by Camilla Gibb
“When you find yourself upon the threshold of the door to your new home,” he says aloud, dropping his hands from his cart, coming to an abrupt halt in the middle of the road. Damn. Nothing. Motorcycles honk and veer around him. He leans against his cart, putting his elbows upon it, closing and rubbing his eyes. Perhaps his sudden recall is limited only to that particular poem he was able to share with Maggie. He had been hopeful of a broader recovery.
Hng arrives home and parks his cart behind his shack, hauling his pots down to the bank of the pond. He stacks them there, abandoning them for a moment while he returns to his shack. He riffles through the piles of paper he collects to feed his fires, some of them a metre high, looking for Fine Works of Spring. He catches himself midway through the second pile and smacks his forehead with his palm. What is he doing? The journal is long gone. Every single one of his papers was gone by the time the Party’s vice squad overturned his shack in the spring of 1964.
His breathing had slowed as he caught sight of the Minsk motorbikes parked in front of his shack that morning. They were throwing his few belongings out the front door. His clothes flew across the threshold, his tea canister rolled down the slope; bits of straw from his mattress filled the air.
Hng parked his cart and dared to approach his shack. “Sirs, what is it you are looking for?” he asked through the doorway.
“Are you Hng?” an officer shouted.
“No, sir.”
“Well, this Hng is harbouring anti-revolutionary literature. You can tell him when you next see him that the Party is well informed of his traitorous connections. If he’s harbouring the evidence, we’ll find it.”
But you’re too late, he could have told them. You’ll find nothing to implicate the man. Those papers are already gone. In fact, the man you are after—keeper of poetry and believer in the beauty of humanity— that Hng is gone.
He proceeded to carry his pots down to the pond and scrub them in its brown water. He lingered over the task, not turning around again until he heard the revving of motorbike engines. He caught a glimpse of movement in the doorway to Lan’s shack. She was hiding, keeping watch. He refused to acknowledge her.
One of the officers tossed a burning rag through the door of his shack as he drove away on his motorbike. Smoke billowed through the doorway; the interior burst into flame. Hng quickly plunged the largest of his pots into the pond and filled it with water. He ran awkwardly up the muddy slope, water sloshing from side to side, and heaved the contents of the pot through his front door. He did this over and over until the flames relented. The guts of his shack were charred, but the structure remained.
Hng eases himself down onto his straw mattress. He runs his fingers over his few strands of hair. He lies back and listens to the belch of an obstinate water buffalo somewhere in the middle distance. He hears the ruffle of a duck shaking water off its back, the blip of a fish gulping a spider off the surface of the pond, the whir of a dragonfly’s wings. A crow lands on his roof; he hears the tick tack tick of its nails across the tin surface.
He caresses the soft mole on his cheek for comfort as he used to do as a child. It is the colour of asphalt, the texture of moss. A birthmark, a simple birthmark, as his Uncle Chin had assured him long ago, not a curse at all.
Where Hng had hoped to be able to offer Bình and T a poem by Ðạo in celebration of the upcoming Mid-Autumn Festival, he will prepare a special lunch for the family instead. Cooking is something no one can steal from him—not poverty nor the Party, not a war, not a girl, not age. Since T shows no signs of getting married, this might be the last opportunity Hng ever has to prepare a feast for him and his family. He will invite the lovely Maggie as well.
He will roast a whole pig on a spit. He has done this only once before, years ago for a wedding banquet in the shantytown, fashioning a spit out of an axle and digging an oblong pit for a great fire that three young men had to feed for twelve hours. He did not ask where that pig had come from. How could he blame people who had been hungry for so long, particularly on an occasion of such celebration?
Hng will pay for this pig himself. He will speak to Anh, perhaps travel to the countryside on Saturday in search of a discount; he will barter like the expert he is. He will dig another oblong pit, spreading the coals unevenly so that the fire will be hotter near the shoulders and cooler by the back and loins. He will make sure to cover the ears and the penis so that they do not char and crumble away—an oversight on his part the last time.
Bright Star
The old man has specially decorated his shack today. T thinks the red streamers fluttering from his roof are a bit excessive; this isn’t a wedding, after all. Hng greets them robustly with two-handed handshakes. He has dressed up for the occasion, wearing his Metropole trousers, the ones that make him look like a trumpet player in a military band, topped with an old jacket of Bình’s, the sleeves rolled up, a red silk handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket.
Hng brings out a jug of rice wine as soon as they arrive. Phng is the first and last to fill his glass. They recline on grass mats and straw-stuffed pillows the old man has laid down on the ground in front of his shack, and chew some betel nut at his insistence, a practice T’s mother normally disapproves of but is willing to ignore on this occasion.
T chomps down hard on a leaf wrapped around slivers of betel. He is pulling bitter red fibres off his tongue when Maggie finally arrives out of breath, apologizing for being late.
She is Maggie but no longer Maggie. She is wearing an indigo-blue áo dài embroidered with golden cranes that hugs the perfect peaches of her breasts and skims her narrow waist, her hips. Her hair is pulled back, her skin glows and T wishes he could bury his face in her neck and run his hands up and down her silk-covered body.
“What does your name mean?” he finds himself asking as soon as his breath returns.
“My name?” she says, shaking her head and kneeling down beside him. “I don’t know. I was named after a Scottish woman my father boarded with when he was at school in the U.S. It’s short for Margaret.”
“You should have a Vietnamese name,” T says. “To match your áo dài.”
T can smell the pepper sweet of lavender emanating from her skin. Show some respect, he silently berates his penis, folding his hands in his lap. He turns his head to the left to admire the pig, the whole roasted pig that Hng is tending just metres away from them. It is a lavish and very expensive thing the old man has done: threading the entire animal on a spit and turning and roasting it for hours and hours until it has reached this glowing perfection.
Hng’s neighbours have begun to line up with their bowls. The old man has special power—he is the heart of this place, was the heart of the Beauty of Humanity Movement—he brings people together, keeps them fed.
Once thirty people have wandered off happy with their bowls of pork and rice, it is finally the family’s turn to eat. T cannot wait to taste that pig, but first his father, not normally a speech maker, stands and offers thanks to Hng, for all he gives to them in his role as adopted patriarch, for the care he has offered three generations of their family.
“You don’t know this story, Maggie,” T’s father says, “perhaps you’ve never heard it either, Phng, but let me tell you about the happy day Hng and I were reunited.”
T wonders why his father has chosen to speak of this. It sounds like the kind of speech you would make if reminiscing about the dead.
“When the war ended, I came back to Hanoi after years in the countryside in search of a job,” his father begins. “I worked as a candle maker until the Russians set up a Ping-Pong factory that paid much better wages. And that is where I met Anh,” he says, glancing at T’s mother. “We were lucky to find each other, but times were difficult. There was no rice for months, no meat. The real sadness for us, though, was that a child was slow to come. We went to visit herbalists and fortune tellers whom we could pay only with ration cards, which left us with even less to eat, and still no child.
“I began to wonder if this could be because my ancestors felt neglected. We had never built a shrine for my father, Ðạo, you see: my mother and I spent the first years praying for his return, and the next years having to defend him against my mother’s relatives, who blamed my father for our misfortune.
“It was Hng who sent word to us in the village. I was nine or ten at the time, playing outside in the courtyard, when a man on a motorbike arrived at the house and, for no apparent reason, pressed a coconut into my hands. It was so light I was sure it was hollow. My mother shook it, then smashed it with a mallet, and there among the pieces of shell was a small folded piece of paper. It was a letter from Hng with the sad news of my father’s death and a promise to honour him for the rest of his life.
“I knew I had to find Hng. Eventually I found my way here, where he had kept the incense burning for my father. I do not quite know how to put the feeling into words, but it was like arriving at the place where a river finally floods into the sea.
“And what do you think happened then?” Bình says, leaning into his toes. “Destiny finally smiled upon us. That is why we called him T, our bright star. The one who heralded the arrival of Ði mi.”
T’s father turns to the old man to thank him for having been there to celebrate every occasion of T’s life. From his birth to every Tet holiday to his graduation, to the betrothal that T’s father says he is sure must not be long off for his son, to the marriage and fatherhood that will follow, the birth of a fourth generation who will be blessed to have a patriarch in Hng.
T blushes and hangs his head. “I fear I will not be here to see that happy day,” says Hng. No pressure! thinks T, looking over at Phng—twenty-nine and not married—for help. But Phng is beyond helping: he is boozy- eyed and useless already, lying on his side, leaning on his elbow, his head slumping toward his shoulder.
T is about to beg for a change of subject, when thankfully Hng says, “Let us eat.”
They begin with a mild soup with pig tail and crunchy lotus root, followed by some shredded cabbage and sausage stuffing pulled from inside the roasted pig’s mouth, and then the pork itself, which melts in their mouths, all its fatty parts, its salted crispy skin, balanced with clean rice and water spinach sautéed with garlic, and finally a crunchy salad of diced pig ears and bamboo shoots. Every time T tastes Old Man Hng’s cooking he feels as if his mouth learns something new.
Unfortunately it starts to rain just then, forcing them all to pick up their bowls and follow the old man into his cramped quarters. It is close and cozy inside Hng’s shack with the rain clattering down on the corrugated tin. T and his father sit on the edge of the mattress, where a drunken Phng is now lying down, and Maggie kneels on the rattan mat on the floor beside T’s mother, the old man beside her, pouring cups of tea.
“Would you like to greet my grandfather?” T asks Maggie.
Hng gestures. “Over here, my dear.”
T has a slight feeling of resentment, as if the old man is competing with him for Maggie’s attention. He notices a full bowl of pork and rice sitting on top of Hng’s unlit kerosene stove. “You’ve left Ðạo’s bowl here,” T says, reaching toward it.
“No,” says Hng, waving his hand as he shuffles toward the altar, “I have already given Ðạo his bowl.”
“Who is this for, then?”
“That? For no one.”
Hng raises his hand in the air once he reaches the altar. He clears his throat and silences the room. “When you find yourself upon the threshold of the door to your new home, fear not, because you will find me there, on the other side, awaiting you, making ready the fire,” he says in a measured and silken voice.
Anh reaches for Bình’s hand, a gesture of affection between his parents that T has never witnessed before. Old Man Hng is reciting verse. Is this Grandfather Ðạo’s poetry? But where has he suddenly found the words? T is about to ask the old man to continue, but the moment appears to have passed, and with it his memory. Hng turns away from the altar, the spark within him extinguished.
Hng has no energy to get undressed, drained by the effort of those words. Do words come before footsteps or is it the reverse? Does the order in which you acquire them dictate which you’ll first lose? Hng sleeps like a baby now, new to the world. He is at a loss to name the shapes and shadows that appear in his dreams. He is a blank slate upon which history will write its story. But he will wake before the story’s end, he is sure of it. He will counter the lies written there. He will fill in the gaps that remain.
The Lady Next Door
The sky is heavy and grey, and Maggie sits behind T and his father on the Honda Dream II, riding like a Vietnamese lady with her jacket on backward and a mask over her mouth. She seems more and more Vietnamese each time T sees her. She now eats her noodles noisily in the way that makes them taste best, and much to his relief she does not grip him around the middle anymore when she sits behind him on the motorbike—she has developed her motorbike muscles.
Arriving at the bank of the river this morning, they find several of Hng’s other regular customers but no sign of the old man himself. He must have been forced to move to a new location. Usually they would have had news of this through the network of mouths in the Old Quarter. When the others see Bình pulling up, they know not to take the situation personally. They simply shrug and get back onto their motorbikes and seek some alternative place to start the day.
But T and his father both worry about Hng’s absence. Was the celebration the other day too much for him? Could he be unwell? That evening, after dinner at home, they climb aboard the motorbike and make their way to the shantytown. The dirt road down to the pond punishes T’s behind, forcing him to stand for the last stretch as if he were riding a horse.
Bình parks the bike by Hng’s shack, which appears to be secured with a chain and padlock. The lady next door, sitting on her threshold weaving a basket from river grasses by the light of a spitting fire, tells them she has not seen the old man in a couple of days.
Hng’s cart and brazier are gone, so he must have set off with the intention of serving breakfast. Did she see him that morning? Was there anything unusual? Did he seem well enough? Might he have had a flu?
She had not seen him that morning. He leaves hours before she wakes up. “He did leave a bowl of pork and rice on my doorstep after your party, but he has not spoken to me for over forty years.”
That is a lifetime of silence between neighbours, almost two of T’s lifetimes, and yes, thinks T, she is never here at Tet, and even the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival she was not among the thirty people who lined up with their bowls, despite being his closest neighbour.
“Why has he not spoken to you?” T’s father asks, rare astonishment in his voice. Hng is not a man who has enemies.
The woman looks to the ground as if ashamed of the answer. She raises her eyes sheepishly and stares at Bình.
“Ahh,” says
T’s father. T looks between them, confused. Bình nods at the old woman and turns away.
“What is it?” T asks his father as they set off on foot toward the river. “Why does he not speak to her?”
“Did you see the regret in her eyes? The pain? My guess is that long ago she broke our Hng’s heart.”
T feels rather chastened: he has never thought of the old man as having a love life, and it must have been something of a dramatic love life to take him from the light of loving this woman all the way to the dark of not speaking to her. T thinks about this as he and his father push the motorbike along the route that the old man is most likely to take into the Old Quarter given the size and awkwardness of his cart. It is three kilometres to the bridge where he last served breakfast. They peer into dark alleyways and call out Hng’s name, but apart from a drunk and a mangy dog, no one responds to their cries.
T and his father sit down when they reach the bank of the river and watch the struggling moon. “We’re lucky to have each other,” says Bình. “I was never able to help my
father.” A man’s worth is principally his worth as a son, and this is something T recognizes his father has been denied.
Bình carries on talking, reminiscing about his boyhood, telling T how he’d felt a stranger growing up in a household of women in his mother’s village. It was only in being reacquainted with Hng all those years later that the feeling abated. He came to see himself as part of a lineage, Hng the bridge between his own small life and a much longer and greater story. “And that was your fault, wasn’t it,” he says, slapping his son’s thigh. “Your stubborn refusal to join me on this earth until I discovered that bridge to the past.”
T thinks of Maggie, faced with much the same predicament. Is it that she feels a stranger in the world in the absence of a family history? Unattached? Without a bridge? Family is everything in Vietnam.
Bình leans forward and uses the cuff of his shirt to wipe dirt off the toe of his shoe. “You know, there were times after learning of his death that my mother would get so angry at my father,” he says. “She would pace back and forth cursing him. Ðạo could be very stubborn and arrogant. She blamed him for arousing the anger of the Party, for denying her a husband and me a father.”
This is the first time T has heard anyone suggest that his grandfather was anything less than a hero.
“We always have a very romantic view of those we lose, especially a martyr,” his father says. “We forget a martyr is just a man, a man who dared for his principles, but a man nonetheless—a less-than-perfect human being.”
It’s something of a relief to T to hear this. It is impossible to consider yourself a worthy person when there are only heroes to measure yourself against.
The following night, after another morning without breakfast, they multiply their efforts. Maggie brings a map, which makes it easy to rule out the alleyways that are too narrow for Old Man Hng’s cart. They can rule out the busiest roads as well, unless of course Hng had another spasm of desire to seek out Maggie at the Metropole. If not, that leaves six, possibly seven routes Hng might have taken between the shantytown and the bridge. Bình traces these onto the map with one of his soft blue drafting pencils.
