The Beauty Of Humanity Movement Part 2

Hng carries his bottle of papaya milk down to the pond and douses his ap.r.o.n with it, then rubs the material back and forth against the was.h.i.+ng stone before rinsing it along with his cooking pots in the pond's brown water. From where he squats at the water's edge, he can spy a nest among the reeds, two ripe eggs waiting to be claimed. He thinks better of it, though, thinks of the long term, a luxury that has only come about in recent years.

A pond has its own ecosystem, largely un.o.bserved by humans, except when their lives come to depend upon it. Hng, who had drifted like some one hundred and fifty others to this muddy, buggy sh.o.r.e in the middle of an industrial wasteland at the edge of the city, has long been a keen and attuned observer. Hng came from the country and the country is still in him. He knows the exact conditions that will promote the spread of algae, the precise details of the dragonfly's life cycle and where the various pond and sh.o.r.e creatures bury their eggs. He'd been a student of nature as a child, a study encouraged by his father, in lieu of companions.h.i.+p, that he could never have known would be of such use in an urban life.

Like Hng, the people who collected on this sh.o.r.e in the late 1950s had lost everything. They were eating rats and the lice from their hair. Their shacks were built of sc.r.a.p metal, woven pond reeds and bamboo posts. The trees had been felled by government edict. The land had been stripped of its small dwellings and kitchen gardens in keeping with Uncle H'o's promise of industrial revolution. The combination of the tire factory across the pond and the construction of blocks of socialist housing co-operatives to the east produced great burning clouds of tar that floated overhead so that on a good day the sun appeared a weak orange through grey gauze.

But nature is a fighter and Hng was a man blessed with a cook's imagination. He had immediately seen the promise lurking beneath the surface of this pool of lazy, brown, mosquito-breeding water. No one in the shantytown would go hungry as long as Hng was there, a fact that became apparent just shortly after his arrival when he caught a duck, the first duck anyone had seen in over a year, among the reeds.

Hng had wrung the bird's neck and plucked it before applying a burning stick to the leeches that had affixed themselves to his feet and ankles. He then drained the blood to make a custard, peeled off the skin and fried it into golden strips, and used the fat he'd sc.r.a.ped from the inside of the skin to flavour and fry the shredded breast meat. He boiled and mashed the liver with a few peppercorns he had in his possession; he stewed the duck's feet in the juice of a single orange; he roasted the duck's eyes and brains on the sharpened ends of chopsticks; he boiled the carca.s.s, heart and kidneys to make a broth; he chopped the boiled heart and kidneys and dark meat of the legs and wrapped the mince in betel leaves and sauteed the remaining meat with sliced pondweed and wild leeks.

The smells enticed neighbours, and neighbours enticed those beyond, and soon a lineup of people had formed in front of his shack-shabbily dressed, grime-encrusted men, women and children with sharp cheekbones and skin variously scabbed, pockmarked and grey. Each clutched a pair of chopsticks and bowed a head in thanks before sampling the elements of the feast Hng had prepared.

But Hng himself had forgotten to eat that day. He had been left without hunger or breath by the sight of the girl who emerged with her grandmother from the shack next to his, a girl with the graceful posture of a crane and skin as pearlescent as eggsh.e.l.l.

You do not belong here, he wanted to say to this vision. My G.o.d. You belong on a throne.

He watched her eat from her bowl like the daintiest of birds, and found he was still staring in the direction of the shack where she lived with her grandmother several hours after she'd disappeared into it.

People thanked him for the feast with small gifts the next day-a piece of rusted tin, a single palm frond, a stalk of bamboo, an old newspaper, a broken pane of gla.s.s-one by one the pieces to build his shack came together. The girl next door emerged, offering him two dried rinds of star anise, dropping them into his open hand without raising her eyes. "From my grandmother," she said in a voice as sweet as birdsong.

Hng could scarcely believe the girl was real.

While he felt moved to thank his new friends and neighbours for their gifts, at least part of his motivation to repeat the feast the following month had been desire. He wanted to feed the girl and feel her near.

For that second feast he speared and threaded water snakes onto a spit; he grilled small, ugly fish with ancient mouths over the fire; he boiled tiny birds' eggs in salted water; he marinated layers of those eggs in the juice of fermented berries; and he boiled snails and crayfish, offering crunchy, sliced bamboo shoots on the side.

The woman next door thanked him with a deep bow of grat.i.tude. "It was dignified and so delicious," she said, then pushed her granddaughter forward by the small of her back.

"Thank you, sir," said the girl, her eyes lowered to the ground.

"This is Lan," said the older woman.

Lan. She was the orchid of her name, as elegant and rare. Hng looked to the ground himself, not wanting to sully her virgin whiteness with the impurity of his gaze. "Hng," he said with a cough. "Just Hng, not sir."

The gift-giving continued, his neighbours bringing him pieces for the interior of his house: a.s.sorted single bricks, strips of soft bark from a eucalyptus tree, a woven gra.s.s mat, a pot someone had fas.h.i.+oned out of clay, tins once discarded by the French army, coconut sh.e.l.ls from the beautiful Lan and her grandmother for ladling water, drinking broth, serving tea.

He made tea from artichokes-their hearts dried and cut like leaves-luring the grandmother and the girl with this brew, drawing them over from their shack to his, where it became something of a nightly ritual for the three of them to sit together on a gra.s.s mat under a starless sky. They said little initially. Sharing stories of the past, tales of where they'd come from, seemed an unnecessary expenditure of energy when survival in the present demanded such effort.

All around them were thieves stealing ration coupons, hawkers selling whatever they could, parents pressed into selling their daughters into prost.i.tution. Hng tuned his senses for early detection of those overdressed men who came prowling through the shantytown. As soon as he caught a whiff of hair oil he would call out to the girl and her grandmother: "Come and keep me company on this dreary day, will you? I've got another story you might like. Something that will put a bit of sun in this grey sky."

It was the fear of losing Lan to traffickers or, if he is honest with himself, simply losing her to another man that led Hng to instigate conversation, entertaining the girl and her grandmother with anecdotes about the men who used to gather in his shop.

"I once knew a man who could look at the most ordinary sky and see such beautiful things hidden there. A river, a paG.o.da, a mountain, a man and his buffalo, a pair of sisters dancing in the sun."

Hng, Lan and her grandmother would look to the sky just at the very moment the men in suits were snaking by, and Hng would say, "Hard to imagine it now when it is such a grey blanket, but that line there between the clouds, can you see it? It looks like the tail of a turtledove, don't you think?"

"I can see the dove," Lan would say, her mouth hanging open. "The whole dove, not just the tail."

"This man would describe what he'd seen in the sky and then someone like my friend o might find himself inspired and spontaneously give birth to a poem."

Admittedly, Hng elevated his own status in these stories by referring to o as a friend. He knows he was never the man's equal. Hng had spent years in awe of o, who, despite being five years his junior, had been something of a mentor to him. o took an interest in Hng's aborted education, encouraging his desire to read and engaging him in the debates of the time. He had shown Hng a respect to which he was unaccustomed.

"My friend o believed everyone had a right to an opinion," he told Lan and her grandmother. "Wherever he came from. Or she. 'Let's hear what Hng has to say on the matter,' he used to say.

"The men seated at the table with him laughed at first. Laughed and pointed at me. Why was this learned young man they all looked up to soliciting the opinion of a simple country boy turned cook? they wondered.

"'Stop it,' o would say, batting his hand in the air as if he was swatting at flies. 'I think his perspective could be useful here.' I remember him turning to me and asking, 'What do you think, Hng? Should all things cost the same? One pair of shoes, one watermelon, one bowl of ph?'

"They were all staring at me, waiting for an answer," Hng told the girl and her grandmother. "I did not know what o expected of me, so I simply said what I knew to be true. 'You come here for some reason. There is cheaper pho.'

"'You see?' o raised his finger and smiled. 'We are hypocrites where it suits us. We will always be willing to pay the difference for a superior bowl.'"

Lan laughed like a bird might laugh, a giddy twitter she stifled with her hand.

Lan's enjoyment of Hng's stories made o real again, leading Hng to feel both the pain of o's absence and the simultaneous relief from that pain. The girl was a balm to him: both her desire for his stories and her improbable beauty. Even though much of the latter was concealed by the government-issue black pyjama bottoms and s.h.i.+rt she wore, when she was bent over was.h.i.+ng pots in the pond, her spine, as delicate as that of a fish, pressed into the back of her s.h.i.+rt, he would think how much better she deserved-an ao dai of luxurious silk to grace her frame, gold for her elegant wrists and fingers, a pearl necklace, a garland of jasmine for her hair.

Hng prayed she was old enough to understand her impact, though he guessed her an innocent of no more than eighteen. She called him Uncle, but Hng's feelings toward the girl were not those of an uncle. He was almost forty then-a middle-aged man in love with a girl half his age-an ugly man, a poor man, a man in love for the first time in his life.

Although the girl's grandmother would often fall asleep while they sat on the gra.s.s mat together, her dreams whistling through her nostrils, Lan would remain bright, nodding, asking questions in a voice as soft as silken tofu, causing Hng to forget the squalor that surrounded them and transporting the two of them to some alternative plane.

"Tell me about the Hundred Flowers, Uncle."

"Teach me why you prefer poems that do not rhyme."

She would lie on her side, her heart-shaped face resting in her upturned palm, her perfect feet moving back and forth against each other according to some internal rhythm.

Tell me. Teach me. Poetry and politics. In the absence of both, she had made him feel he still had something to give. These had been exquisite moments: a brief respite from life on earth, a journey to some faraway Buddhist heaven. But it is not a place he has visited ever since. He has neither the means nor the desire. He turned his back to her long ago, and his heart became a stone. They do not even acknowledge each other, have not done so now for over forty years.

She has lived alone in the hut next door since her grandmother died, refusing to move. Whether this is motivated by a deliberate wish to torture him or rooted in some more benign and practical reasoning, he really cannot say. The effect upon him is the same, regardless.

There is a particular bird that sings in the same register as her speaking voice, but he has managed to so thoroughly block out the song of this bird that it may as well belong to a species extinct. He even finds the cataract that began to cloud his vision a couple of years ago something of a blessing. It limits his peripheral vision so that he can't see her shack when he retrieves the ap.r.o.n he leaves to dry outside over the handle of his cart. Why then does he find himself glancing briefly to his left this afternoon as he reaches for his ap.r.o.n? Why has he been thinking of her at all? It is because of the girl who came for breakfast. A beautiful girl, imploring. Maggie Ly, the daughter of an artist, Ly Vn Hai. Tell me, she might just as well have said, teach me.

Lan is hunched over a wicker basket now, picking dirt and stones out of a bushel of rice, or perhaps sh.e.l.ling peanuts for sale, or maybe she has been lucky enough to find a cl.u.s.ter of tree ear mushrooms from which she is brus.h.i.+ng dirt.

Hng shakes his head to be rid of her and looks to his right instead, toward his neighbour Phuc Li, a man who, as a boy, lost his legs to a land mine and perhaps a bit of his mind as well, sitting as he does with his hand cupping his genitals, his old mother tr.i.m.m.i.n.g his hair.

The legless Phuc Li waves to Hng, grinning like a child watching fireworks. His mother snaps the rusty shears shut over his head. "Do you want me to do you next, Hng?"

"I'll give it another week," Hng says, running his hand over his few remaining strands of hair.

Hng crouches to enter the door of his shack, lays his dry ap.r.o.n down on his straw mattress and roots for the needle and thread he keeps inside an old rubber boot. He stares at o's framed image on the altar as he digs around in the toe. The picture is all he really has left of o, having forgotten all his poems over the years. It was drawn for him by a woman who had come begging decades ago. "Look, we're all poor here," he had said to her as she stood on the threshold of his shack. "I'm sorry, but I have nothing to give you."

Much to his horror, she unb.u.t.toned her s.h.i.+rt then and tossed it to the ground, revealing a bony, scabbed chest. "Stop that," he reprimanded, picking up her s.h.i.+rt and tossing it back at her. "Cover yourself. What do you think you are doing?"

"You can lie with me and do what you want," she said. "Pay me anything."

"Woman," he said with disgust, "what did you do before life came to this?"

The woman said she had been a tea lady at the art school.

"And did you learn anything of art while you were there? Did you learn to draw, for instance?"

She nodded once and cast her eyes to the ground. But Hng had no paper. The only thing he could think to do was tear out one of the endpapers from Fine Works of Spring, the journal o and his colleagues had published a few years earlier. And so Hng had squatted beside the woman as she laboured her way toward some likeness of o, using a piece of charcoal from Hng's kitchen fire.

He attempted to describe o to the woman as best he could, but found a simple physical description of the man could not adequately capture his spirit. Once she had a basic outline of his face, Hng interjected, "His eyes were set a bit farther apart, almost as if he had a wider view than an ordinary man, that of a visionary."

o had made references in his poetry to tragedies that had not even befallen them yet, as if he could intuit the future. He had sought to warn people of what was imminent, hoping to inspire them to action. And Hng had marvelled at his ability to do so in such few perfect words.

"He was fearless," Hng told the woman. "He had a scar, just here, a mark of courage that ran two inches across the bone of his cheek."

Hng had offered the woman his bed for a week as payment, while he himself slept outside. The frame for o's portrait-that, he hadn't been in a position to make for years, not until he found a way to sell ph again and someone paid him with a piece of gla.s.s.

Hng notices a spiderweb glistening at the edge of the frame now. He can picture Bnh as a boy, his face contorted in concentration as he counted the silk rings of a web. The fate of those on earth depends upon honouring the ancestral spirits, and Hng has kept o's memory alive for Bnh, whose father disappeared when he was only six years old.

Hng peels the silken web away with his forefinger, lights a stick of incense and offers up his hands in prayer. He wishes o well on whatever higher plane he now inhabits and he prays that they will know each other in the next life. But there are things Hng must impart before he allows the spirits to take him on that journey. At a minimum he has a recipe to pa.s.s on. "The taste of home" is how an artist had once, long ago, described his ph.

My G.o.d, thinks Hng. That someone. His hungry eyes hovering above a bowl. The man had been travelling; he had come by s.h.i.+p from America and his legs were still wobbly. He was carrying his belongings in a sack and he said he hadn't had a bowl of ph in years. Hng had wondered how the man could still be standing.

The man's name was Ly Vn Hai, Hng is sure of it. He must tell Miss Maggie Ly that he did once meet her father, if only briefly. He will make his way to her fancy hotel tomorrow and do just that, he thinks, patting the card in his s.h.i.+rt pocket.

"o," he says to the portrait in front of him, "do you remember Ly Vn Hai? Eating ph in my shop one morning? You must have been there too."

He needs o's help. There is simply too much for one old man alone to remember.

New Dawn.

Maggie had deliberated about returning to the old man for breakfast this morning. She doesn't want to push, but she's impatient. You left him your card, she reminds herself. He knows how to get in touch if anything comes to mind.

She stops in the kitchen to thank Rikia for directing her to Hng yesterday, then battles her way into her office holding a cup of coffee at shoulder height. The room is a bit of a disaster, crammed with pieces of art she has pulled out of storage leaning four deep against each wall. She has to tear through a forest of cardboard and brown paper just to reach her desk, spilling half her cup of coffee as she does.

She's eighty-five per cent of the way through cataloguing the hotel's collection-an incomparable body of work from the colonial era found stashed in the bomb shelter beneath the hotel. The art had survived both the war and the decades of the hotel's service as a Communist Party guesthouse, during which the building had deteriorated into a rat- and bat-infested dump.

The story of the collection's discovery had reached her through a colleague at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. "There's a real opportunity there," he had said, and Maggie had known this to be true in her gut. A hidden vault of art in her father's city. The opportunity to bring its contents to light. Her mother no longer alive to dissuade her. And Daniel's feelings no longer a consideration before her own.

Maggie came up with a proposal, which she pitched to the French management company undertaking the Metropole's refurbishment, to open a contemporary gallery in the hotel. Her timing couldn't have been better. Interest in contemporary Vietnamese art has surged over the last decade-having a gallery at the hotel made sound business sense. So did having a Vietnamese-speaking curator with a master's degree in curation from the Art Inst.i.tute of Chicago who could do the work of preserving and cataloguing the original collection.

She spent her first month and a half in Hanoi below ground in a metal chamber with a flashlight. Her first weeks were all cool surfaces, taut canvases and a pounding heart. She pored through work that spanned the five and a half decades from the hotel's opening in 1901 to the expulsion of the French in 1954-her father's era, the world into which he was born, the one in which he drew, grew up, painted.

She was hopeful then. But that hope grew heavy, canvas by canvas, sheet by sheet, until it hung above her like a leaden cloud. And then finally a sliver of light. An old man. A ph seller. Mr. Hng.

Maggie lifts a black-and-white painting and props it on the arms of a chair. A string of barbed wire made up of Chinese characters runs across the canvas. She was looking for this piece yesterday; it's by the Hoa artist she represents. Maggie is a collector of lost sheep: artists like this one who fall between cracks. In Vietnam, her Hoa artist is not recognized as Vietnamese, but in China, where he spent his adolescence after his people were expelled from Vietnam, he isn't recognized as Chinese either.

Maggie can relate. While she might look Vietnamese, this only gets her so far. She has had shopkeepers quadruple their prices as soon as she opens her mouth, people mock her accent, gossip behind her back and treat her with a great deal of suspicion. They call her Vit Kiu -some watered-down and inferior species of Vietnamese-a sojourner, an exile, a traitor, a refugee. However people might regard her, Maggie has to content herself with the knowledge that her roots are here, the family stories, as remote and inaccessible as they might be.

Maggie's mother was not a storyteller. She revealed very little over the years, and it was only after suffering a stroke two years ago that she offered anything unprompted. "Your father didn't feel entirely Vietnamese," she said one day from her hospital bed. "His experience in the U.S. changed him. He felt it had made him a better artist and a better person, and he wasn't going to let anyone take that away from him."

They had been speaking about apples just the moment before; she was craving the tart juice of a hard, green variety she had eaten as a child. It had taken Maggie a minute to follow: to move from the taste of fruit to this rare mention of her father. She seized the opportunity then, exhaling the question that had haunted her for the thirty years since that day she had said goodbye to him on the tarmac.

"What happened to him in the camp? His hands?"

Her mother turned away at the question.

Maggie sat down on the bed and leaned her chin upon her mother's silken head. She felt a tremor run through her mother's body as if she had just exorcised a small ghost.

The truth her mother revealed to her that afternoon is one Maggie has since kept caged in her chest. There was a time when she might have shared that painful story with someone-with Daniel-but that time had pa.s.sed.

"They might have broken Hai's hands but they could not touch him inside," was the last thing Maggie's mother said before she drifted off to sleep that afternoon, the weak sun through the blinds casting prison bars across her bed.

Her mother died in that bed, suffering another stroke in the night. Maggie felt she had been struck down as well, made an orphan.

The phone rings once, twice, three times before Maggie makes a move to answer, bending at the waist and prostrating herself over the corner of her desk in order to reach it. There's some kind of problem, though the young man at the front desk is having difficulty articulating precisely what it is. From what Maggie can make out, it seems someone has been involved in an accident in front of the hotel. But why would they call her?

"Is it one of our guests?" she asks.

"No," says the young man.

"One of the staff? An artist of mine, a client?

"No. I think he is some kind of homeless man."

It's one of the uncomfortable truths of working in a hotel like this that the doormen are under instruction to clear the street of beggars and the homeless. The official line is that it's done so that guests don't feel uncomfortable, but it's part of both the government's efforts to promote tourism and a wider Party policy that sweeps the streets of humanity periodically, particularly in advance of the arrival of foreign dignitaries.

"Did he injure himself on hotel property?" Maggie asks, still unsure why this is being brought to her attention.

"No, on the street," says the young man at the front desk.

"Is he okay? Does he need to go to hospital?"

"I don't know," he says. "He's asking for you."

Hng feels like his leg has its own heartbeat. He's ashamed to be sitting here in this room with his trousers muddied and torn, particularly since his little accident seems to have knocked the reason he was coming to the Metropole in the first place right out of his head.

A taxi had swerved to the right as he neared the hotel, tearing a corner off the front of his cart and causing it to roll backward, trapping his trouser leg and sending him cras.h.i.+ng to the ground. He rubs the back of his head now-sticky, a bit of blood. Perhaps the reason he is here at the Metropole is still lying out there on the street like a log parting a river of traffic, just as he was for a few minutes before the doormen hauled him to the pavement and onto his feet.

He came to tell the Vit Kiu girl something, but what? It must have had to do with her father, something compelling enough for him to wheel his cart around and push it in the opposite direction from the pond, barrelling his way toward the hotel after breakfast with a great sense of urgency-and recklessness, it would appear.

Now he is just a mess of pain and shame and frustration. How humiliating it is to be here in this condition. He has never stepped inside this building before; this is not a building for men like him with its grandeur and ghosts of Indochina.

He cannot now even recall her father's name. He could tell her what he remembers about 1956, he supposes, the year she said her father was sent to a camp, but as he used to feel with Lan, he would rather tell her about the decades that preceded it, the years of the liberation struggle, a time when people still believed they had the power to influence the course of history, that words could change the world.

What an unfamiliar and intoxicating new world Hng had discovered upon being sent by his parents to work for his Uncle Chin in the city in 1933. At eleven years old, Hng found himself in the midst of a noisy, boisterous circus where men shouted at one another over breakfast, leaping to their feet in mid-sentence if the spirit moved them. The air was filled with competing voices, and great clouds of cigarette smoke spiralled with the dizzying rotation of the ceiling fans above.

Hng had initially cowered in the corner, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of their voices. There was none of the polite bowing and deference toward elders that he was used to. Nothing he had been exposed to in village life had prepared him for the heat of such exchanges, their speed.