by Camilla Gibb
“Come, we’ll have some tea,” says Hng, turning his pots over to dry. He cups his knees and groans as he stands, then makes his way up the slight muddy incline toward his shack.
T ducks through the doorway, then places his palms together by way of greeting his grandfather at his altar while Hng puts the kettle on to boil.
“Did I ever tell you how your grandfather got that scar on his cheek?” Hng asks.
T shakes his head. He’s always thought that line was just a shadow.
“Your grandfather made a very passionate speech, saying that if just one person read the words of their publications, if one single heart was moved, they had done their job: they had succeeded in setting the truth loose in the world.
“There was this man—he wore a beret and carried a thick book, just like they all did back then—who stepped out of the shadows in the corner of the room. He walked toward Ðạo as if he were about to shake his hand and congratulate him for such inspirational words. Once he reached your grandfather, this man raised his book without a word and smashed it with two hands across his face.
“Ðạo fell backward and everyone leapt to their feet. I was down on the floor with him, holding his head, when I saw that it wasn’t a book the man had used to assault your grandfather but a brick wrapped in paper. Ðạo coughed and spat out two of his teeth. His cheek was cut just there where you see the scar. It had been deeply serrated by the edge of the brick: his cheekbone shone like a pearl. I was thankful your father did not have to witness this.
“In the commotion of it all, the stranger slipped out the door. He was a spy, that seemed certain. But Ðạo just said, ‘We cannot let them intimidate us. It just makes it even more important that we carry on.’
“It was a great privilege for me to be the one who stitched his face with a needle and thread. I anaesthetized him with rice whiskey and offered him a bed. He took refuge in my backroom, not wanting to alarm your grandmother or your father with his appearance. But you know, I didn’t see a battered face, I saw a strong face,” he says, pointing at Ðạo’s picture, “that strong jaw.”
T inadvertently strokes his own chin, wondering if he would ever have such courage. Everything about his life can feel petty and selfish when he thinks of the heroism of people in the past. What value is he really adding to the world? He plays some role in introducing foreigners to Vietnam, but the thrill seems to have gone out of it for him recently. More than the thrill.
“Sometimes it’s hard to feel your life has any worth by comparison,” he finds himself saying out loud.
“But it is not a matter for comparison, T,” says Hng. “We all have our place in Buddha’s universe.”
T reaches for the plastic bag and pulls out the high-tops. “I thought maybe you could use some new shoes.”
“Well,” says Hng, clearing his throat. “They’re quite something. Is this the latest fashion?”
“That would probably be the Nike Air Jordans, but these are still pretty cool. Do you like them?”
“Very much,” says Hng, “thank you.” He places them alongside Grandfather Ðạo’s portrait on the ancestral altar. “I wouldn’t want to dirty them, though.”
——
Having sent T on his way with a small packet of lotus seeds for his mother, Hng worries he has made the boy feel insecure. He understands Ts concern about the worth of one’s life. What strikes him is that he hasn’t heard this type of concern expressed in a great many years. Men of Ðạo’s circle might have wondered such things, but no one since would dare posit a question with the individual at its centre. It’s the freedoms of Ði mi, Hng thinks. In some ways, Ts generation shares more with their grandfathers than with their fathers.
He should have told T that a hero is just a man, a person who makes mistakes from time to time. It is natural when speaking of the dead that we tend to remember the heroic things rather than the flawed. Hng has for so long been invested in giving Bình a portrait of his father as a hero that it seems he has forgotten T. The boy might actually be better equipped than someone of his father’s generation to understand the imperfections and contradictions that characterize a man, however great.
Ðạo had dedicated a poem to Hng in the last issue of Nhân Van, though Hng had not read it until years later. He’d never been able to bring himself to turn the pages beyond the editorial that had determined Ðạo’s fate. It was Lan who finally pushed him to do so. Lan with her insatiable appetite, begging him for more. He turned the page of the magazine and stared.
“What is it?” Lan asked, putting her fingertips to the paper.
Hng inhaled deeply before reading the line of dedication. “‘To H who is wise in matters of soup and well beyond.’”
“H,” said Lan. “Is it you?”
Hng read aloud the poem that followed.
Ðạo wrote of longing for those who had disappeared, all the innocent farmers and compromised children. He wrote in the elliptical way of a poet, without naming who was responsible. He had gone well beyond theory and found the stinging heart. Ðạo had atoned through poetry, spanning the differences between their worlds, capturing the tragedy of the countryside so viscerally that Hng could taste blood on his tongue.
Hng stopped reading and wiped his lips.
“What’s the matter?” Lan asked.
“My mouth,” he said, turning toward her. “Is it bleeding?”
She put her delicate finger to his chin and said, “Open.” She peered into his mouth. “There is no blood. But, Hng,” she added, “I can taste it too.”
Hng still holds that poem somewhere deep inside him. He can share stories about the Beauty of Humanity Movement with T, with Bình, even with a relative stranger like Miss Maggie, but he has not been able to share poetry with another soul. Not since the day he returned home from peddling his pondweed noodles to discover all his papers— the journals and the poems, every single one of them—gone.
He had torn the place apart. He had wept for years, not observably, but on the inside. The poems that he had memorized slowly bled out of him from lack of use. Is this why his chest hurts now?
He swallows a good medicinal dose of Bình’s rice wine as the sun beyond his shack sinks into the ground. He toasts Ðạo’s picture upon the altar, framed and illuminated by a ridiculous pair of shoes.
T returns to the Metropole at half past five and paces the lobby while he waits for Miss Maggie. He’s rehearsing a speech in his mind, one that will allow them both to save face. If she pushes, as Americans tend to push, and forces him to say something less than polite, it will be she who is at fault for not knowing the Vietnamese culture.
Miss Maggie approaches with a smile and her jacket folded over her arm. “I thought we could get out of here,” she says. “Go somewhere for a drink.”
“Um. Yes?” says T, disarmed by her informality.
“And please try to call me Maggie,” she says over her shoulder as they snake their way up the sidewalk. “The Miss just makes me feel like a schoolteacher.”
Maggie, Maggie, T repeats in his head as he follows her to a place he doesn’t know even though he thought he knew almost every bar in the city. It’s a funny little Russian vodka bar called Na zdorovye— “cheers”—the only Russian word T knows because they replaced Russian with English as the second language in schools in 1988.
Which is just fine with him. T finds everything Russian, apart from perestroika and glasnost, a bit sad. The crappy Minsk motorbikes and the cloudy potato vodka that makes you sick and all the stories of young Vietnamese who got scholarships from the Russian government to study in Moscow but ended up freezing to death alone in unheated apartment blocks in winter.
That whole generation of sour-faced old men now very high up in the Party got their training in Russia, men who probably fantasize about being one of the ones whose brain is sent to Moscow after they are dead to be sliced into a thousand pieces and mounted onto Plexiglas sheets revealing many things of great importance to the scientific
community.
Russia is the absolute last place in the world T would like to visit. He might even prefer to see shit on a canvas.
The vodka bar is stuffy and windowless, full of smoke and the clash of foreign languages. They sink into a red velvet sofa, which feels a bit damp. T checks to make sure there aren’t mushrooms growing between the cushions. Miss Maggie, Maggie, orders vodka for both of them, then clinks her glass against his. T is not used to women who drink, and he wonders what people in the bar must think of their unusual pairing. She is at least ten years older than him, certainly of an age where she should be married.
“So tell me,” she says. “Your friend said you were offended by some of the art you saw.”
T has a screed in his head about the greed and arrogance of artists like Mindanao and the one who was a dandy peacock who are only making art for money, growing bloated and arrogant in their service of the foreign market, behaving like French plantation owners and getting rich off the backs of the Vietnamese slaves who are doing the actual work. And what about people in positions of influence like Miss Maggie? They are no better—encouraging and indulging these artists in their crude misrepresentations of the country and presumably, like all those foreign gallery owners, getting rich in this process themselves. He expects more of someone of Vietnamese heritage, but that is the deceptive lie of her face.
He is too schooled in politeness, however, to offer anything more than, “I am simply uncomfortable with the ways in which Vietnam is being represented in many of these contemporary art galleries.”
“How so?” she asks.
The subject of Mindanao’s pornography is too uncomfortable to raise with a lady, even one of questionable values. “You would think we are all still pulling ploughs by hand and sleeping alongside pigs and oxen,” he says.
“That’s what sells, I’m afraid. A kind of timeless and romantic fantasy of Vietnam. No unpleasantness. No war.”
“But we don’t live like this,” T stammers. “Where is the truth in it? In the past, there were artists and writers who would risk their lives to depict reality rather than some socialist utopia.”
“I know,” she says quietly. “My father was one of them.”
“Seriously?”
“No joke.”
“Huh,” he says, cocking his head to the side to get a better look at her, a different angle. So who was her father? And if he was such a principled man, shouldn’t she know better than to indulge these contemporary artists in their gross distortions of Vietnamese life? Ts mind floods with questions, but before he has a chance to ask any of them, she slides an envelope full of money—good crisp American dollar bills, from what he can see—across the table.
“For the days you worked,” she says.
T quickly sweeps the envelope off the table into his lap. It might look like he’s taking some kind of bribe, and you never know who’s watching.
“So,” he says quickly, changing the subject. “Your father was from Hanoi?”
Miss Maggie nods as she stares at the bottom of her empty glass. “He was an artist here in the forties and fifties,” she says.
“Ah, so this is why you have such an interest in Vietnamese art.”
“Yes,” she says.
“Would you like another drink?” T asks, intrigue now trumping anger. “Maggie.”
“I shouldn’t,” she says, then pauses. “Oh, all right, then.” She nods her head at the waitress and points at their empty glasses.
“I understand why you find that work offensive,” she says.
“And you don’t?” he asks, emboldened by the drink. “Would you rather see shit on a canvas?”
“Hah,” she laughs. “You mean Mindanao. I know. I understand what he’s doing, but that doesn’t mean I like it and it doesn’t mean he isn’t an asshole.”
T bursts out laughing and quickly slaps his palms over his mouth. He has never in his life heard a lady use such a word. Wait until he tells Phng.
“It’s an issue of freedom of expression,” she continues. “The artists and writers who used to frequent Old Man Hng’s restaurant? They were shut down because the Party didn’t like what they had to say. You can’t really defend them without extending the right to someone like Mindanao, whatever you might think of his work.”
Perhaps this is what Phng was suggesting the other night when he slapped those ugly lyrics onto Ts ears.
“Hey—did the old man know your father?” T asks, suddenly realizing the likely connection between them.
“He might have. It’s possible he was part of that group, or at least known to them. Unfortunately the old man isn’t sure.”
“Your father might have known my Grandfather Ðạo then.”
Miss Maggie smiles. A very lovely smile that causes a ripple in Ts stomach. He attempts to reciprocate, though he knows he cannot offer her comparable loveliness given the stains on his upper teeth. He imagines their ancestors looking down on them: beauty and the beast.
“That’s a nice thought,” says Miss Maggie. “Hng said he was in good company.”
“You must come again for breakfast,” says T. “The old man’s memory is a bit random. Maybe next time will be your lucky day.”
The Memory of Taste
The sun has not yet risen when Maggie climbs aboard the motorbike behind T and wraps her arms around his middle. T is mortified by the erection that springs up in response to her hands. He remembers the way Phng looked her up and down as she walked toward them in the hotel lobby the other day, and his erection quickly leads to thoughts of what she might look like naked. He is forced to conjure up an unpleasant memory of the Australian who pissed off Phng in order to kill his erection before they arrive at the Chng Dng Bridge.
This is not the best of Old Man Hng’s locations, given that people use the space under the bridge as a toilet and the smell of urine is very strong. Thankfully one forgets this as soon as one raises a steaming bowl to one’s nose, as T assures Maggie, standing in line behind his father.
“Ah,” the old man says to Maggie. “You’ve finally come to me again. I was beginning to worry that perhaps you did not like my ph.”
“She came with me,” T says proprietarily over Maggie’s shoulder.
“I’m glad to see you have become friends,” says Hng, making T feel self-conscious. “I’m afraid nothing has come to mind about your father.”
“Actually, there was something I should have mentioned,” says Maggie. “His hands. After the camp, they were like claws.”
“So he could no longer paint,” says Hng.
“No, not really.”
“That must have been very hard for him. It reminds me of a poet I knew who lost his tongue.”
“But how did he eat?” T interjects, the steam rising from his bowl.
“He used his imagination,” says Hng, “his memory of taste.”
Ts father asks him to hold his bowl so he can lay his windbreaker down on the sloping concrete ground for Ts guest to sit upon.
“That’s not necessary,” she says, “but thank you.”
T wishes he had thought of this gallant gesture, but then his father is displaying rare animation this morning, obviously impressed by the new company his son is keeping. He takes his bowl from T and squats down between them, leaning over to suck back a few quick spoonfuls of broth. “Ah,” he says, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “Miss Maggie,” he says then, clearing his throat. “Tell me, what is it like to grow up Vietnamese in America?”
She raises her eyebrows and T is made uncomfortable by his father’s directness. In tourism college they were taught that American notions of what constitutes a personal question are quite different from their own. T has learned this the hard way, through responses to questions like: And what do they pay you to be a pharmaceutical representative with GlaxoSmithKline, Mr. Clark? Is this lady your wife or your daughter? Do they have the death penalty in your state of Texas? Why are the insides of your ears so hairy?
“I
t was complicated,” Maggie replies. “When I was young, especially, you know, in the years just after the war.”
“I spent most of the war hiding in the caves at Tam Cc,” Ts father says. He throws his head back, moves his hand up his chest and indicates rising water. He pretends to be gasping for breath.
T stares at his father with astonishment, so slack-jawed that he is forgetting to eat. His father is not a conversational man.
“One day my mother saw Vit Minh soldiers coming toward the caves in a sampan,” Bình continues. “Thanks to my mother and a sharp stick, I was not conscripted,” he says, pointing at the glass eye that eventually replaced the one his mother damaged.
Miss Maggie cringes. T wishes his father didn’t have to be so graphic.
“You know, I saw an American soldier once,” Bình carries on, sitting with his bowl now clenched between his knees. “I had been fishing in the river and I was making my way back to the village when I heard the crack of a tree branch above. I looked up and I saw an American soldier hugging the trunk. His plane must have been shot down. I remember the look in his eyes and I could see he was afraid of me—just a boy with two small fish—and so I looked away and left him to hug this tree, far away from his comrades and his country. He was gone the next day. I had been hoping to give him a fish.”
T has never heard this story before and is beginning to feel rather excluded. “So, uh, Miss Maggie, Maggie,” he interrupts. “Can you tell what is so special about Old Man Hng’s broth?”
“Maybe the way the taste evolves in your mouth?”
“That comes from years of experience,” Ts father says. “It is an indication of the strength of Hng’s commitment to his craft that even in the years we had no rice he could find a way to make noodles.”
“And he doesn’t get bored of making the same thing day after day?”
“It’s like religion for him,” T says.
At that moment, Phng jumps down from the bridge above, waving his arms, shaking the keys to the van. He’s brought the company vehicle so that Bình can take the motorbike to work. Maggie and T have to move now—Phng has left the van parked on the bridge above.
