“Teach me,” she said, placing her hand on the page lying between them.
He stared at those graceful fingers, their beautifully tapered tips and natural polish, and thought, Oh, but, my dear girl, I cannot. Surely my heart would break.
Hng had studied Ðạo’s poetry with his untrained eye and found his heart moved. His heart had then begun to educate his eye. He had recited certain poems so often that they had become part of him, as familiar as the tongue in his mouth. To teach the girl one of these poems would be to give himself to her. To see himself in her mouth.
He quickly changed the subject, pointing at the moon. “Did you hear the Russians put a man in the sky this week?”
“But why would they do such a thing?”
“Perhaps so they could prove once and for all that God does not exist.”
News of the wider world could not distract her for long, though; it was far less compelling than the world they were creating between themselves.
One evening, as she reclined on her elbow, hair loose about her shoulders and bare feet interlaced, she said, “Maybe one day you will have a shop again and all the artists will come back. And I will work for you. I will chop the herbs and wash the dishes.”
The scenario was so impossibly perfect that Hng knew this exchange could not continue. It was torture. It would cause him to dream the impossible, will the dead to life, act on impulses better left buried. He would lose his way and perhaps destroy her in the process. And look how thin the girl had become in recent months: what had he been thinking feeding her only poetry? He needed to find his way back to making ph.
But how did one make ph from nothing? Even the rice ration, when it was available, did not fill more than the palm of his hand—and that included the maggots. And so he was forced to experiment. One day he pulled weeds from the pond and laid them out to dry in the sun until they were as crispy as rice paper. Then he ground the dried weeds in a makeshift mortar until he had a fine powder, to which he added enough water to make a paste. He poured the paste onto a grid of dried, woven grass and left it to bake in the weak sun. When it had set, he cut the sheet into fine strips for his first batch of pondweed vermicelli. He improved upon the vermicelli the next time, making sure to use only the white hearts of the weeds. The slightly muddy taste was easily masked with a dash of . He had to make do with fish and wild leeks for the broth.
The girl and her grandmother were the first to taste Hng’s communist-era ph. From the looks on their faces, Hng knew he’d been successful. The broth tasted nothing like it should have, but it was pleasant enough, and the vermicelli was quite convincing.
“You could sell this,” said the grandmother, and in fact, this was already in Hng’s thoughts.
He spent the next month building a stone grinder he could operate by pushing a pedal. Then he made himself a cart out of wood scraps and twine, and set out into the streets, launching himself as a roaming ph seller.
Up until that point, Hng’s sense of Hanoi had been fairly circumscribed, his routes dictated solely by the needs of the restaurant, but times had changed, and with them both the city and his way through it. His route meandered as he went in search of new clientele. How quiet the city was in those days, how devoid of people. Streets that had once bustled with commerce had become graveyards. Just a few entrepreneurial souls like himself had something to sell.
Without distraction he began to see the layers of the city. Craft villages had firs
t arisen on this site a thousand years before, when the capital had been moved to Hanoi. The wall of the citadel, which these villages had served, still marked the western edge of the Old Quarter. The inhabitants had built walls around their villages as they evolved into guilds, and though those walls had since come down, Hng could map their respective territories by discerning which temple, which pagoda, which communal house or đình belonged to which of the thirty-six guilds.
He had walked around the perimeter of the Old Quarter and come to rest his cart at the East Gate, the only original gate still standing. Hng reasoned that a gate was an invitation to traffic, even in the absence of a wall, even in the absence of traffic, and so this is where he waited with his cart.
Several people passed by him on foot that first morning, none of them even glancing his way, but eventually two men on bicycles, curiosity or perhaps hunger getting the best of them, turned around and asked what he was selling.
“But there’s no rice,” the older of the two said, “no noodles. How on earth can you be selling ph?”
“Come,” Hng said with a nod and an inviting smile. “Taste.”
He pulled the lid off one of his pots. Even he found the aroma tempting. He lowered a handful of his pondweed vermicelli into the broth with his bamboo ladle. He had one bowl and one bowl only— they would have to share. They held the bowl between them, accepted the proffered chopsticks and grasped at the noodles. They drank from the bowl in the absence of spoons.
“Ahh,” the younger one sighed, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “That is excellent.”
“That is the best thing I’ve tasted in years,” said the other, burping loudly.
“I’ll be here again tomorrow morning,” said Hng. “Bring your bowls and your friends.”
“But how much are you charging?” asked the younger.
“How much can you pay?”
“Not much now, but next week I am old enough for the army.”
“Me, I could pay in leather,” said the older one. “I used to be a leather worker, that is, before all the cows disappeared. But I still have my scraps. Hey, a belt—do you need a belt?”
And so Hng found himself the proud owner of a new belt, and soon thereafter, of quail feathers and palm fronds and lumps of northern coal.
He would share these things with the girl. Present them as small gifts. “You deserve so much more,” he would say, handing her a speckled duck’s egg or a smooth piece of cow horn.
She had tried to reciprocate where she could. One morning he found her sitting on the threshold of the shack she shared with her grandmother sewing a man’s shirt out of a piece of tarpaulin. In the absence of news, of underground papers, of anything other than propaganda shouted through megaphones and plastered on walls, one had to rely on signs like these. There must be threat of another war, Hng thought, if there are enough military vehicles for her to risk tearing a piece of tarpaulin off the back of a jeep. Who is it now? he wondered. The French or the Chinese? The Saigonese or Japanese or Khmer?
He had to resist the urge to reach out and wipe the smear of grease off her cheek with his thumb. “You deserve a better life,” he said instead.
“We had a better life,” said the girl, breaking a piece of thread with her teeth. “Of course we didn’t realize it at the time. We had a very large apartment, and before my father was killed, plenty to eat. Even croissants and chocolate.”
Hng had felt all the communism in his body drain out of him as she spoke. All the colonial resentment too. The politics and history of Vietnam lay in a puddle at his feet. “You deserve the best pastries and the finest chocolate,” he said. “You deserve a man who adores you and spoils you with such things.”
“But I have a man who adores me and spoils me, don’t I?”
Hng had stood there feeling stripped naked. He was powerless in her presence; this was now clear to them both.
“Here,” she said, holding out the shirt to him, “try this on. It only has one sleeve, but I’ll find the material to make the other one eventually.”
By the time she did finish making the shirt they were no longer speaking. The silence between them was as deafening as the raining bombs of the American War, but where the latter came to an end, the former waged on. He could not believe she was capable of such destruction, but in hindsight, the seeds had been there all along.
Hng interrupts the driver as the taxi nears the shantytown, asking if he could just stop and let him off at the end of the dirt road leading down to the pond. Hng would feel ashamed to arrive home in such an extravagant manner.
“I wasn’t going to drive down there anyway, my friend,” says the driver. “Bad roads. Bad people. You be careful.”
What do you know of it? Hng wants to say. The taxi driver has obviously mistaken him for a visitor. Hng slams the car door and stomps down the unlit road in his bellhop’s trousers, determined to look forceful and confident despite the pain in his leg. It has started to rain, and as soon as Hng is out of sight of the taxi he reaches down, brushes his hand against the mud at his feet and runs a streak of it across his cheek and through his hair.
Father and son are taking turns pushing the cart toward the shantytown, but T is losing patience by the time they get to the track leading down to the pond. It has taken them an hour and a half to get this far, and it takes the strength of both of them—two hands on each handle of the cart. How the hell does Old Man Hng do this on his own? T is grateful that it is at least dark; he really wouldn’t want anyone mistaking him for a food seller with a rickety old cart.
They discover the track muddy and difficult from the early evening rain, and T is pissed off that his Nikes are getting dirty.
“It’s a pair of shoes, T,” says Bình.
“You don’t understand,” T mumbles.
“No, you’re quite right. I don’t,” says his father.
They manoeuvre the cart to the edge of the track. As they near the pond, they see several small fires throwing sparks into the damp night. Black smoke spirals upward and the smell of kerosene stings Ts nostrils. He hears the murmur of talk, the howl of an unhappy baby, the clang of metal pots and the drone of hungry mosquitoes and, as they approach the old man’s shack, the distinct soft tenor of his voice as he talks to the man next door, a halfwit who honks like a goose.
Hng is the heart of this small community on the banks of a polluted pond; he is good to these poor people, keeping them fed and entertained. He treats everyone with respect—from people in high places, like Miss Maggie Lý, to people without sense or legs, like his neighbour. It is humbling to have an Old Man Hng in your life. It makes you want to be a better person.
The old man thanks T and his father for the return of his cart with his hands clasped together and a bow of his head, and insists they stay and eat something. He apologizes for having little to offer: rice, a bit of fried pork belly and fish sauce, that is all.
“Hng, Hng,” says Bình. “Honestly, it’s fine. What a day you’ve had, huh?”
“It’s been quite an adventure. Come. Let’s get out of the rain. You’ll at least stay for a cup of tea.”
They bend through the entrance to his shack and take a seat on his hard, straw-filled mattress. Hng places the kettle over a small kerosene stove and rummages for his tea canister.
T and his father always visit the old man here on the first day of Tet. Even though his shack is normally dark and dank, at Tet it is always bright with fresh flowers, flowers he travels kilometres to collect. The room is swept of dust and evil and is fragrant with incense and plump fruits.
Few words beyond the customary pass between them on these occasions. They will wish Old Man Hng prosperity, and he will return the good wishes and offer them square packets of bánh chung which have been cooking overnight in a pot on the fire, his callused fingers unaware of the heat as he pulls each packet from the boiling water. They will eat the sticky rice and mung bean paste that hug the prized fatty pork middle, and T will share this treat with
Grandfather Ðạo by placing one of the square banana-leaf packets at the base of his altar alongside some white rice, rice wine and crisp new bills in a red envelope.
Ðạo’s altar still shines like a bright star today, a candle lit to keep him company. T and his father both bow to their ancestor before taking the cups of woody brown tea Hng offers.
“So what took you over that way this morning, anyway?” T tries again.
“That Vit Ki’êu girl has lost something,” the old man says, his eyes milky in the candlelight. “She thought maybe I could help her find it.”
“And can you?” T prods.
“I don’t know yet,” says Hng.
Bình asks Hng about his leg and the visit with the doctor, changing the subject just as it’s getting interesting.
“Leg will be fine,” the old man says. “Just need to restore my qi.”
“I’m glad it wasn’t worse,” says Ts father. “For you or your cart.”
They hear a sudden sharp cry outside the shack. “What was that?” T asks, getting to his feet.
“What was what?” says the old man.
“It sounded like someone in pain,” says Bình.
Bình and T poke their heads out the door of the shack and see a woman lying on her back about a metre away. T rushes forward and helps her into a sitting position. She curses the mud on her backside. “It’s the only decent skirt I have. So stupid to be wearing these things in the mud,” she says, pointing at the flip-flops on her feet.
Ts father follows him outside. “It’s okay, Dad. I’ve got her.” T lifts the old woman by the elbow, light as an egg. She leans the yolk of her weight into his forearm. “I’m all right, son,” she says. “Thank you. You go on back to your grandfather now.”
T and his father stoop to enter the door of Hng’s shack. It takes a minute for Ts eyes to readjust to the dim.
“Did you know that at the Metropole you can pick up the phone and order anything you want to eat?” the old man says. “Imagine. Anything at all.”
T wipes the rain off his face with his shirtsleeve and wonders if the old man has lost his hearing along with his qi. That lady couldn’t have been more than a couple of metres away and that was a sharp and distinctive cry of pain. He wouldn’t just ignore her. He is clearly not himself.
