by Camilla Gibb
“Come,” Hng said at last, drawing Bình away from the table. “There is a bird nesting above the frame of the door.”
The boy padded through Hng’s backroom after him, where Hng pointed to the nest wedged under the eaves.
“Are there babies?” he remembers Bình asking.
Hng had crouched down and encouraged the boy to climb up and sit on his shoulders. Hng tottered upright, pinning the boy’s calves against his chest. “Can you see inside?”
“There’s a blue egg,” Bình said, his voice full of wonder. “When will it hatch?”
“I tell you what,” Hng said. “We’ll have a look every day until it does.”
One night, Hng took a pair of ivory chopsticks, sawed off their tips and sanded them until they were nicely tapered and polished. He pulled Bình out of the inferno the next morning to present these to him. The boy held them in one hand and clutched them against his chest as he walked back to the table unnoticed and resumed his seat. The glow in Bình’s eyes as he turned the chopsticks over in his hands and admired them from all angles had given Hng the sense, for the briefest of moments, of what it might feel like to be a father. He had felt it again this morning watching Bình rise to address the foreman: that same proud flicker of paternal love. Age is doing its inevitable though, and reversing their roles; the son is now defending the father.
How gentle and selfless Bình has always been. How bold and idealistic was his father. But perhaps the politics of a time determine the disposition of a man; perhaps a revolutionary is only a revolutionary in revolutionary times. Hng cannot say with any certainty what makes a man. But he certainly knows what breaks one.
Perhaps the poor girl who turned up unexpectedly this morning knows something of this too. If Lý Văn Hai was among the men who used to frequent Hng’s shop, he is unlikely to have met a happy end.
Right, he says to himself, slapping his thighs. Time to tell Anh about the girl and the ghost who is her father. Hng presses his palms into his knees and pushes himself upright with a groan. He really is getting old. He has begun to wonder what Buddha has in store for him in the afterlife, whether it be reincarnation as a bull or a bug.
Hng offers the bird seller a thousand đng to watch his cart. The bird seller bargains for double. Hng passes over a greasy wad of small bills, then makes his way unburdened toward a pink pyramid of stacked pigs in the far corner of the market.
Anh waves a large blade in greeting. She puts the knife down and wipes her bloodied hands on her white smock before delicately taking the business card Hng holds out to her by the edges. She does not read English either. They need someone of Ts generation to translate. Anh calls over the fishmonger’s son, but he shakes his head: he was in a boat as a boy, not a classroom.
The district propaganda broadcast is reaching its peak as the business card is passed from bloodied hand to fish-scaled hand to muddied hand throughout the stalls of the market. A voice backfires like an exhaust pipe through the loudspeaker, spluttering the names and addresses of those who have neglected to pay their garbage collection fee or renew their motorbike licence or turned eighteen and failed to report for military duty.
Having heard his own name so many times, Hng is immune to this public shaming. He’s more attuned to the smaller sounds, the burps of nature. Frogs croaking their final days in pans of slimy water; birds twittering in their lacy cages. Despite all the years he has lived in Hanoi, Hng can still hear a canary sing above the propaganda broadcast, over the thrum and burr of engines and the orchestra of competing horns. He can still discern a note of nature’s grace.
The card is a stampede of fingerprints by the time it is returned to Hng, but someone has written a translation of the words on its reverse.
MISS MAGGIE LY
Curator of Art
Hotel Sofitel Metropole
15 Ngô Quyn Street
luxury at the heart of Hanoi since 1901
A Seam Between Worlds
Maggie’s taxi is now wedged into a jam of idling engines. She wants to reach over the driver, punch the steering wheel and join the chorus of horns. On any other day she would simply lean her head back against the seat, resigned to the futility of fighting Hanoi’s traffic, but she feels renewed this morning, more hopeful than she has in months. That faint glimmer of recognition in the old man’s eyes as he repeated her father’s name had been like finally seeing a sliver of light peek out from under an iron curtain. She’d wanted to slip her hand underneath, whatever the risk of being crushed, to grope around for a hand to take hold of on the other side.
She’s spent a frustrating and painful year combing through archives that have yielded no evidence of her father. She’s found no reference to him in the archives of the Fine Arts Museum, not even a single catalogue for an exhibition where his work might have been shown. Even his presence at the city’s former École des Beaux Arts is in question—there’s no record of his attendance at the school. The censors literally cut the names of dissident artists out of registries and publications. They’ve been systematic and thorough revisionists, leaving a history full of holes.
The records would suggest Lý Văn Hai never existed. But if that is so, whose daughter is she? And who was the man with the hands gnarled like a boxer’s from an accident he refused to talk about, the one who taught her to write the English alphabet with a pen gripped between the knuckles of his index and middle fingers, the one who sketched crude animals for her with his claw, trying to guide her own hand in imitation as they knelt side by side on the floor of their room in Saigon?
He used to hold her hand every morning as they walked down the street together even though he had no grip. People referred to him as her grandfather because he was relatively old when she was born, the fourth and only one of her mother’s pregnancies to result in a child. His hair had turned completely white during the three years he’d been interned in a re-education camp after returning from the U.S.
For a Vietnamese man, Maggie’s father displayed what she knew even then to be an unusual amount of public affection, kissing her on the forehead when he dropped her off at school on the base every morning—a school for the children of the friendliest of friendly Vietnamese, those who were working directly for the Americans. Her mother worked as a nurse, and her father as a translator because, although he could no longer paint, he could speak English thanks to the four years he’d spent studying in Chicago in the early 1950s.
“I missed you today,” he would often say when he picked her up.
“But, Daddy, I was here at school the whole time. Just where you left me.”
There were days when there was no school and the three of them stayed in their shuttered room, her father kneeling on the cracked linoleum floor, bending over paper and sketching a story for her with his claw while her mother cooked over a kerosene burner, the smell of rice mixing with the incense they burned to mask the stench of sewage beyond the bamboo curtain.
Her parents would whisper at night, Maggie lying on one mattress, her parents on another, discussing the progress of the war, making plans. Maggie’s stomach would flutter as if full of fish. “If we have a choice,” her mother would whisper, and the fish would get rough with their tails.
Only when they were standing on the tarmac at Tân Sn Nht air base in 1975 about to board a U.S. military plane did Maggie realize a choice had been made. Her father had stepped out of line as they approached the plane, joining the other men gathered to one side. Maggie broke free from her mother, running toward her father, mashing her forehead into his stomach and digging her nails into the back of his thighs.
“Little one,” he said, trying to loosen her grip with his claws. “Listen.” He squatted so that he could face her. “We have no choice, Maggie. The men who did this to my hands? The men from the North? They are coming to Saigon.”
The heat rising from the tarmac wavered like water and the fumes of the plane made Maggie feel woozy. She buried her face in her father’s neck and inhaled the peppe
ry smell of his sweat and the starch from the collar of his shirt.
“It is women and children first to safety,” her father said, patting her back with his claw. “I will be coming on another plane.”
Maggie looked over her shoulder at her mother in her nurse’s uniform, holding a baby that was not her own. Lined up behind her were hundreds of nurses and nuns holding the hands of children and cradling a great many crying babies.
“You go back to your mother now. You keep her company. Be strong,” he said, giving her a gentle push.
“But, Daddy—”
“She needs you, Mouse.”
When Maggie stepped out of the arrivals building at Hanoi’s airport a year ago, the combination of jet fuel and sweat and the starched shirts of men had caused her to drop her bags and bury her face in her hands. The smell of home was indistinguishable from the smell of leaving home: each inhalation a mix of familiarity and fear.
The recognition ended there. Maggie entered a city so much brighter and busier than the cold and dark portrait of Hanoi she had inherited from her mother. The optimism and energy of the place, with its doors thrown open to the West, its new wealth and possibilities—her mother wouldn’t have believed the spirit, the surging adrenalin of three and a half million dreams being pursued simultaneously with little concern for what is stirred up in their wake.
Maggie found herself in a world of teenagers, a generation fuelled by hopes and hormones, people who had no interest in being dragged back to the past. They face forward, the future, the West. The past is abandoned: the pain of it, perhaps; the shame of it. It’s old men Maggie must turn to now, old men with their ailing, fading memories and their fears.
A few months ago, an artist whose work Maggie has on display in the hotel gallery had directed her to just one such old man, telling her about a café that served as an informal gallery of artwork from the dark days before Ði mi. Maggie had made her way to Nguyn Huâu Huân Street later that same day. She paused in the doorway for a few minutes as her eyes adjusted to the light. Huge cracks ran across the tiled floor as if the building had survived an earthquake, and the thick metal bars on the windows gave it a penal air. A few men sat on low wooden stools drinking coffee and a fluorescent light buzzed overhead, casting a greenish pall over the room.
The walls were crammed with pieces of art hanging so closely together it was as if they formed a continuous mural. Maggie moved around the room, looking at each piece in turn, noticing how many of them were neither signed nor dated.
As she neared the kitchen, the café owner, Mr. Võ, shuffled forth in black slippers, broom in hand. She introduced herself, but he did not smile. Older Hanoians have recoiled at her American accent before, but his lack of warmth made her particularly cautious. According to the artist, Mr. Võ was notoriously wary of foreigners, especially those interested in art. He’d been hounded by dealers and collectors in recent years.
“I was told this is where you could see the real old Hanoi,” she said, which did at least soften his expression. “You knew all of these artists?” She gestured at the walls.
“Of course,” he said.
“Did you ever know a Lý Văn Hai?”
Mr. Võ’s bottom lip curled upward. “He must have been one of Hng’s,” he said, with a shrug.
Maggie shook her head, not understanding.
“He’s a ph seller,” said Mr. Võ. “Years ago he had a shop where a lot of artists ate breakfast, but now he’s on the street, always moving.”
“Do you know how I can find him?”
“They say you find him with your nose.”
But it had taken more than her senses. After three months of asking virtually everyone on staff, every artist and dealer she knew, every driver or tour guide she found waiting in the lobby of the Metropole, she finally got lucky. Yesterday she met the new sous-chef who has been hired in the kitchen—a French-trained Indian woman named Rikia Saddy who speaks enviably flawless Vietnamese.
“I’ve heard he makes the best ph in the city,” the woman said, pouring Maggie a cup of coffee as thick as melted chocolate.
“But if it’s the best ph in the city, why don’t more people know about it?” Maggie asked, leaning back against the stainless steel counter.
“I don’t think it’s a secret, just something shared with a small number of people. My husband’s driver takes his breakfast from him.”
Rikia phoned her husband later in the day. She came back to Maggie with the name of a new hotel under construction on the east shore of West Lake. “He says to bring your bowl before seven. And be prepared to run if the police turn up.”
And so Maggie had brought her bowl this morning and introduced herself to Old Man Hng. And seeing that faint look of recognition on his face as he said her father’s name? A seismic moment that revealed a seam between worlds.
Hng leans all his weight into his cart to push it the last hundred metres down the dirt track to the shantytown. He parks his cart behind his shack and hauls his pots down to the bank of the pond, resting them in the mud while he goes to fetch the papaya milk he uses to wash his apron.
As he puts his key into the padlock, he sees a package jutting out from under the corrugated tin eaves. Bình must have come by, that was good of him—here are his glasses, the wonky arm straightened, the cracked lens replaced.
There is little that can be done about the eye with a cataract, but with glasses, the sight of his right eye is measurably improved. Hng can once again see the Cyrillic letters stamped on the canvas from which, years ago, he sewed himself a straw-filled mattress. If he leans into the scrap-metal wall of his shack, he can make out some of the headlines of the old newspapers he stuffed into the cracks to keep out the winter draft. But he has given up reading, gave that up some time ago; it just reminds him of all he has lost.
Hng carries his bottle of papaya milk down to the pond and douses his apron with it, then rubs the material back and forth against the washing 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 unobserved 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 shore 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 shore creatures bury their eggs. He’d been a student of nature as a child, a study encouraged by his father, in lieu of companionship, that he could never have known would be of such use in an urban life.
Like Hng, the people who collected on this shore in the late 1950s had lost everything. They were eating rats and the lice from their hair. Their shacks were built of scrap 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’ô’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 t
hemselves 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 scraped 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 carcass, 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 sautéed 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 eggshell.
You do not belong here, he wanted to say to this vision. My God. 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 glass—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.