The Beauty of Humanity Movement

by Camilla Gibb

  “Grandmother,” Hng faltered, dropping his hands in abandoned prayer.

  She did not look up, simply waved him aside as if to speak or alter her gait would cause her to lose the balance of wood upon her shoulders.

  “Grandmother,” he repeated. “It’s Hng.” She slowed and whispered, “Go back,” through teeth stained sepia by betel nut. She tilted slightly to the left, and Hng reached out, pushing the wood sliding off her shoulder to the middle of her back so that she could right her balance. The wood was smooth, lacquered red, no ordinary firewood. He moved aside to let her pass.

  The temple, he realized, as he watched her hobble away. She was carrying wooden beams from the temple on the other side of the village. What would drive an old woman to such desecration?

  Hng lingered with a sense of dread behind the bamboo hedge that surrounded the village, in that hidden place where he had first discovered what it was that made him a boy. He looked to the sky for the courage to step through and onto the village road, a road built by bricks given by men from elsewhere who had married and taken village women away.

  He held his breath in the silence, one foot following another until, approaching the ochre-walled đình, the communal hall and home of the village spirit, he heard laughter from inside. He drew back at the sight of the row of soldiers’ boots at the entrance. He stood by the communal well. The stretch of wall to the left of the entrance to the đình was pockmarked by gunfire. Below that riddled surface a cloud of flies swarmed above a dog licking sticky bloodied ground.

  Suddenly he could smell it—the tinny scent of fresh blood, and beyond it, the older stench of decaying bodies. He could smell it so acutely that he could taste it, like rust in the mouth. He broke into a run, loping toward the other end of the village, past buildings with collapsed mud walls, houses whose thatched roofs had gone up in flames, past the charcoal-stump residue of trees that used to offer nuts and bark and shade.

  The Chang family house was nothing more than a scorched outline. His own family’s house, though without its roof, at least remained. He pushed the front door open with his foot and stepped onto the dirt floor. The squat stools were tucked under the wooden table, the blankets were all neatly stored away in the chest, everything in the room lay in order—covered in a fine black dust, but otherwise as if ready for a new day. In the pantry beyond the main room, pots and bowls sat stacked on the wooden shelf and a fistful of fragrant herbs hung from the ceiling.

  The bowl of shrivelled fruit and the maggots in the rice pot hinted at a lengthy absence, as did a certain smell his nose refused to interpret.

  Hng lifted the photo of his grandfather from the ancestral shrine but then thought better of it. He put the photo back in place, then closed the door quietly, as if people lay sleeping and he wished to disappear forever from their lives.

  He exhaled on the threshold, then broke into a run down the track, past Widow Nguyt’s beaten, collapsing house, toward the house of the postmistress who had showed him rare kindness when he was a boy.

  He burst through her front door, tearing through cobwebs, wanting to scream, and threw himself down upon the dark, wooden planks of the floor. He inhaled the smell of rot in the village while a bird beat itself selfless in the rafters overhead. He thought of birds he’d called friends as a boy in lieu of human companionship. He thought of tadpoles and lotuses, things he used to wade through water to collect. He remembered the flute he’d once carved from a piece of bamboo and how he’d tried to communicate with the birds through its whistle.

  Then, between heaving breaths, he heard a muffled thump below the floorboards. He sprang upright, ran back outside the house and pulled up the door to the root cellar, casting alien light upon a face he knew from his boyhood, wizened now, crumpled and petrified.

  The postmistress raised her hands so as not to have to see her executioner, but when the blow did not come, she peeked from between her gnarled knuckles and cried, “Oh my God, Hng. Hng!”

  He reached his arm out to her, but she would not take it.

  “Please leave me, Hng,” she said, her voice vestigial, fading. “I am old. It is better if you just leave me. Everyone is gone.”

  But where had everyone gone? He clambered inside the root cellar, pulling the door shut behind him, encasing them together in the dark. He begged the old woman to speak.

  She spoke without euphemism because she had nothing left to lose; what would it matter now if she were killed for denouncing the soldiers who had come to liberate the village?

  “They filled the air with speeches about our revolutionary duty, saying it was our responsibility to help them root out all class enemies— only then would we live in the glorious new light envisioned by the great father.

  “The Chang family knew they would be the first accused. They ran and barricaded themselves inside their house and the soldiers just took a torch and burned the house down. You could hear them screaming, Hng, but the soldiers just said, ‘Burn, you bastards, and let this be a lesson to the rest of you. We will turn all landlords, notables and reactionaries into ashes, into dust; we will cleanse this place of greed.’ Hng, anyone with a patch of dirt to call his own is an enemy in their eyes. Anyone who grows so much as a carrot for his own consumption.

  “The ones who surrendered their land without resistance have been sent away for re-education, but the ones who did resist, oh, Hng,” she said, her voice breaking. “They called everyone in the village to the đình. They forced us to watch. Shot them dead and left their bodies to rot in the street. Their families were too afraid to claim them.”

  “And my parents?” Hng asked.

  “Hng,” she said, her face in her hands now, speaking through her fingers. “There are sons of the village among those soldiers. Those sons were the ones to point fingers and say, that man has a vegetable plot, and this family owns land they have not told you about down by the river, and this man works a kiln for profit, and that one raises silkworms for sale, and that Widow Nguyt built her wealth on the backs of peasants, and these people here, her neighbours, are beneficiaries of that wealth.”

  “These people—my parents?”

  “Yes,” she croaked.

  He could smell the mildew of starvation in her mouth; he could smell her last days.

  “And my brothers were the ones to report them?”

  “You will find two of them in soldiers’ uniforms smoking a pipe in the đình.”

  “And my sisters?”

  “I lost track of who was killed and who just ran,” the old woman said, hanging her head. “I don’t know where they went. Up into the mountains, perhaps, or out to sea, what does it matter now?

  “Have you any plastic?” she asked, a moment later.

  “But why?” said Hng.

  “Because then I can suffocate myself.”

  Hng kissed her forehead, the skin as thin as rice paper, and bid her goodbye.

  He reached the far end of the village. The temple was no longer standing guard between the village and the world beyond; it had been torn apart, limb by red limb, to serve the fires of the starving. He heard a nightingale sing the song of an inverted world. He inhaled the scent of a rare, night-blooming flower, a smell that would forever be associated with the village he would never return to again.

  Dandy Peacocks

  T makes his way to the Metropole on foot, his thoughts numbed by revving engines, the insistent beeping of horns, the crowing of street vendors, the racket of hammering and sawing, the spark-flying screech of metal cutting metal. “Dancing Queen” blares through giant speakers on the sidewalk of a café where schoolboys and office workers sit under a green-and-white striped awning dripping with Christmas lights, steaming bowls of ph perched on their knees.

  T takes a moment to adjust to the hush of the Metropole, idly scanning the front page of the Vietnam News lying on a table in the lobby, the headlines declaring the imminent launch of the “Learn and Follow the Exemplary Morality of President H Chí Minh Campaign,” and t
he president’s posthumous awarding of the Gold Star Order to two former Party officials for their effort and dedication to the cause of national liberation in the late 1940s.

  He throws the paper down and walks along the corridor to Miss Maggie’s office. He finds her having breakfast—a cup of black coffee and a buttery French pastry—and adding red dots to her map. At her invitation, T takes a seat. They visited five galleries yesterday, perhaps only a quarter of the locations she has marked on the map.

  This morning she has made appointments to meet two artists at their studios. The first of these artists turns out to be one Miss Maggie represents in her gallery. He works in an old stilt house that has been lifted beam by beam from his mother’s village in the North and rebuilt in the middle of a housing block near West Lake. He has old-fashioned manners and no cellphone, or wife, but given the prices of his paintings T wonders just how honest he is, because what the hell does he do with all that money?

  T leads Miss Maggie to the next atelier marked on her map, turning down one of the narrowest lanes in the Old Quarter. Miss Maggie has never met this artist, though she says he is very famous, which must mean famous in the ninety-eight per cent international sense because T has never heard of him.

  “Here’s what I want us to do,” she says. “Let’s pretend I’m your client and you’re taking me on a tour of various galleries and studios. I’m just trying to get a general overview of the contemporary art scene, I haven’t committed to buying anything yet.

  “Oh,” she adds, “and I don’t speak a word of Vietnamese.”

  T repeats these instructions to himself as they pass through a set of iron gates. They’ve entered a garden full of Buddhas—two hundred or more Buddhas—laughing happy Buddhas, Buddhas with crumbling faces, bright orange, bronze and marble Buddhas, stone Buddhas covered in moss. This artist is certainly crazy for Buddhas. Or maybe he’s just plain crazy, thinks T, because he appears in the garden wearing a flowing silk robe, more like a lady’s áo dài than anything a normal man would wear.

  “Wow,” Miss Maggie says. “He’s a real dandy.”

  T will look up the word dandy in his dictionary when he gets home. For the moment, he chooses to interpret this as “peacock.” The man is like a strutting peacock, displaying his colourful plume of feathers.

  “Welcome! Welcome!” the artist bellows as Miss Maggie greets him in English. “Please”—he waves his arms—“Coffee?”

  It would seem he has quickly exhausted all the English he knows. “How serious is she?” the artist asks T quietly, still smiling.

  “She has a serious interest in art,” T replies.

  “I mean as a buyer. How serious is she about buying?”

  T fears an honest answer would cause the bellowing man in women’s clothes to do something unpredictable, so he responds with what he knows in English to be called a white lie, even though for him white hardly seems an innocent adjective, symbolizing death as it does. “She takes buying very seriously,” T says, nodding and matching the artist tooth for tooth with his New Dawn smile.

  “Sit! Sit!” the artist says to Miss Maggie, once they have followed him up the stairs to his studio.

  Miss Maggie sits down on a stool that swings 360 degrees, enabling her to view the art covering three walls of the rectangular room of this renovated tube house. At the far end of the room a team of workers are standing at a long table. Nine young men and women wearing splattered aprons are each working on a different painting. The last artist worked alone, but then, thinks T, perhaps that is because he was not so famous.

  T begins to translate. Does the artist mind if they ask some questions?

  “Yes! Yes!” the artist says, jumping up to pull a heavy black book down off a shelf. Photos of pieces currently on display in galleries in Hanoi and Saigon, Singapore and Hong Kong. Shipping to the U.S. only $150.

  “Please! Please!” he says, flipping through the first few pages for them.

  T translates Miss Maggie’s questions about method and materials and themes he likes to explore and why those themes and who are his influences and why does he think contemporary Vietnamese art is receiving so much attention and what does he consider uniquely Vietnamese and what does he attribute to the French and Chinese and is the evolution in Vietnamese art different from the evolution in Chinese art and does he feel his expression restricted today by Party concerns and what about his own journey to becoming an artist?

  “Please! Please!” he says, flipping some more pages of his black book for them. To T, he says, “Why so many questions? She is exhausting my creative energy. Please, enough.”

  “He wonders if you would like to see the pieces he is working on now,” T says, pointing to the long table at the back of the room.

  The artist jumps up with relief and gestures for them to follow.

  Miss Maggie looks over the shoulders of the young artists, watching them work. The paintings seem very similar to the ones they saw in the galleries yesterday.

  “Excellent!” the artist says, picking up a paintbrush. He adds his initials in black to the corner of a newly completed piece of work.

  A young woman with hair cut short like a boy places a tray of coffee on a corner of the long table. T would like to ask her why she has cut her hair, because she will never get a husband looking like that. He hopes for her sake that she is not married to the artist, who may have insisted she maim her appearance in this way so that no other man will look at her. Imagine all that flesh hovering above you. T shudders, repulsing himself with the thought—as oppressive as China pushing its weight down upon Vietnam.

  While Miss Maggie waits for the black drip of her coffee to finish, she moves around the room studying the work on the walls.

  “Bill Clinton!” says the artist, pointing at a painting at eye level.

  “Ah, so this is the one,” says Miss Maggie.

  “Bill Clinton bought this painting?” T asks, very impressed.

  “Well, he bought one just like it. They now call it Bill Clinton style. Isn’t that depressing?”

  T isn’t sure how he is supposed to respond. What is depressing about Bill Clinton? He is something of a hero to young people in Vietnam. He threw a giant burning log on the slow fire of Ði mi when he lifted the trade embargo with the U.S., and he was the first U.S. president to visit Vietnam since the war.

  Miss Maggie finishes her cup of coffee, stands up and thanks the artist for his time.

  “I thought you said she was serious,” the artist reprimands T while handing Miss Maggie his card. “But she is clearly a philistine.”

  T does not know the meaning of this word, but the artist has said it in a French way, and he thinks it must be some kind of insult because Miss Maggie has raised her eyebrows in a very American expression of doubt.

  T is deeply embarrassed by the behaviour of this dandy peacock. It is shameful. No better than a beggar harassing a tourist in the street. From what he has seen of the contemporary art scene so far, he can only conclude it is a world of arrogance and greed.

  They walk back to the Hotel Metropole together in silence as if Miss Maggie, too, has been depressed by what they have seen. T would like to apologize, but he’s not sure exactly what he would be apologizing for.

  “You did well, T,” she says.

  “Oh?”

  “You protected the interests of your client. You didn’t let him manipulate her with his hard sell. It can be an aggressive business. You don’t want people to feel pressured into buying.”

  Maggie sinks into the steaming water of the bath holding a wineglass aloft. She plugs the dripping tap with her big toe, and listens to the wind rattling a pane of glass in the reception room. She smells the chicken Mrs. Viên down the hall must have cooked for dinner; she hears the monotone drone of a radio in the distance.

  Perhaps it was the rare treat of company all day, but Maggie feels lonelier than usual this evening. These are the hours that should be spent with family and friends, sharing food and news of
the day. Maggie wonders where T lives, whether his mother irons his sagging hipster jeans for him, whether he has a girlfriend and if Ts mother and the girl’s mother are plotting to see their children marry.

  Maggie’s mother had spent years asking when she and Daniel were planning on making things proper, making her proud. Daniel was an installer at the Walker Art Center—a gentle loner a few years older than her whom she had come to know when he hung the pieces for the first exhibition she curated. Daniel had an expansive brain and an enthusiastic heart—even going so far as to spend three years studying Vietnamese in order to impress her mother—but he was also burdened with a capacity for such sadness that it could, on occasion, replace him at a table, in conversation, in bed. There were dark walls Maggie had to stroke with a delicate hand, particularly when it came to his own family.

  Maggie was twenty-six when she met Daniel, thirty-five when they were driving to the wedding of a university friend of his in Ann Arbor and he suddenly divulged the fact that his father, a man he’d simply referred to as dead up to this point, had served in Vietnam. Had served but in some ways never returned. The body yes, but not the rest of him.

  It ended right there, really, on the road to Ann Arbor, Maggie staring out the window at a salt-stained world, realizing that Daniel’s attraction to her was obviously so much more complicated than she had ever known and in some ways had nothing to do with her.

  She couldn’t bring herself to talk about it initially, especially with her mother. As betrayed as she felt, she saw herself a failure. That somehow, she should have known. It cast doubt on all her relationships, forcing her to wonder what she represented to other people, whether people saw her at all.

  “Another girl?” her mother eventually had asked.

  Maggie nodded, an easy way out.

  “American?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Maggie snapped.

  “Better to stick with your own kind,” said her mother. “Better for the children.”