The Beauty of Humanity Movement

by Camilla Gibb

  T drains and rinses their bowls, shoves them into a plastic bag, then climbs up the bank and hops into the van. T has his face plastered to the glass as he watches Maggie saying a long goodbye to his father. Bình is unusually expressive, his fingers moving in the air like they are folding origami.

  T taps his fingernails against the glass impatiently.

  “You shouldn’t get so involved with foreigners,” says Phng. “I’m a tour guide, Phng; it’s in the job description. Besides, she has a deeper connection to this country than you know.”

  Phng snorts.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  Miss Maggie steps inside the van just then and Phng immediately hits play on the CD player.

  “This is Phng’s music,” T says in English. “What do you think?”

  “It’s not really the kind of music I listen to normally,” she says, “but the beat, it’s kind of infectious.”

  The booming bass accompanies them all the way to the Metropole. So does the delicate floral scent of Maggie’s perfume, which floats above the mint of the Happy Toothpaste air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror and causes Ts nostrils to flare.

  “What does infectious mean?” Phng asks as they watch Maggie walk up the hotel steps, both of them staring at her behind.

  “I think it’s something like a disease,” T says with considerable satisfaction.

  Maggie feels warmed through, sated but not inflated, though having been raised on the sweeter broths and abundant garnishes of America, she has to admit she finds the ph here, Hng’s included, a bit austere.

  When she was a child, her mother had taken her for a bowl of ph downtown once a week. She never cooked it herself, never passed on a recipe—too hot, she said, too much work—but what she really meant was, How would I know who was marrying whom, who had lost her life savings at a casino and whose son was going to become a dentist?

  It had to be the gossip that drew her, because it certainly wasn’t the ph. People get lazy in the U.S., she always said. Too many ingredients and too much choice leads cooks to take shortcuts, flavouring weak broth with things from packages and jars. Beware the evil of the stock cube.

  Maggie remembers the salad her mother used to make, dressed with a mixture of fish sauce, sugar, garlic and lime juice. She would peel a cucumber, then slice it very finely. She would tear mint leaves and coriander and slice tiny red shallots and a red chili. Then she would cut five niches around the edges of a carrot and produce a cascade of orange flowers with her knife.

  As Maggie climbs up the hotel steps, she unzips her purse, reaching into it for the velvety reassurance of worn paper. She had brought one of her father’s pictures with her to breakfast in the hope that there might be an opportunity to show it to the old man, but after hearing about the poet who lost his tongue and meeting Bình, such a gentleman, laying down his jacket for her to sit upon, a man whose own mother had caused him to lose an eye in order to save the rest of him, she couldn’t pull the drawing from her purse. Everyone has a painful story. Her father’s is just one of millions.

  T is back to regular work with the agency, but despite the wide stretch of his New Dawn smile, he feels his shoulders stiffening this morning as he shakes the hand of Mr. Bob Brentwood from North Dakota. It is the man’s receding hairline, the belly spilling over the belt holding up his khaki trousers and the fact that he is travelling alone that tell T Mr. Bob Brentwood is a vet on a war tour.

  While T wants to offer such tourists a broader history of the city, the ancient things that existed long before the war, they are generally only interested in the story since 1965, most specifically the lake where Senator John McCain was shot down and his prison cell at the Hanoi Hilton. They have come to Vietnam to see the DMZ, China Beach, My Lai, Khe Sanh Combat Base, the Rex Hotel, the C Chi tunnels, imperial Hu, the Hanoi Hilton—places that make them very choked up with emotion.

  If T said “China Beach” to an ordinary Vietnamese person, even one who had lived through the war, they would think he was talking about a beach in China. If he said, “Hanoi Hilton,” they would think first of a hotel.

  T didn’t know many of these places until he’d had a full week of lessons on the subject in tourism college. He also learned the names and plots of various movies—Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Hamburger Hill and Rambo: First Blood—all of which are banned in Vietnam, but all of which he, like all his friends, has secretly watched on pirated DVDs from Malaysia.

  Tourists often tell T that they have every intention of going straight back to the U.S. to lobby the government to compensate the victims of Agent Orange. And how can they help the Vietnamese people here, right now? they want to know.

  What can you do here? Spend your money, thinks T. Did you shoot a Viet Cong rifle at the C Chi tunnels? Play with the AK-47s the communists used against you? Sample the manioc the soldiers lived on throughout the war? Crawl into a tunnel that was widened to accommodate the very non-Vietnamese width of your behind? Excellent. I hope you had a very nice time. And if you would still like to spend some more money? Well, then you can consider giving me a very good tip.

  For Mr. Bob Brentwood, T suggests an itinerary that would satisfy anyone on a war tour. “And for lunch I would like to recommend the favourite restaurant of Bill Clinton,” he concludes with great enthusiasm.

  “What about the favourite restaurant of your president?” Mr. Brentwood asks.

  “Of course,” T says because he doesn’t know how else to respond.

  Mr. Bob Brentwood is not displaying predictable behaviour. Rather surprisingly, he brushes Ts proposed itinerary aside and says that he has become a Buddhist in recent years and would like to visit a temple. While T has met young white Buddhists before, this is his first old one. The young ones have often shaved their heads and declare they have given up meat and alcohol, and even sex in some cases, and just once he would like to ask one of them why they feel it is necessary to be so extreme to be a Buddhist.

  “Which temple would you recommend?” Mr. Bob Brentwood asks.

  T immediately thinks of his mother’s favourite—that of the Trng sisters. They have commanded an audience for two thousand years despite the Chinese defeat of their short-lived dynasty, which led the sisters to drown themselves in the river.

  Inside their temple, giant spiral cones of incense hang from the ceiling. The smoke snakes and billows, and ashes fall limply to the floor. T leads Mr. Brentwood through the fog of incense toward the altar. T bows to the statues of the kneeling Trng sisters with their copperleaf crowns, their arms outstretched to receive their audience.

  T admittedly finds it hard to imagine a world where such sacrifice would be necessary: today one is more likely to kill oneself because of debt or drug addiction or a broken heart than for reasons of protest or principle. He whispers a few words of prayer to ward off debt or drug addiction or a broken heart in his own life, then stares upward at the cards that hang from the burning coils of incense.

  “What are the tags for?” Mr. Brentwood asks, his eyes watering.

  “You give some đng to have your name written down on a card, and then the incense carries your prayers up,” says T.

  Mr. Brentwood pulls some đng from his pocket, and T gestures to a novice monk. The monk pulls the card down from the coil and passes it to Mr. Brentwood along with a pen that he pulls from his orange folds. Mr. Brentwood places the card on his thigh, bends his knee and writes down his name before saying, “How do you spell your name?”

  “My name, Mr. Brentwood?” T stammers.

  “I’d like to pray we can forgive each other.”

  This man is looking for forgiveness? From him? It is Ts job to understand and respond to the needs of his clients—but forgiveness? Even when General Khi welcomed President Bill Clinton he didn’t offer him forgiveness. Nor did the general demand an apology. He simply said that it is better to make up for what happened in the past with actions in the present.

  T finds himself
in a very uncomfortable position. Mr. Brentwood is looking at him with some kind of emotion on his face. Emotion is admittedly not a subject in which T has developed much expertise. Tact and sensitivity in the face of the foreigner’s emotions, he reminds himself—rule #10. The instructors at tourism college had cautioned him about dealing with Vietnam vets and couples who are adopting babies from Vietnam, particularly the women. “Their opinions might be very different from your own,” his instructors said, “but it is your job to remain neutral and friendly. Give them your best Vietnamese smile, and when in doubt? Just change the subject.”

  “I think it is best you put your name alone,” T finally says. The man is trying hard to be a good person, T can see this, but still, he cannot give Mr. Brentwood what he wants.

  The Campaign to Rectify Errors

  Hng had sensed Miss Maggie in the line this morning before he’d even seen her. Perhaps he’d smelled something sweet beyond the familiar warmth of his broth. He had not been surprised to learn of her father’s mangled hands, though he wishes such a lovely girl were not familiar with this kind of suffering. The cruelest torture in the camps had often been the most deliberate, destroying the mouth of a poet, the mind of an intellectual, the will of a man of resolve.

  The propaganda could lead one to believe that much of the inmate’s time in a re-education camp was spent in a classroom. Lessons on Stalinism and productive socialist thinking, lectures condemning American imperialism and the puppetry of the South. But Hng knew the truth beyond the propaganda; they all did.

  Hng had never felt such loneliness as he did those first few months after Ðạo and his colleagues disappeared. Having been surrounded by their company for so many years, only to have it all taken away, was far worse than the isolation he had felt in childhood.

  As much as he missed Bình, at least he could assume the boy was safe, far away in his grandmother’s village. But where Ðạo had been taken, if Ðạo was even still alive, Hng didn’t know. The re-education camps were scattered throughout the North, inmates constantly being shuffled between them precisely so that their families could not locate them and interrupt the progress of their ideological retraining.

  As he’d promised Amie, Hng kept his shop open as if it were a lighthouse, a bright star to guide the men home. He counted their absence in months, months during which he made ph from less and less every day, marking the arrival of each new moon with a knife blade against a wall, each cut a little deeper than the last.

  Independent businesses in the city had begun to close all around him. Little food reached the city anymore. Millions of hectares of farmland had been razed to remove those peasants stubborn enough to remain. Didn’t the Party understand that no one who had survived the devastation of land reform would be able to forgive their brutality? They had murdered families, hundreds of thousands of them, including his own. The new collective farms were failing to produce. Who had the will for such a thing? More than a million people had fled south.

  One day in late 1956, Hng was drawn out of his shop. The streets were filled with H Chí Minh’s message of personal apology. The Party would now launch the Campaign to Rectify Errors: those who had been wrongfully charged as landowners were to be reclassified as “middle peasants.”

  But it’s too late, Hng wanted to shout. Like his parents, most of these people were already dead and gone. Gone too was Hng’s favourite butcher, gone was all the beef. Gone too was the spice man, the salt and pepper, the cinnamon and star anise. Gone were the rice sellers, the noodle makers, the fish sauce and soy peddlers. Gone were all the dogs from the streets.

  And in place of all that was gone? Government shops, their shelves tragic displays of meagre produce farmed by labourers in camps that would soon kill half a million more.

  Hng bought what he could with his ration card, but he lost days to standing in line. Ten hours of waiting for chicken only to be told there was no chicken left. No option of trying a store in another district. This is the district in which you are registered. There is no chicken left, only bones. Here: there is turnip instead.

  He’d boiled onions and chicken bones and lime leaves he plucked from a tree by the lake until the tree was left naked. He floated chunks of taro in water and fed five to ten faithful regulars a broth too weak to be called soup.

  Then, one morning twenty-three months after Hng had last seen Ðạo and his colleagues, Phan Khôi, the aging revolutionary who had edited Nhân Van, appeared at the entrance to Hng’s shop. Phan Khôi, who had always struck Hng as imposing, now looked as shrivelled and harmless as a one-hundred-and-ten-year-old walnut. His eyes had sunk deep into his skull. He had no teeth with which to chew and no tongue left with which to speak.

  “You’ll have some broth, won’t you?” said Hng, trying to encourage him to take a bowl, but Phan Khôi shook his head and waved the bowl away. It was as if he simply wanted to be seen, that was all, and when he vanished that morning as suddenly as he’d appeared, Hng was left to wonder if he had just been visited by a ghost.

  But two days later the ghost returned and so too, eventually, the fewest words.

  “This is the world after the end,” Phan Khôi struggled to say, his voice a gurgled whisper in the dark backroom of Hng’s shop. “We are all ghosts now, Hng. There is no more beauty. Perhaps Ðạo is the luckier one in the end.”

  Hng sank onto his mattress in despair. In keeping his shop open he had been performing a vigil, keeping hope alive. He had been wilfully naive. Ðạo was gone, Phan Khôi had confirmed it. The world would never be the same.

  It hardly mattered when Party officials came to requisition Hng’s shop for their own use in 1959. Hng’s remaining customers had nothing left to offer him except their tales of suffering. He had nothing left to offer them but rain and river water.

  Hng ran to the backroom and grabbed the Nhân Van magazines, Fine Works of Spring and Autumn, and all the handwritten poems he had accumulated over the years, quickly stuffing them into a burlap sack. The Party officials followed, pushing him out of the backroom and into the alleyway and claiming possession of the building, saying he would be charged as bourgeoisie if he did not simply walk away.

  And so he’d walked away, but not simply. He’d walked to the shores of this muddy pond. He’d caught a duck, fed his neighbours, met a girl, shared Ðạo’s poetry. Then he’d sent a note to Ðạo’s wife and son in the village on the Sông C River.

  Dear Mrs. Amie and young Bình,

  I am sorrier than I know how to express. I had been praying Ðạo was sent to a re-education camp just like his teacher Phan Khôi. I felt sure that whatever Ðạo might be forced to endure, he would one day reappear in Hanoi. Phan Khôi told me Ðạo did not even make it as far as a camp. They chose not to re-educate in his case.

  I will honour Ðạo like my own ancestor and keep a stick of incense burning in his memory for all eternity, at least all the eternity I have left since I have no descendants to continue the tradition after I am gone. I hope the countryside teaches you many things, Bình. I would welcome your visit should you ever return to Hanoi.

  Hng

  Maggie takes a hotel car to Ðng Ð district at the concierge’s insistence. “It’s not a good place,” he says. “Especially at night.” Rikia had said much the same thing after calling her husband. “He spoke to his driver, but he is only willing to let me pass this information on to you because I told him you were setting up a charity for the poor.

  “Take this at least,” she said as Maggie was about to leave the kitchen, handing her a lemon meringue pie destined for the garbage because of the slightest singe to its edges. “It will make me feel like less of a liar.”

  Maggie needn’t have worried about asking the driver to let her out before getting to the shantytown. He comes to a stop, his headlights illuminating a potholed and rocky dirt track. “You’ll have to walk from here,” he says. “I’m not going to lose a muffler over this.”

  The driver turns on his high beams and illuminates
the first fifty metres of the track, but as soon as Maggie passes over a slight rise, she is plunged into darkness. As she stares ahead into the unknown, she’s less convinced this is such a good idea. What if the old man resents the intrusion? What if the picture means nothing to him?

  An hour ago she was in her office entering names and descriptions of pieces of art into a database. She has devoted herself to cataloguing and preserving the hotel’s collection, yet her father’s drawings are in terrible shape. The one she’d brought to breakfast with her this morning was lying flat on her desk. She ran her fingers down its nearly translucent creases. Leaned over and inhaled its musty smell. She can take it in with all her senses, but the meaning of this particular drawing has always eluded her.

  Her father’s story might be one of millions, but it is still the one that matters most to her. She reaches into her pocket for the reassurance of the paper and carries on walking in the dark, sticking to the middle of the track, listening for creatures in the verges. The air is pulsating with the night’s crickets and acrid with the smell of burning kerosene. She tenses her shoulders, gripping a bottle of wine under her arm, and keeps her eyes fixed on the fires burning in the distance. She tries not to squeeze the cake box she holds in her other hand.

  Maggie is close enough to the shantytown to hear voices when something flies out of the dark and smacks her on the thigh.

  “Jesus!” she yelps, leaping backward.

  “Money,” says a boy in English, his hand outstretched.

  “You scared the crap out of me.”

  “Money, Mister. Pencil.”

  “Who taught you to beg?” she reprimands in Vietnamese, causing the boy to scurry off.

  “Stranger coming! Lady stranger!” she hears him shout.

  So much for an unobtrusive entrance. She sees the outlines of people assembling at the end of the track.