by Camilla Gibb
There were details that Hng used to share with Bình, things that no one else noticed, things Hng no longer saw in the boy’s absence. Hng lost track of the translucent trail left by the lizard that made its home on the wall of his backroom.
“Why does he leave a trail?” Bình had once asked. “Do you think he wants us to find him?”
The atmosphere in the shop was so tense that Hng longed for the relief he used to feel whenever he felt his hope for Vietnam’s future flagging and he looked over at Bình and was relieved of despondency or doubt.
Then suddenly, one morning as he was delivering a stack of bowls to the dishwasher in the alleyway, Hng caught sight of the boy in an adjacent doorway. Only his ears and knees seemed to have grown in the months since he last saw him.
“Bình,” Hng said. “But what are you doing here?”
“Ma only makes rice,” the boy said, shuffling over. “She never makes ph.”
“Yes, well, I can understand that, Bình. It’s a lot of work and she’s a busy woman. But rice is not so bad, is it?”
He shrugged his small shoulders. “It’s okay,” he said. “Everything’s just quiet.”
“Ah,” said Hng. “You miss the conversation, is that it? The company?”
Bình blinked. “I miss you.”
For a man who had largely gone unwanted in his life, this was a particularly unsettling thing to hear. And how did one respond to affection, particularly when expressed so nakedly? One cleared one’s throat, shuffled back and forth on slippered feet and slowly recovered one’s composure.
“What about this, Bình,” Hng proposed. “Ask your mother’s permission to come see me at the end of the week. You wait here for me, just in that doorway where you were waiting this morning, and I will bring you a bowl of ph.”
Bình did come to the alleyway behind ph Chin & Hng accompanied by his mother that Friday. “Of course I gave my consent,” Amie said to Hng. “The boy is terribly fond of you. But please, you mustn’t let Ðạo know, he’d be furious with me. He means well, he’s just trying to keep us safe.”
And so they had crouched in the alleyway and eaten Hng’s ph that Friday and the next. The Friday after that, Bình came without his mother. He carried a chessboard, laid it down in the dirt, and tried to entice Hng into a game.
“One move each,” said Hng. “That’s all I have time for.”
“But I don’t know how to play,” said Bình.
“Oh dear,” said Hng, squatting down in the dirt with the boy, the board between them. “I’m not sure that I do either.” Hng picked up a wooden piece carved with the Chinese character for elephant and laid it down.
Hng carried on with his routine every morning, bracing himself for the day when his shop would be burned to the ground. Winter was upon them, the grey days of November, when the fourth issue of Nhân Van was published. Ðạo delivered a copy to Hng after dark, knocking on the back door of the building. Hng, heart in throat, opened the door.
“I went out into the country myself,” Ðạo said to the ground. He hesitated, a man of words unsure of what to say next, his uncharacteristic awkwardness silencing them both. “To my wife’s village,” he finally added, pressing the magazine heavily into Hng’s hands.
Hng read the editorial that night by the weak yellow light of his lamp. There, listed plainly, were the crimes of land reform, unmasked by poetry or allegory. The Party had violated the Republic’s constitution by making illegal arrests, deliberately misclassifying peasants as landowners, seizing their property, throwing them in prison, subjecting them to barbaric torture, performing executions and abandoning innocent children, leaving them to starve to death.
The editorial went on to suggest that it might be time for new leadership, since H Chí Minh and the other senior Party officials seemed to have become rigid and closed-minded with age. They had now forbidden all protest—but had they not, as young men, engaged in protest themselves? How had the Party come into being in the first place? Were they now, from the comfort of their positions of power, content to stagnate, to atrophy, to close the Vietnamese mind?
Hng was overcome by a fear of the sort that turns a mortal heart into concrete. He wished with every fibre of his being that Ðạo had not gone so far in his attempt to compensate for his failure to empathize with the peasantry. Ðạo had not merely criticized the Party’s policies, he had committed the ultimate crime—insulting Uncle H’ô—for which he risked the threat of the ultimate punishment.
The next day, none of the Nhân Van contributors turned up for breakfast. The room was so quiet that Hng could hear the slow beat of his heart. After breakfast was over, the fire extinguished, the tiled floor swept, the chopsticks neatly housed, Hng closed all the shutters, pulled the beret Ðạo had given him years before down over his eyebrows and left the building by the back door.
The paranoia that had stopped the men talking in the ph shop had now infected him as well. He put his hands in his pockets and studied the ground as he walked very deliberately in the opposite direction of the Nhân Van office. When he was certain he had not been followed, he doubled back and emerged at the busy eastern edge of the Old Quarter, slid into Café Võ, strode through the length of it, exchanging no more than a nod with the owner, and walked out the back door into yet another alleyway.
He turned the corner.
He smelled the burning before he saw it. This time the Party had not been content simply to destroy the contents of the office. They had razed the neighbourhood communal house, the place for meetings and worship of the ancestral spirits, at the back of which the men of the Beauty of Humanity Movement had been given sanctuary. A crowd of people stood across the street and stared at the smouldering rafters, too late to save the building or the people who might have been trapped inside.
Ðạo in flames—Hng couldn’t bear to think of it. Ðạo choking, gasping for air. Hng walked away as he had walked away from his village’s temple, feeling as if everything vital had been desecrated. He eventually found himself at the shores of Hoàn Kim Lake. He studied the ever-calm surface of the water, willed a turtle to rise from the murk and walked across the red Bridge of the Rising Sun toward the temple on Jade Island.
A single spiral coil of incense burned inside the temple, where once, not long ago, there would have been hundreds. He raised his hands to pray, but a great listlessness overcame him and he abandoned the effort. It was communism that caused the weight in his arms. Religion is a thing of the past, the Party said, an instrument of oppression that keeps the common man in bondage.
But where he found no comfort in the temple any longer, he still prayed each night to the ancestral spirits, lifting Uncle Chin’s photo from its small altar at the back of the shop, dusting it, offering fruit. He prayed for Ðạo’s life, but woke each morning in certain distress, dread lodged like an egg in his throat.
Days passed without any sign of Ðạo or his colleagues. Hng found himself at the threshold of Ðạo’s apartment in the French Quarter. The door had been torn from its hinges. “Bình,” Hng called out, his voice echoing in the front room. “Amie?”
He knocked on the doors of the adjacent apartments to no avail. But someone must have heard him, for the next day, Ðạo’s wife came to see him at the shop. “He must have been sent to a re-education camp,” Amie said.
Hng failed to reply, fearing a fate far worse, having no reassuring words to offer.
“Hng, please tell me you think he has been sent to a re-education camp,” she begged.
Hng could not imagine Ðạo ever abandoning his convictions, but then, perhaps there would be torture and brainwashing, the likes of which Hng had read descriptions of in Nhân Van.
“I will keep the broth hot in anticipation of his return,” Hng said, which became true the moment he uttered it. This would be his vigil.
“Did Ðạo tell you we had another baby, Hng?”
Hng took a step backward, startled by the news.
“Last month. A baby brothe
r for Bình. But the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck.”
Amie’s voice was one of quiet desperation, her expression one of pain. “His face was blue from lack of oxygen,” she continued, “but instead of cutting the cord and freeing him, the midwife just pulled the cord tight.”
“An act of mercy,” Hng said gently. “It must have been too late for the child.”
“But not for the child’s sake, Hng. Not for my sake or Ðạo’s either. Do you know what the midwife said?” Amie’s lips were trembling now. “A child like this will be of no use to the revolution,” she whispered. “This is what prompted Ðạo to go to the country. To finally see the devastation for himself. To be able to write of it.”
Hng suddenly felt Ðạo’s presence, as if they stood side by side bearing witness to the carnage of his village. Ðạo now understood that the revolution would not stop short of murdering everyone who stood in its way. But they had missed the opportunity for this conversation, the moment where Ðạo might have said, Now I understand with my heart, and Hng might have said, Forgiven.
“Perhaps you should take Bình away from Hanoi for the time being,” Hng said.
“Yes,” replied Amie. “We will go back to my mother’s village. You’ll send word to us if you hear anything, won’t you?”
“Of course,” said Hng, leaning over to the rattan drawer. “And take these. They belong to Bình.”
He watched Amie run down the street, her hand gripping the boy’s short chopsticks, her áo dài flapping behind her like a struggling kite.
Shit on a Canvas
Beyond the sound of birds, there is little to suggest it is morning when Maggie strikes a match to light the gas burner. She sits down on a hard wooden chair at the table and waits for the kettle to boil. The sky outside the kitchen window is an industrial grey designed to challenge the most resilient of spirits, so unlike the blue expanse of a Minnesota morning at this time of year. She misses home—the ease and familiarity of it— though she misses fewer people than she expected. It’s easy to assume colleagues as friends until you are no longer working beside them every day.
She always felt herself an alien to some degree—not at work so much, but in the wider world. It happens when people—even the most enlightened among them—can’t resist asking you where you’re from. It reminds you that you have no attachment to the history or geography of a place, except insofar as you are pioneering your way through it in your own lifetime, your roots buried in some faraway earth.
You don’t always want to answer the question.
And the answer is not always the same.
Maggie presses the plunger into the Bodum prematurely, forcing it down with both hands. She adds a thick dollop of condensed milk to the cup and takes her first sip of coffee, pressing a fingertip to the few grains of coffee stuck to her bottom lip.
Despite the dullness of the day, she’s looking forward to spending it with T. He showed her the lake the other day; she introduced him to some art. She wonders if he considers it a fair exchange.
Only in her last year of high school did Maggie realize she wanted a career in art. It had never occurred to her as a possibility before because she lacked artistic talent, something her father must have realized when she was just five years old. She hadn’t known there were options like curation until a trip with her sociology class to see an exhibition documenting the protests in Tiananmen Square.
“But why are they placed so far apart?” she had asked her teacher.
“That was probably a curatorial decision.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the curator takes the work and presents it in such a way as to tell a story. If you read these pieces from left to right, chronologically, you realize how much of the story is missing. All that white space. You go from thousands of people in that shot to only one person in the last shot. Maybe you’re supposed to use your imagination to fill in the gaps.”
When it comes to her father’s story, she has exhausted her imagination. She wants the justice of facts, some hard evidence.
Hng wakes late this morning, battling a storm of a headache. What a relief it would be to lay his head in Lan’s lap as he had once done, the velvet pads of her forefingers massaging his temples in hypnotic circles. He had been working his hardest in those days, his earliest days as a roaming ph seller, seeking customers on empty streets in the mornings, making his broth and pondweed vermicelli in the afternoons, and spending his nights fashioning dung cakes and foraging for reeds for his fire and repairing the cart he had built out of random scraps.
They were sitting together in front of his shack after a late supper— Lan weaving a basket, Hng whittling bamboo chopsticks—when he described the pounding in his head being like that of a blacksmith forging a horseshoe on an anvil.
“Come,” she said, placing the partially finished basket by her side and patting her thighs. “Lay your head here.”
Hng hesitated. Whatever touch had passed between them before had been accidental, or inadvertent.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I used to do this for my brother when his head hurt from too much studying.”
Hng eased himself down onto his back and inched his way up so that his head finally rested in her lap.
“Relax your weight,” she said. “You won’t break me.”
Oh, but how wrong you are, he thought to himself. He could feel his head becoming liquid, melting into her thighs as she drew those sensuous circles around his temples and pressed her fingertips between his eyebrows and on either side of the bridge of his nose.
“Close your eyes,” she instructed him.
He hadn’t realized they were still open.
“Tell me a story,” he whispered.
“But I’m not the storyteller,” she said with a quiet laugh.
“Then you are the healer,” he said, feeling himself drifting off to a place too sublime to be earthly.
That memory alone is enough to part the dark clouds in his head this morning. A ray of light, however fleeting, propels him to gather his things, load up his cart and set off into the day.
On Miss Maggie’s agenda today are two more ateliers. As they set off down the street, T prays that the dandy peacock was just an aberration and that some decency prevails in the world of contemporary art.
They are once again confronted by twenty lanes of traffic between them and the lake. “The quiet inside,” Miss Maggie says of her own accord, closing her eyes for a second before stepping off the curb.
Unusually, T cannot find his own quiet this morning. He is worried about the old man. Hng doesn’t appear to be limping anymore, but his movements have really slowed down since his accident, and something was missing from the ph this morning: it had tasted only ninety per cent complete. T had also spied two neatly folded grey blankets stacked underneath the old man’s cart at breakfast, leading him to wonder if Hng might actually be sleeping at the factory, having lost the energy to travel back and forth.
With Phng being so moody and the old man out of sorts, T begins to wonder if the problem isn’t astrological. There’s not much one can do to negotiate with the planets other than breathe deeply, still the mind with some Zen practice and wait until they orbit back into alignment.
Ts meditation tends to be of a strictly mathematical nature. He recites pi to himself as he glides across the lanes of traffic. He’s at twenty decimal places by the time they reach the lake, fifty-two by the time they reach the Old Quarter.
The sun is putting in a rare appearance. Steam rises where shopkeepers have scrubbed and rinsed the pavement. T puts on his wraparound sunglasses, which instantly add swagger to his walk. He might not have Phng’s good looks, but he knows how to look cool— he hopes Miss Maggie can appreciate this. He wonders if she’s ever had a Vietnamese boyfriend. She’s probably used to American-style dating: eating hamburgers before seeing a Hollywood blockbuster, maybe with Russell Crowe, and then kissing in the back seat of the guy’s
car. Ahh! But they do not live with their parents, so perhaps he is inviting her back into his apartment and they are getting naked while the wide- screen television is blaring some hip hop on MTV.
The thought of none-of-this-waiting-until-married business stirs him up. How many men does the average thirty-something-year-old American woman sleep with before she is married? How many times has Miss Maggie had sex? All that experience might actually lead her to be thoroughly disappointed with a guy like him, he realizes.
They make their way down a winding back alleyway sticky with fish guts and scales. The artist they have an appointment to see lives at the dead end of this alley. Curiously, he has taken the name of a Filipino island—Mindanao, he calls himself. To change one’s name is to defy the parents and the stars; what kind of son would do such a thing? The answer soon becomes apparent.
Against the long wall of his tube house, Mindanao has a row of barrel-chested, straw-stuffed mannequins that must have been left behind by the French, all topped with papier mâché heads. A Vietnamese emperor, a legionnaire with an opium pipe in his mouth, Presidents Bill Clinton and Hu Jintao. The last of the mannequins is topped with the fishbowled head of a Russian cosmonaut.
The rest of his work is even more shocking. A series of paintings hang on the wall, all repulsive nudes with inflamed mouths and genitalia, one of them delivering a pig out his anus. There are serpentine men poking each other with their penises through what looks to be an American flag. A mannequin with a Vietnamese face hangs from the ceiling, suspended by ropes twisted around its clay testicles. The head lolls to one side, tongue hanging out, eyes about to explode.
T is staring aghast, stunned by this creature and his disgusting art.
