The Beauty of Humanity Movement

by Camilla Gibb

  Before Maggie has a chance to explain herself, a woman is pressing silk pillowcases against her skin. “You buy,” she says in English. “Very good price.”

  A teenage boy waves a fan of postcards before her eyes. Someone else tries to tempt her with a bottle of Coke, tapping his fingernail against the glass.

  “I’ve just come to visit someone,” says Maggie.

  “Lady,” says the boy who first ran into her, “what is in the box?”

  “It’s a pie.” She opens the lid of the box and everyone leans in to have a look.

  “Ooh,” says the boy, wiggling his finger toward the crust.

  “Van!” a woman shouts, slapping the boy’s wrist.

  “Who are you coming to visit?” a pockmarked man asks.

  “Old Man Hng,” she says. “Can you tell me where I might find him?”

  “He lives beside the spinster Lan,” says the woman who just slapped Van’s wrist. “I’ll show you,” says the boy.

  “Here,” Maggie says, holding out the cake box to the group. “Please, you can share this. It’s very good.”

  “Hng first,” says the pockmarked man, pulling Van away from the box.

  Van natters away as Maggie follows him, re-enacting some pivotal moment from a soccer game that is lost on her while they weave between shacks, through hanging laundry, past people huddled around small fires. The boy hoofs an imaginary ball into the air, jumps up to meet it with his head, adds a karate kick for good measure, then segues into the plot of a Bruce Lee movie he says he saw projected onto the side of a building last year during Tet.

  He stops in front of a row of shacks facing a pond and bellows through the doorway of one them: “Foreign lady for Mr. Hng!”

  Maggie winces. Old Man Hng pokes his head through the doorway. His hair is sticking up off his head and he is wearing a tattered grey undershirt.

  “What are you yelling about, Van? I’m not deaf.”

  “A lady is here to see you.”

  “I’m very sorry to disturb you, Mr. Hng.”

  “Miss Maggie?” The old man squints and pats his chest as if looking for a pair of glasses. “Is something wrong?”

  “I just wanted to talk to you, if that’s okay. I didn’t get a chance this morning.”

  “Come.” He beckons her into his shack. “Off you go, Van.”

  “But Old Man Hng—”

  “Yes?”

  “There is a cake,” the boy whispers.

  Maggie offers the old man the box and opens the lid for him.

  “From your room service?” he asks.

  “From the restaurant,” she assures him. “The chef is excellent.”

  The old man peers inside the box and inhales. “I smell lemon, but what is this on top?”

  “That’s meringue,” says Maggie. “They beat the egg whites with sugar until they’re stiff and then bake the whole thing at a low heat.”

  “Huh,” says the old man. “I’ve never seen such a thing.”

  “I will get you a knife, Mr. Hng,” says the expectant boy, bounding off, shouting, “Ma! Ma! Get a knife!”

  Maggie follows the old man into his shack. His few belongings are stacked neatly on wooden crates, but the space is narrow and cramped, with nowhere to sit down really except upon his mattress.

  Van pokes his head through the door of Hng’s shack a minute later. He holds a crude knife with a roughly serrated edge that looks like it could skin the hide off an animal. Hng takes it from the boy and slices the pie in half. “There’s plenty enough there to share, Van,” says Hng, as the boy receives half the pie with grateful hands and a gleeful yelp and disappears into the night.

  “I brought you some wine as well,” says Maggie, handing Old Man Hng the bottle she has held clamped under her arm.

  “That’s very generous of you,” he says, turning the bottle around in his hands. “Is this the kind they make from grapes?”

  “It is.” She nods. “French.”

  “Ðạo will enjoy this,” he says, rising to place the bottle in front of a candlelit altar. “Bình’s father. Ts grandfather. He was a man of European tastes despite himself.”

  Hng places the bottle and a slice of the pie alongside an orange, a banana and some grains of rice positioned in front of a framed picture. Maggie doesn’t know what to make of the very white pair of basketball shoes also parked there.

  Hng stares at the picture, the face of a man, for some time. His lips move as if he is reciting a prayer, and Maggie feels as if she is interrupting a private moment. She’s not even sure the old man remembers she’s there.

  “Mr. Hng?” she prompts gently.

  Hng looks at Maggie for a few seconds as if trying to place her. “They slit Ðạo’s throat,” he says. “The very day that they came to arrest him.”

  Maggie doesn’t know what to say. “I’m so sorry,” she eventually utters. “You know,” he says, turning away from the altar, back toward her, “that story of your father’s escape from a camp raises the question of whether it’s possible any of the men I knew might have managed to escape.”

  Maggie takes this as her cue. She pulls her father’s drawing from her jacket pocket. “I wanted to show you this,” she says nervously, laying it down on Hng’s mattress. She’s worried he’ll think it clumsy. That he’ll dismiss it as insignificant or unintelligible.

  “My father drew several like it for me when I was a child,” she says. Hng leans over the drawing then picks it up, holding it to the weak light. He reaches for a pair of glasses. They are thick-rimmed and don’t have the elegance of the previous pair. They don’t seem to be the right strength for him either. He holds them like a magnifying glass rather than putting them on.

  “It’s a bit blurry,” Maggie says. “Smudged.”

  “Cats,” Hng remarks. “In a fight. ‘Once we were Siamese,’” he says, reading the bubble of text that floats halfway up the page.

  “I’ve never fully understood it.”

  “The North and South. The country was ripped apart by the partition in ’54.” Hng slowly raises his finger. “‘The skin of a fruit, discarded; a skinless fruit,’” he says.

  His mouth hangs open. His pupils float toward the corrugated tin ceiling, his finger still poised in the air. He looks like a man watching stars fall to earth. Mesmerized, Hng begins to whisper to himself, barely audible. He sways back and forth like a child.

  Maggie hears something about a homeless man. The line, “Your fruit is a feast for maggots.”

  Hng coughs and raises his hand to his chest. He continues to cough, then splutter.

  Maggie reaches out to touch the old man’s back. “Did you ever have that X-ray, Mr. Hng?”

  The old man closes his eyes and leans his head back against the wall of his shack. His bottom lip quivers and tears pool in the corner of his eyes. “It’s not that,” he whispers. “I thought it was gone. I didn’t think I could remember anything beyond the first line.”

  ——

  Maggie’s perfume still lingers, or is it the cake that is in fact a pie that he smells? Hng cannot be sure. His senses are as confused as his emotions. Something in him has been rattled loose. Perhaps this is what the release of tears does to you; having so little experience with the phenomenon, he really doesn’t know.

  Hng has only shed tears once before in his adult life—at the sight of Bình returning twenty-five years after his mother took him away.

  One unremarkable day in the years after the war, a man of Ðạo’s likeness arrived in the shantytown on a bicycle. “Uncle Hng,” the man had said.

  Hng pulled Bình—now a grown man—into his shack and showed him the ancestral shrine he’d built in Ðạo’s honour.

  “I apologize for the fact that the drawing is not a perfect likeness,” he said, but Bình had already closed his eyes. Hng joined the man in prayer. When Hng opened his eyes some minutes later, water was dripping from his chin onto the front of his shirt. It had taken him a moment to understand the source.
>
  In all these years since their reunion Hng has never been able to recite any of Ðạo’s poetry. The last person to hear the poems was Lan, the girl who had sat beside him under weak moonlight decades ago, repeating back to him those lines that pleased her most.

  A feast of flowers breeds butterflies of a thousand hues.

  The angels of revolution float on gossamer wings.

  Her lips were like cherry blossom, new and pink in spring.

  Lan’s lips had been like cherry blossom. He had even dared to put his finger to the centre of her plump bottom lip as she delivered that line, speaking it as if she had written it herself. She had paused, not breathing, then touched the delicate tip of her tongue to the rough tip of his finger, transforming him from a solid into a liquid. She had closed her lips around the tip of his finger and sucked, taking in the entire liquid being of him as if through a straw.

  Hng can taste the salt of Ðạo’s words in his mouth when he wakes. He yearns for something sweet. He pulls the paper box perched on the crate that holds his clothes toward him and sticks his fingers into Maggie’s lemon meringue pie.

  The Real Vietnam

  To see the old man smile at Maggie when he sees her again this morning, to see the gleam of his new dentures, affirms Ts own positive assessment of her.

  Ts father had also smiled at her when she emerged from her apartment building. He’d even attempted some English. “Good morning, Miss Maggie,” he said as she climbed onto the back of the Honda Dream II, the three of them riding together to breakfast.

  T felt a bit embarrassed; his father pronounced his vowels like a deaf man. “Have you been reading my English phrase book?” he yelled into his father’s ear as they lunged into traffic.

  Bình laughed and said he was just doing a bit of mental calisthenics; good to exercise the brain with a new challenge once in a while.

  His father thinks English is a language only for the young. It’s Russian he knows as a second language.

  “I was wondering, Maggie, is there ph in America?” Hng asks over Ts shoulder this morning. “Have the Vit Ki’êu managed to keep the recipe alive?”

  Maggie clearly enjoys the question. Her eyebrows do a little dance as she says, “Every major city has its little Saigon, and even in small towns you often find a couple of Vietnamese restaurants, usually in a row.”

  T has met plenty of Americans familiar with the taste of ph, but her description paints a new culinary picture of the U.S. in his mind. He tends to think of uninterrupted kilometres of hamburger chains and Kentucky Fried Chickens. The latter came to Saigon last year, the first and only one of the American fast-food chains allowed into Vietnam, and while T has never tasted Kentucky Fried Chicken, there are people eating ph on the streets of New York. And maybe even in smaller towns like Little Rock, Arkansas, home of Bill Clinton. Perhaps while the Vietnamese are becoming more Americanized, America is becoming more Vietnamesized!

  “I am very glad to hear there is ph in America, even if it has to be Saigon ph,” says Old Man Hng. “For all its riches, America would be a very poor place without it.”

  Ts father is once again being a gentleman, laying his windbreaker down on the ground for Maggie. Oh, thank you. Are you sure? That’s so kind of you. What about you?—too much fuss and too many thank- yous, just like a typical American.

  Steam rises from their bowls, dissipating in the air.

  “So how’s work?” Maggie asks T. “No more encounters with offensive art and artists, I hope.”

  “No more art or artists,” he says. “Just Americans and their obsession with the war.”

  “It runs very deep in the American psyche,” says Maggie.

  If the Vietnamese were so obsessed, if they didn’t get over the war and allowed themselves to be haunted or just lay down like dogs, where would they be today? In the South they’d be speaking Khmer; in the North they’d be speaking Mandarin. The Vietnamese would be yet another ethnic minority being kicked about like a football by the big boots in Beijing.

  “Sometimes I feel it is all about them, not really about Vietnam at all,” T finds himself saying rather boldly. “Even among those who say they are here to learn about the country, me still seems to be their favourite word.”

  “But it is all about them, isn’t it? It’s the business of tourism.”

  Has T been naive in thinking his job has something to do with introducing people to Vietnam? But then, come to think of it, how can they possibly see anything beyond stereotypes when the tourism industry gives them war tours and movie tours and romance of Indochina tours, and a hotel like the Metropole drives them about town in a ’53 Citroën, perhaps taking them to a gallery where they can purchase a souvenir in the form of a three-thousand-dollar painting of a lady in an áo dài riding a bicycle alongside a lazy river?

  T feels quite unsettled. “Don’t you think they want to see the real Vietnam?” he asks.

  “But what’s the real Vietnam, T? This is a country that erases its own history. Anything that goes against the Party. Your grandfather. My father. Millions of people. And if people aren’t being censored? They’re busy hiding anyway. Desperately trying to save face.”

  Ts father looks uncomfortable and puts down his bowl. A few people on either side of them do the same. T regrets taking liberties. She is angry and she shouldn’t be speaking about any of this in public, which proves her point, he supposes, but still doesn’t make her behaviour any less embarrassing.

  More buildings seem to have gone up along the highway since T last made the trip out to the airport. Kilometres of construction. Apartment blocks rising from rice paddies. Buildings emerging from swamps, a lonely university campus, shopping malls, new factories.

  Why don’t any of those contemporary artists paint this? T wonders. Vietnam is not standing still, not moving at the pace of a buffalo pulling a plough. Foreigners seem to think backwardness is romantic, whereas for T, nothing could be more romantic than the estimate that twenty billion foreign dollars will be invested in the country this year alone. Figures like that can make you swoon.

  T is distracted by these thoughts on the drive back into the city, paying less attention to the French family seated in the back than he should. They have paid for the super-deluxe service, after all, and offering them informative and lively conversation as he escorts them back to the Metropole in the super-deluxe Mercedes van with the leather seats and seat belts and the multi-disc CD player is part of the package. Unfortunately, only the most senior driver at the agency is allowed to drive this van—a guy T calls Karl Marx because he studied German in Germany and came back with a beard, which is not only impossible to grow, but a very dirty thing in his opinion—Phng will be thoroughly annoyed.

  T stops by his friend’s house in the evening hoping to share some of his thoughts, but Phng’s mother says he has gone to the library. T, finding this very hard to believe, makes his way straight to the bar they started frequenting while in tourism college, having some happy hour bia hoi after classes before going home for dinner or, depending on how much they had to drink, perhaps not going home for dinner at all and doing karaoke instead. But there is no sign of Phng here either. T orders a glass of beer and is once again reminded that happy hour is depressing without his best friend.

  Fortunately Phng walks in just in time to prevent T from sliding into a funk. And he really has been to the library. Phng is carrying a collection of traditional songs, meaning songs approved by the Ministry of Culture and Information.

  “What are you doing with this?” T asks, flipping through the pages. There is nothing but songs in praise of agricultural productivity, the Party, the workers, Stalin, H Chí Minh, the revolution.

  “Research,” Phng says. “What’s it to you?”

  “Are you pissed off with me for some reason?”

  “How could I be?” says Phng, throwing half a glass of beer down his throat. He burps and slams his glass down. “I barely see you anymore.”

  “Hey. You’re the
one who spent a week in bed.”

  Phng’s nostrils flare. He holds up his empty glass and flags the waiter. “You’re the one who’s lusting for the Vit Ki’êu,” he says out of the corner of his mouth.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Phng rolls his eyes, turning his attention back to his book.

  Okay, yes, maybe T has pictured Maggie naked once (okay, more than once), but what man doesn’t imagine a woman naked? Surely Phng was doing exactly that when he looked Miss Maggie’s entire body up and down in the hotel lobby the day T introduced them. Why does Phng have to cheapen it?

  “She’s my friend, Phng,” T says, anger hardening his jaw.

  He knows it sounds strange: friend. It’s not a word often used between men and women, but T doesn’t know how else to describe this new relationship. He doesn’t care what Phng thinks. He will prove himself worthy of Maggie’s friendship. And if she happens to fall completely in love with him in the process and say, You are the hero of my life? Well, it wouldn’t be his fault then, would it? He could turn to Phng and say, I’m afraid you are mistaken. It is not me lusting for Miss Maggie. Miss Maggie is lusting for me.

  T slaps some đng on the table and stomps out of the bar.

  His feet know where he’s headed before his brain does. T marches straight over to the eastern edge of the Old Quarter. If anyone knew Maggie’s father, it would be Mr. Võ. All the old artists took their coffee at his café—Võ is to coffee what Hng is to ph—but unlike Hng, Võ has managed to hold on to his shop, keeping his doors open throughout the decades, even during the years when his weekly rations allowed him fewer beans than he would use today to make a single cup, even during the years when the government stores carried no coffee and he had to reuse and reuse old grinds.

  T has not visited the café since he was a child, but he finds it exactly as he remembers it. Mr. Võ has few customers at this hour, just a couple of men using a tabletop as the board for a game of c tng, Chinese chess, cigarettes hanging from the corners of their mouths, squinting through the smoke as they calculate their next moves.