The Beauty of Humanity Movement

by Camilla Gibb

  Whole Fruit

  Maggie moves through the faded glory of the marble lobby of her apartment building. She steps into the rattling iron cage of an old French elevator and presses the top button. Gears click, wheels hum.

  Her mother grew up in a building just like this on another tree-lined boulevard in the French Quarter. It was quite grand, though she used to lament how much it had deteriorated after her father was killed in the fight against the French. The cracks in the plaster, the leaks and broken windows, none of which they could afford to repair.

  She never did see her beloved home again. Despite all the years in Saigon and Minneapolis after that, Nhi never stopped referring to Hanoi as home. It was the Hanoi of her childhood she missed, not the world it became after independence, a place where “everybody a snake, a spy.” She had never contemplated returning. She had never forgiven her family for rejecting her because of her relationship with a dissident artist. She could not believe the country had really emerged from darkness; not even Bill Clinton lifting the trade embargo in 1994 could convince her.

  “Don’t you want to see it for yourself?” Maggie had asked when they were watching the news of Clinton’s visit in 2000.

  Nhi had turned her head away at the suggestion, covering her mouth.

  “I could go,” Maggie said, “and if it’s safe, which I’m sure it is, you could join me.”

  “Please don’t do this,” her mother had whispered through her hand.

  Maggie had been reminded of her father’s words from long ago in that moment: You keep her company, be strong, she needs you. Those words had been prophetic. From the moment they arrived in the U.S., Maggie had led the way.

  They were resettled in Minneapolis in 1975 with clothes for winter courtesy of the U.S. Army, but with little evidence of home beyond the piece of paper upon which her father had written the phone number of Margaret McGillis, his former landlady in Chicago, after whom Maggie had been named. “You call her,” he had said to Maggie’s mother. “You call her and give her your address. That way I’ll be able to find you.”

  But Nhi could speak no English, and Maggie was largely limited to letters and numbers. Their first task was survival, feeding themselves from tins of things they recognized by the pictures on the labels: sliced pineapple, sections of mandarin oranges in syrup, carrots, tuna, button mushrooms. Maggie’s mother stockpiled these cans just in case—a mantra she never let go of in all her years in the U.S. Every night, for this same reason, she wedged a chair under the handle of the front door of the subsidized apartment they had been allocated.

  About a month after she and her mother arrived, Maggie had been lured by the sound of a bouncing ball into the stairwell, where she discovered a Vietnamese girl very close to her in age playing a game by herself. She counted to ten in English before switching to Vietnamese. Maggie taught her new friend, Mei, the English words for eleven through thirty-two before they gave up the game and returned to the girl’s apartment, where her mother, Mrs. Minh, was making spring rolls. It was the first thing Maggie had eaten in a long time that didn’t come from a can.

  Mrs. Minh took Maggie’s mother to a Chinese grocery the very next day, and both their meals and her mood began to improve. Soon after that they had a visit from a social worker accompanied by a Vietnamese translator who gave them a lengthy set of instructions. Nhi would attend English classes in a church basement, and Maggie would start first grade at the school in their neighbourhood in the fall.

  “Please,” her mother had said to the translator that day, pulling the piece of paper with Margaret McGillis’s phone number on it out of her pocket. “Please will you call this lady and tell her we are here?”

  But the number was out of service. According to the operator, the line had been disconnected for some time. They learned then that Americans do not stay in a house for generations, that there are few generations and little continuity, something her father must have failed to understand about America in his time there as a visitor. The future her mother had envisioned was rewritten in that instant. They no longer had the certainty of reunion with Lý Văn Hai.

  Her mother had smiled and nodded politely at the translator that day and escorted her and the social worker to the door. She then wedged the chair under the door handle and lay face down on the floor of the hallway. Her back arched and contracted in undulating waves; she was soundless, her fists clenched against her temples.

  Maggie rushed to the balcony, hoping to catch sight of the translator in the parking lot, but saw no trace of her. She ran back inside and picked up the phone, yelling for help over and over in Vietnamese to a dial tone.

  There was a knock at the door. Maggie dropped the receiver and climbed over her mother, unhooking the chair from under the door handle. It was Mrs. Minh, Mei’s mother, from down the hall. Mrs. Minh looked at Maggie’s mother on the floor with some surprise before sitting down very calmly beside her and resting her palm on her back. “I was going to ask if you wanted to play mah-jong,” she said, as if this were the most ordinary scene in the world.

  Maggie unhinges the metal gates of the elevator and tiptoes to the end of the hall. She flicks the light switch and kicks off her heels in the foyer, padding across the parquet squares of the reception room into the kitchen in her stockinged feet. The sound of her heels on the wood floors makes the place feel too hollow and lonely. The flat came furnished with some heavy French antiques, but apart from a few kitchen utensils, Maggie has acquired nothing, uncertain of her place, or how long she will stay.

  Her mother had accumulated very little over the course of thirty years in the U.S., as if her life there had only ever been temporary. Maggie realized just how true this was after her mother died. She stayed at her mother’s apartment in the weeks that followed her death, sleeping in her mother’s sheets and wearing her mother’s bathrobe, still smelling of her Chanel No. 5. She sipped tea from a chipped year of the cat mug and spent hours staring up at the peeling border of poppies her mother had glued to the walls sometime in the 1980s, bracing herself for the task of disposing of her mother’s things.

  She drank a bottle of wine one night, destroying any resolve, and called Daniel. She hadn’t spoken to him in months. “My mother died,” she said blankly.

  “Oh, Mouse,” he said, piercing a heart already broken.

  The regret she felt the next morning did at least give her the push she needed. She packed up her mother’s mah-jong tiles to give to Mrs. Minh, and donated her clothes and scant pieces of furniture to charity. She kept her mother’s watch and the rarely worn áo dài she’d had made for special occasions. It was then that she discovered her mother’s secrets. Five years’ worth of unsent letters from her mother to her father lay bundled in a shoebox at the back of the closet. Maggie had knelt down on the green carpet with the box in her lap and pulled one letter at random from the pile. The envelope was addressed to Lý Văn Hai at their old apartment in Saigon.

  My dear husband,

  Maggie has just lost her fifth tooth and will be starting third grade in the fall. In just two years, she is speaking English as if she was born in this country. She is an enormous help to me. Who could have imagined when you began to teach her the English alphabet, that soon she would be using it every day? I am taking a night class called Basic English for Newcomers, but it is not easy and sometimes I miss the class because of my shift at work. I think it will be some time before I know enough of the language to retrain as a nurse here, but I am thankful for the good job that I have. The head matron has been very patient with me and she has just hired two more Vietnamese cleaners because she says I have shown her how hard the Vietnamese work.

  I am enclosing Maggie’s second grade photograph. My dear husband, can you see how much she is starting to look like you? I worry about you so much, but when I look at our Maggie it makes me feel you are not so far away. I remain hopeful for our happy reunion.

  Your loving wife

  Nhi

  Maggie, still kneelin
g on the carpet, had wept. Her mother’s handwriting was so frail, so hesitant. She put the letter back in the shoebox with the others. They really weren’t meant for her to read. She cleared out the rest of the closet, emptying a basket of greying, utilitarian bras and underwear into a green garbage bag, only to discover more secrets her mother had withheld. At the bottom of the basket were several pieces of paper: sketches Maggie’s father had done for her as a child in Saigon. Gifts of lumbering animals he’d drawn with his clumsy claw. But her mother had taken nothing with them when they left; they had even been ordered to leave the small bag they had packed on the tarmac. Had she hidden these pictures in a pocket? They are creased and stained, perhaps with her sweat.

  Why her mother had never shared them with her, Maggie will never know. But they are in Maggie’s possession now. Much the same way her mother left Vietnam thirty years ago, Maggie has returned: carrying six of Lý Văn Hai’s drawings.

  Hng lies in the dark listening to the gentle patter of rain on his corrugated tin roof, wishing he could pluck whatever it was he had hoped to tell Miss Maggie out of the weeds cluttering his mind. He falls asleep only to awake startled an hour later, the rain thundering down violently from above, catapulting him back to the time of war. The worst of it was in December of 1972, what the Americans called the Christmas bombing, when the B-52s rained bombs for eleven days, destroying railway yards and warehouses, factories and airfields and roads and bridges and hospitals and schools and blocks of communist housing, and wiping out entire neighbourhoods like Khâm Thiên. It had seemed then that all of Hanoi was burning.

  The Old Quarter fortunately was spared, but the bombs had landed so close to the shantytown you could feel the heat rising from the northwest. The squatters were saved by their dirty pond. The tire factory on the far side of the muddy water exploded and lit up the sky for several days before engulfing them in an oily black cloud. For weeks the city was dark and smouldering, and people were coughing up blood and crawling on all fours because they could not see their way.

  Finally, the sky faded from black to smoking grey. For several sunless days, Hng and the other men and women of the shantytown waded through the oily pond, tossing debris onto the shore. He remembers pausing a moment at the sight of Lan there among the foragers, a brief look of recognition passing between them as if to say: all the pond weed is gone, all the fish, frogs and birds too, but somehow, whether by accident or design, we have survived.

  It would take eleven years to rebuild the hospital, a generation to rebuild the neighbourhood of Khâm Thiên, but less than a year before the pond, without human intervention, began to show signs of new life. A film of algae appeared on the surface. The colour green returned to the palette of Hanoi.

  Somehow it was only after the shock of the devastation of that winter bombing that the fear really set in. Hng held his breath, listened for the drone of another wave of bombers. He prayed for an end to the war, prayed for the mercy of a God who was said to no longer exist.

  Hnger forced him to breathe again, to venture beyond the shantytown to forage among ruins, to dredge muddy craters, to drag home dead dogs, to eat the roots of upturned trees. There were losses in the community: those who died of the blood in their lungs, of the rot in their intestines, of septic shock and suicide and starvation. Hng did what he could to keep himself and his neighbours alive, turning over rubble in search of snails, digging for earthworms, boiling and reboiling rank water and making a weak green broth from the lichen he scraped off rocks.

  Though Hng no longer spoke to Lan, he would not let her go hungry. If she did not appear among those survivors who gathered for one of his neighbourhood suppers, he would simply wrap a portion of his share in a banana leaf and leave it on her doorstep in the middle of the night. He did this throughout the years of the war.

  In April of 1975, black vans drove throughout the city, announcing the withdrawal of American troops. The Liberation of Saigon was imminent and victory would belong to the People’s Army. The puppets of the South would be crushed.

  “Rise up, comrades,” Party spokesmen shouted through the windows of the vans, “for the homeland will soon be unified in the name of the revolutionary father. There will be new life in the new dawn. New light.”

  They had been waiting more than twenty years for this moment. The skin of a fruit, discarded; a skinless fruit, Ðạo had once written of his divided country. Hng has not since had the heart to abandon an orange peel, or even the useless dull-red rind of a lychee. Because of Ðạo’s words, Hng’s life has been governed as much by metaphor as economics.

  How Hng wished Ðạo could have been there to see it. A future united. Whole fruit.

  Of course, the deception of whole fruit is the rot that can be concealed beneath its skin. The victory of 1975 was tainted, as victory always is, by opportunists. Smugglers of uncertain origin came to the squatter settlement on the edge of the pond. A team of sharply dressed men and women walked past the shacks, luring people into the light with shouts of “Who wants a future for their children? Who wants relief from suffering?” The Americans are crazy for Vietnamese children, they said, they are scooping up all the orphans in Saigon and giving them medicines and making them strong. Sell yours to us and we will take them south and get them onto the planes and they will grow up rich.

  Hng was struck numb as he watched one young woman after another pass a swaddled newborn into the arms of an uncertain future. Where the young woman could not do it herself, her mother or mother- in-law stepped in. Whatever their feelings about the war, they must not have hated the thought of their children growing up rich in America. Perhaps they simply felt they had no choice. They were starving and the smugglers were waving money before their eyes. In less than a week, all the baby girls were gone.

  The shantytown throbbed with the ache of loss, and those who had not sold babies because they had none to sell seethed with anger and refused to speak to those who had, calling them traitors of the worst possible kind—worse than the Catholics and the selfish cowards who had fled south.

  A good nine months of silence passed before the tension began to ease. New baby girls were born, and many of these new arrivals were named after their sisters who were growing up rich in America.

  Hng has only once seen an American, at least someone he was sure was an American, and even that was from a distance. This man was lying on the shore of Trúc Bạch Lake draped in parachute silk. He’d been dragged to shore by men just like Hng, poor men fishing farther along the shore, fishing despite the danger, because when bombs fell, fish rose—dead, not always intact, but in good numbers nevertheless.

  Now, having met Miss Maggie, Hng is able to picture who one of those babies of the shantytown might have become. A strong, educated young woman with a good job who speaks with confidence and does not lower her eyes when she meets a stranger. He thinks of all those babies, women now, their áo dàis flapping in American winds, and he wonders if they still know the Vietnamese language, if they have married American men, if they eat ph for breakfast, if they even know the taste of home. He must ask Miss Maggie if America still suffers the deprivation of ph. He wonders how many young women like her are haunted by questions about the past, their homeland. And how many old men like him might have some answers.

  If only he had not been so careless with his memories. Carelessness has cost him dearly in the past: shouldn’t he have learned when his papers were taken from his shack? He was too angry at the time to think of it, but he should have dedicated himself to his memories then. He should have worked hard to preserve all that he could, because soon there will be nothing of them left.

  Maggie can’t sleep. She’s remembering that winter morning with her mother in Minneapolis when they lost all contact with Vietnam. The snowbanks were the size of elephants that day, the sky bright, flakes swirling around them as if they were figures in a shaken snow globe. Maggie’s feet were sliding around in her boots as they trudged up the street because even though she was only
ten, her mother had bought her ladies’ boots so that they would last a few winters.

  They passed ph Vit Anh, where they usually stopped for lunch, because although Mrs. Trang made the best ph bc in Minneapolis, Nhi wasn’t in the mood for the lady’s gossip. They pulled open the door of the new Vietnamese restaurant down the street instead, bells tinkling overhead as they walked in.

  The place was thick with cigarette smoke and the noisy clatter of dominoes on Formica tabletops. Maggie’s mother nudged her into a booth and took a seat beside her on the red vinyl bench.

  “Nghiêm Nhi?” asked the man who came to take their order, his mouth and eyebrows almost cartoon-like in their expression of surprise. He stared at Nhi, not closing his mouth.

  Her mother squinted. “Do I know you?”

  “I’m Paul,” he said, his finger to his chest. “Paul Nguyn. Van Hai’s colleague from Saigon. Photojournalist. Associated Press.”

  She raised her eyebrows in recognition.

  “I’m very very sorry about Van Hai,” Paul Nguyn said.

  “Ma?” Maggie prodded.

  Her mother rose from the booth. She walked back into the kitchen with Paul Nguyn, leaving Maggie alone at the table. She returned a few minutes later with a glass bowl of vanilla ice cream.

  “Daddy didn’t make it out of Vietnam,” Nhi said to the tabletop once she sat down.

  They both sat and stared at the bowl of ice cream. Maggie thought of the figure eights she’d learned to make on ice that winter wearing borrowed skates. She remembered the sensation of gliding backward.

  “Daddy’s not coming?” Maggie said after a few minutes of silence—voicing something she had perhaps known for years.