The Beauty Of Humanity Movement Part 5

He had to resist the urge to reach out and wipe the smear of grease off her cheek with his thumb. "You deserve a better life," he said instead.

"We had a better life," said the girl, breaking a piece of thread with her teeth. "Of course we didn't realize it at the time. We had a very large apartment, and before my father was killed, plenty to eat. Even croissants and chocolate."

Hng had felt all the communism in his body drain out of him as she spoke. All the colonial resentment too. The politics and history of Vietnam lay in a puddle at his feet. "You deserve the best pastries and the finest chocolate," he said. "You deserve a man who adores you and spoils you with such things."

"But I have a man who adores me and spoils me, don't I?"

Hng had stood there feeling stripped naked. He was powerless in her presence; this was now clear to them both.

"Here," she said, holding out the s.h.i.+rt to him, "try this on. It only has one sleeve, but I'll find the material to make the other one eventually."

By the time she did finish making the s.h.i.+rt they were no longer speaking. The silence between them was as deafening as the raining bombs of the American War, but where the latter came to an end, the former waged on. He could not believe she was capable of such destruction, but in hindsight, the seeds had been there all along.

Hng interrupts the driver as the taxi nears the shantytown, asking if he could just stop and let him off at the end of the dirt road leading down to the pond. Hng would feel ashamed to arrive home in such an extravagant manner.

"I wasn't going to drive down there anyway, my friend," says the driver. "Bad roads. Bad people. You be careful."

What do you know of it? Hng wants to say. The taxi driver has obviously mistaken him for a visitor. Hng slams the car door and stomps down the unlit road in his bellhop's trousers, determined to look forceful and confident despite the pain in his leg. It has started to rain, and as soon as Hng is out of sight of the taxi he reaches down, brushes his hand against the mud at his feet and runs a streak of it across his cheek and through his hair.

Father and son are taking turns pus.h.i.+ng the cart toward the shantytown, but T is losing patience by the time they get to the track leading down to the pond. It has taken them an hour and a half to get this far, and it takes the strength of both of them-two hands on each handle of the cart. How the h.e.l.l does Old Man Hng do this on his own? T is grateful that it is at least dark; he really wouldn't want anyone mistaking him for a food seller with a rickety old cart.

They discover the track muddy and difficult from the early evening rain, and T is p.i.s.sed off that his Nikes are getting dirty.

"It's a pair of shoes, T," says Bnh.

"You don't understand," T mumbles.

"No, you're quite right. I don't," says his father.

They manoeuvre the cart to the edge of the track. As they near the pond, they see several small fires throwing sparks into the damp night. Black smoke spirals upward and the smell of kerosene stings Ts nostrils. He hears the murmur of talk, the howl of an unhappy baby, the clang of metal pots and the drone of hungry mosquitoes and, as they approach the old man's shack, the distinct soft tenor of his voice as he talks to the man next door, a halfwit who honks like a goose.

Hng is the heart of this small community on the banks of a polluted pond; he is good to these poor people, keeping them fed and entertained. He treats everyone with respect-from people in high places, like Miss Maggie Ly, to people without sense or legs, like his neighbour. It is humbling to have an Old Man Hng in your life. It makes you want to be a better person.

The old man thanks T and his father for the return of his cart with his hands clasped together and a bow of his head, and insists they stay and eat something. He apologizes for having little to offer: rice, a bit of fried pork belly and fish sauce, that is all.

"Hng, Hng," says Bnh. "Honestly, it's fine. What a day you've had, huh?"

"It's been quite an adventure. Come. Let's get out of the rain. You'll at least stay for a cup of tea."

They bend through the entrance to his shack and take a seat on his hard, straw-filled mattress. Hng places the kettle over a small kerosene stove and rummages for his tea canister.

T and his father always visit the old man here on the first day of Tet. Even though his shack is normally dark and dank, at Tet it is always bright with fresh flowers, flowers he travels kilometres to collect. The room is swept of dust and evil and is fragrant with incense and plump fruits.

Few words beyond the customary pa.s.s between them on these occasions. They will wish Old Man Hng prosperity, and he will return the good wishes and offer them square packets of banh chung which have been cooking overnight in a pot on the fire, his callused fingers unaware of the heat as he pulls each packet from the boiling water. They will eat the sticky rice and mung bean paste that hug the prized fatty pork middle, and T will share this treat with Grandfather o by placing one of the square banana-leaf packets at the base of his altar alongside some white rice, rice wine and crisp new bills in a red envelope.

o's altar still s.h.i.+nes like a bright star today, a candle lit to keep him company. T and his father both bow to their ancestor before taking the cups of woody brown tea Hng offers.

"So what took you over that way this morning, anyway?" T tries again.

"That Vit Ki'eu girl has lost something," the old man says, his eyes milky in the candlelight. "She thought maybe I could help her find it."

"And can you?" T prods.

"I don't know yet," says Hng.

Bnh asks Hng about his leg and the visit with the doctor, changing the subject just as it's getting interesting.

"Leg will be fine," the old man says. "Just need to restore my qi."

"I'm glad it wasn't worse," says Ts father. "For you or your cart."

They hear a sudden sharp cry outside the shack. "What was that?" T asks, getting to his feet.

"What was what?" says the old man.

"It sounded like someone in pain," says Bnh.

Bnh and T poke their heads out the door of the shack and see a woman lying on her back about a metre away. T rushes forward and helps her into a sitting position. She curses the mud on her backside. "It's the only decent skirt I have. So stupid to be wearing these things in the mud," she says, pointing at the flip-flops on her feet.

Ts father follows him outside. "It's okay, Dad. I've got her." T lifts the old woman by the elbow, light as an egg. She leans the yolk of her weight into his forearm. "I'm all right, son," she says. "Thank you. You go on back to your grandfather now."

T and his father stoop to enter the door of Hng's shack. It takes a minute for Ts eyes to readjust to the dim.

"Did you know that at the Metropole you can pick up the phone and order anything you want to eat?" the old man says. "Imagine. Anything at all."

T wipes the rain off his face with his s.h.i.+rtsleeve and wonders if the old man has lost his hearing along with his qi. That lady couldn't have been more than a couple of metres away and that was a sharp and distinctive cry of pain. He wouldn't just ignore her. He is clearly not himself.

Whole Fruit.

Maggie moves through the faded glory of the marble lobby of her apartment building. She steps into the rattling iron cage of an old French elevator and presses the top b.u.t.ton. Gears click, wheels hum.

Her mother grew up in a building just like this on another tree-lined boulevard in the French Quarter. It was quite grand, though she used to lament how much it had deteriorated after her father was killed in the fight against the French. The cracks in the plaster, the leaks and broken windows, none of which they could afford to repair.

She never did see her beloved home again. Despite all the years in Saigon and Minneapolis after that, Nhi never stopped referring to Hanoi as home. It was the Hanoi of her childhood she missed, not the world it became after independence, a place where "everybody a snake, a spy." She had never contemplated returning. She had never forgiven her family for rejecting her because of her relations.h.i.+p with a dissident artist. She could not believe the country had really emerged from darkness; not even Bill Clinton lifting the trade embargo in 1994 could convince her.

"Don't you want to see it for yourself?" Maggie had asked when they were watching the news of Clinton's visit in 2000.

Nhi had turned her head away at the suggestion, covering her mouth.

"I could go," Maggie said, "and if it's safe, which I'm sure it is, you could join me."

"Please don't do this," her mother had whispered through her hand.

Maggie had been reminded of her father's words from long ago in that moment: You keep her company, be strong, she needs you. Those words had been prophetic. From the moment they arrived in the U.S., Maggie had led the way.

They were resettled in Minneapolis in 1975 with clothes for winter courtesy of the U.S. Army, but with little evidence of home beyond the piece of paper upon which her father had written the phone number of Margaret McGillis, his former landlady in Chicago, after whom Maggie had been named. "You call her," he had said to Maggie's mother. "You call her and give her your address. That way I'll be able to find you."

But Nhi could speak no English, and Maggie was largely limited to letters and numbers. Their first task was survival, feeding themselves from tins of things they recognized by the pictures on the labels: sliced pineapple, sections of mandarin oranges in syrup, carrots, tuna, b.u.t.ton mushrooms. Maggie's mother stockpiled these cans just in case-a mantra she never let go of in all her years in the U.S. Every night, for this same reason, she wedged a chair under the handle of the front door of the subsidized apartment they had been allocated.

About a month after she and her mother arrived, Maggie had been lured by the sound of a bouncing ball into the stairwell, where she discovered a Vietnamese girl very close to her in age playing a game by herself. She counted to ten in English before switching to Vietnamese. Maggie taught her new friend, Mei, the English words for eleven through thirty-two before they gave up the game and returned to the girl's apartment, where her mother, Mrs. Minh, was making spring rolls. It was the first thing Maggie had eaten in a long time that didn't come from a can.

Mrs. Minh took Maggie's mother to a Chinese grocery the very next day, and both their meals and her mood began to improve. Soon after that they had a visit from a social worker accompanied by a Vietnamese translator who gave them a lengthy set of instructions. Nhi would attend English cla.s.ses in a church bas.e.m.e.nt, and Maggie would start first grade at the school in their neighbourhood in the fall.

"Please," her mother had said to the translator that day, pulling the piece of paper with Margaret McGillis's phone number on it out of her pocket. "Please will you call this lady and tell her we are here?"

But the number was out of service. According to the operator, the line had been disconnected for some time. They learned then that Americans do not stay in a house for generations, that there are few generations and little continuity, something her father must have failed to understand about America in his time there as a visitor. The future her mother had envisioned was rewritten in that instant. They no longer had the certainty of reunion with Ly Vn Hai.

Her mother had smiled and nodded politely at the translator that day and escorted her and the social worker to the door. She then wedged the chair under the door handle and lay face down on the floor of the hallway. Her back arched and contracted in undulating waves; she was soundless, her fists clenched against her temples.

Maggie rushed to the balcony, hoping to catch sight of the translator in the parking lot, but saw no trace of her. She ran back inside and picked up the phone, yelling for help over and over in Vietnamese to a dial tone.

There was a knock at the door. Maggie dropped the receiver and climbed over her mother, unhooking the chair from under the door handle. It was Mrs. Minh, Mei's mother, from down the hall. Mrs. Minh looked at Maggie's mother on the floor with some surprise before sitting down very calmly beside her and resting her palm on her back. "I was going to ask if you wanted to play mah-jong," she said, as if this were the most ordinary scene in the world.

Maggie unhinges the metal gates of the elevator and tiptoes to the end of the hall. She flicks the light switch and kicks off her heels in the foyer, padding across the parquet squares of the reception room into the kitchen in her stockinged feet. The sound of her heels on the wood floors makes the place feel too hollow and lonely. The flat came furnished with some heavy French antiques, but apart from a few kitchen utensils, Maggie has acquired nothing, uncertain of her place, or how long she will stay.

Her mother had acc.u.mulated very little over the course of thirty years in the U.S., as if her life there had only ever been temporary. Maggie realized just how true this was after her mother died. She stayed at her mother's apartment in the weeks that followed her death, sleeping in her mother's sheets and wearing her mother's bathrobe, still smelling of her Chanel No. 5. She sipped tea from a chipped year of the cat mug and spent hours staring up at the peeling border of poppies her mother had glued to the walls sometime in the 1980s, bracing herself for the task of disposing of her mother's things.

She drank a bottle of wine one night, destroying any resolve, and called Daniel. She hadn't spoken to him in months. "My mother died," she said blankly.

"Oh, Mouse," he said, piercing a heart already broken.

The regret she felt the next morning did at least give her the push she needed. She packed up her mother's mah-jong tiles to give to Mrs. Minh, and donated her clothes and scant pieces of furniture to charity. She kept her mother's watch and the rarely worn ao dai she'd had made for special occasions. It was then that she discovered her mother's secrets. Five years' worth of unsent letters from her mother to her father lay bundled in a s...o...b..x at the back of the closet. Maggie had knelt down on the green carpet with the box in her lap and pulled one letter at random from the pile. The envelope was addressed to Ly Vn Hai at their old apartment in Saigon.

My dear husband, Maggie has just lost her fifth tooth and will be starting third grade in the fall. In just two years, she is speaking English as if she was born in this country. She is an enormous help to me. Who could have imagined when you began to teach her the English alphabet, that soon she would be using it every day? I am taking a night cla.s.s called Basic English for Newcomers, but it is not easy and sometimes I miss the cla.s.s because of my s.h.i.+ft at work. I think it will be some time before I know enough of the language to retrain as a nurse here, but I am thankful for the good job that I have. The head matron has been very patient with me and she has just hired two more Vietnamese cleaners because she says I have shown her how hard the Vietnamese work.

I am enclosing Maggie's second grade photograph. My dear husband, can you see how much she is starting to look like you? I worry about you so much, but when I look at our Maggie it makes me feel you are not so far away. I remain hopeful for our happy reunion.

Your loving wife Nhi Maggie, still kneeling on the carpet, had wept. Her mother's handwriting was so frail, so hesitant. She put the letter back in the s...o...b..x with the others. They really weren't meant for her to read. She cleared out the rest of the closet, emptying a basket of greying, utilitarian bras and underwear into a green garbage bag, only to discover more secrets her mother had withheld. At the bottom of the basket were several pieces of paper: sketches Maggie's father had done for her as a child in Saigon. Gifts of lumbering animals he'd drawn with his clumsy claw. But her mother had taken nothing with them when they left; they had even been ordered to leave the small bag they had packed on the tarmac. Had she hidden these pictures in a pocket? They are creased and stained, perhaps with her sweat.

Why her mother had never shared them with her, Maggie will never know. But they are in Maggie's possession now. Much the same way her mother left Vietnam thirty years ago, Maggie has returned: carrying six of Ly Vn Hai's drawings.

Hng lies in the dark listening to the gentle patter of rain on his corrugated tin roof, wis.h.i.+ng he could pluck whatever it was he had hoped to tell Miss Maggie out of the weeds cluttering his mind. He falls asleep only to awake startled an hour later, the rain thundering down violently from above, catapulting him back to the time of war. The worst of it was in December of 1972, what the Americans called the Christmas bombing, when the B-52s rained bombs for eleven days, destroying railway yards and warehouses, factories and airfields and roads and bridges and hospitals and schools and blocks of communist housing, and wiping out entire neighbourhoods like Kham Thien. It had seemed then that all of Hanoi was burning.

The Old Quarter fortunately was spared, but the bombs had landed so close to the shantytown you could feel the heat rising from the northwest. The squatters were saved by their dirty pond. The tire factory on the far side of the muddy water exploded and lit up the sky for several days before engulfing them in an oily black cloud. For weeks the city was dark and smouldering, and people were coughing up blood and crawling on all fours because they could not see their way.

Finally, the sky faded from black to smoking grey. For several sunless days, Hng and the other men and women of the shantytown waded through the oily pond, tossing debris onto the sh.o.r.e. He remembers pausing a moment at the sight of Lan there among the foragers, a brief look of recognition pa.s.sing between them as if to say: all the pond weed is gone, all the fish, frogs and birds too, but somehow, whether by accident or design, we have survived.

It would take eleven years to rebuild the hospital, a generation to rebuild the neighbourhood of Kham Thien, but less than a year before the pond, without human intervention, began to show signs of new life. A film of algae appeared on the surface. The colour green returned to the palette of Hanoi.

Somehow it was only after the shock of the devastation of that winter bombing that the fear really set in. Hng held his breath, listened for the drone of another wave of bombers. He prayed for an end to the war, prayed for the mercy of a G.o.d who was said to no longer exist.

Hnger forced him to breathe again, to venture beyond the shantytown to forage among ruins, to dredge muddy craters, to drag home dead dogs, to eat the roots of upturned trees. There were losses in the community: those who died of the blood in their lungs, of the rot in their intestines, of septic shock and suicide and starvation. Hng did what he could to keep himself and his neighbours alive, turning over rubble in search of snails, digging for earthworms, boiling and reboiling rank water and making a weak green broth from the lichen he sc.r.a.ped off rocks.

Though Hng no longer spoke to Lan, he would not let her go hungry. If she did not appear among those survivors who gathered for one of his neighbourhood suppers, he would simply wrap a portion of his share in a banana leaf and leave it on her doorstep in the middle of the night. He did this throughout the years of the war.

In April of 1975, black vans drove throughout the city, announcing the withdrawal of American troops. The Liberation of Saigon was imminent and victory would belong to the People's Army. The puppets of the South would be crushed.

"Rise up, comrades," Party spokesmen shouted through the windows of the vans, "for the homeland will soon be unified in the name of the revolutionary father. There will be new life in the new dawn. New light."

They had been waiting more than twenty years for this moment. The skin of a fruit, discarded; a skinless fruit, o had once written of his divided country. Hng has not since had the heart to abandon an orange peel, or even the useless dull-red rind of a lychee. Because of o's words, Hng's life has been governed as much by metaphor as economics.

How Hng wished o could have been there to see it. A future united. Whole fruit.

Of course, the deception of whole fruit is the rot that can be concealed beneath its skin. The victory of 1975 was tainted, as victory always is, by opportunists. Smugglers of uncertain origin came to the squatter settlement on the edge of the pond. A team of sharply dressed men and women walked past the shacks, luring people into the light with shouts of "Who wants a future for their children? Who wants relief from suffering?" The Americans are crazy for Vietnamese children, they said, they are scooping up all the orphans in Saigon and giving them medicines and making them strong. Sell yours to us and we will take them south and get them onto the planes and they will grow up rich.

Hng was struck numb as he watched one young woman after another pa.s.s a swaddled newborn into the arms of an uncertain future. Where the young woman could not do it herself, her mother or mother- in-law stepped in. Whatever their feelings about the war, they must not have hated the thought of their children growing up rich in America. Perhaps they simply felt they had no choice. They were starving and the smugglers were waving money before their eyes. In less than a week, all the baby girls were gone.

The shantytown throbbed with the ache of loss, and those who had not sold babies because they had none to sell seethed with anger and refused to speak to those who had, calling them traitors of the worst possible kind-worse than the Catholics and the selfish cowards who had fled south.

A good nine months of silence pa.s.sed before the tension began to ease. New baby girls were born, and many of these new arrivals were named after their sisters who were growing up rich in America.

Hng has only once seen an American, at least someone he was sure was an American, and even that was from a distance. This man was lying on the sh.o.r.e of Truc Bch Lake draped in parachute silk. He'd been dragged to sh.o.r.e by men just like Hng, poor men fis.h.i.+ng farther along the sh.o.r.e, fis.h.i.+ng despite the danger, because when bombs fell, fish rose-dead, not always intact, but in good numbers nevertheless.

Now, having met Miss Maggie, Hng is able to picture who one of those babies of the shantytown might have become. A strong, educated young woman with a good job who speaks with confidence and does not lower her eyes when she meets a stranger. He thinks of all those babies, women now, their ao dais flapping in American winds, and he wonders if they still know the Vietnamese language, if they have married American men, if they eat ph for breakfast, if they even know the taste of home. He must ask Miss Maggie if America still suffers the deprivation of ph. He wonders how many young women like her are haunted by questions about the past, their homeland. And how many old men like him might have some answers.

If only he had not been so careless with his memories. Carelessness has cost him dearly in the past: shouldn't he have learned when his papers were taken from his shack? He was too angry at the time to think of it, but he should have dedicated himself to his memories then. He should have worked hard to preserve all that he could, because soon there will be nothing of them left.

Maggie can't sleep. She's remembering that winter morning with her mother in Minneapolis when they lost all contact with Vietnam. The s...o...b..nks were the size of elephants that day, the sky bright, flakes swirling around them as if they were figures in a shaken snow globe. Maggie's feet were sliding around in her boots as they trudged up the street because even though she was only ten, her mother had bought her ladies' boots so that they would last a few winters.

They pa.s.sed ph Vit Anh, where they usually stopped for lunch, because although Mrs. Trang made the best ph bc in Minneapolis, Nhi wasn't in the mood for the lady's gossip. They pulled open the door of the new Vietnamese restaurant down the street instead, bells tinkling overhead as they walked in.

The place was thick with cigarette smoke and the noisy clatter of dominoes on Formica tabletops. Maggie's mother nudged her into a booth and took a seat beside her on the red vinyl bench.

"Nghiem Nhi?" asked the man who came to take their order, his mouth and eyebrows almost cartoon-like in their expression of surprise. He stared at Nhi, not closing his mouth.

Her mother squinted. "Do I know you?"

"I'm Paul," he said, his finger to his chest. "Paul Nguyn. Van Hai's colleague from Saigon. Photojournalist. a.s.sociated Press."

She raised her eyebrows in recognition.

"I'm very very sorry about Van Hai," Paul Nguyn said.

"Ma?" Maggie prodded.

Her mother rose from the booth. She walked back into the kitchen with Paul Nguyn, leaving Maggie alone at the table. She returned a few minutes later with a gla.s.s bowl of vanilla ice cream.

"Daddy didn't make it out of Vietnam," Nhi said to the tabletop once she sat down.

They both sat and stared at the bowl of ice cream. Maggie thought of the figure eights she'd learned to make on ice that winter wearing borrowed skates. She remembered the sensation of gliding backward.

"Daddy's not coming?" Maggie said after a few minutes of silence-voicing something she had perhaps known for years.