The Beauty of Humanity Movement

by Camilla Gibb

  “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 crashing 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.

  “Come,” his uncle said, luring him out of the shadows. “They might roar like tigers, but they have the soft fur of kittens, I promise you.”

  Uncle Chin seemed immune to the volume and violence of the men’s voices. He darted around the room, ducking under gesticulating arms while balancing a full bowl of ph in each hand, sidestepping sudden movements, changing his direction mid-step. Uncle Chin was a dancer, keen to teach his nephew the steps.

  “Your height is an advantage,” he said kindly. Hng hardly had to bend to lift empty bowls, replenish water glasses and bottles of fish sauce, replace clean spoons and chopsticks in canisters and wipe sticky rings off the surfaces of the low tables.

  Under Uncle Chin’s calm and steady direction, Hng grew accustomed to the tone of the room. Soon it was no longer a wilderness of ferocious animals, but an orderly zoo. The same people congregated at the same tables each morning, certain men commanding more attention than others. They spoke of liberating the peasantry, the class struggle, the proletariat and bourgeoisie—ideas that might not have meant anything to Hng, but certainly became familiar to him through their frequent repetition. As did the names of foreign men with big ideas: Stalin, Marx, Lenin. Zhū Dé, Zhōu Ēnlái, Máo Zédōng.

  Hng no longer flinched when someone stood up abruptly, throwing back his chair and bursting into spontaneous verse, or set the spoons on a table jumping as he pounded a fist for emphasis. He performed his tasks proudly and began to find the grace in his own feet. His height also gave him a further advantage his uncle had not foreseen. He could study the texts the men placed on their tables, make out the words they jotted down in their moleskin notebooks, marvel at the sketch of a tablemate’s likeness—the magic of pencil on a page.

  Hng was captivated. These men were different from all the men he had ever known, and it was not just the absence of ploughs. Their foreign ways piqued his curiosity and he took it all in, eyes and ears aflame.

  Hng’s limited education had given him the basic ability to read, though he’d had little opportunity to use this skill since arriving in the city. His uncle, illiterate himself, looked upon an abandoned newspaper as nothing more than good fortune for his fire. As he got older, Hng found himself attempting to read over the men’s shoulders. He found himself repeating, furthermore, some of their more well-worn phrases at night before his uncle came to bed: We must overthrow the forces of oppression and degradation. Communism is key to our liberation. By means of guerrilla warfare, if need be. Our allies are the Comintern and the Communist Party of China, but the future must be fashioned by Vietnamese hands.

  Through years of repetition, Hng shed his provincial accent, acquiring some sense of the liberation about which these men always spoke. He never revealed this transformation to his Uncle Chin, who still spoke with a peasant’s accent, still betrayed his humble origins as a matter of principle perhaps, despite all his years in Hanoi. Not until his uncle passed away did Hng dare to speak in the clipped tones of the Hanoi dialect to which he did not feel entirely entitled.

  Hng was twenty-two years old when he inherited his uncle’s shop, and while he missed his uncle more than he knew it was possible to miss someone, he was ready to do his memory proud after apprenticing under him for eleven years. It was 1944, a world war going on. H Chí Minh’s Vit Minh, the People’s Army, were fighting the Japanese who had occupied the country three years earlier, displacing the embattled French, but people still needed to eat breakfast, perhaps more so than ever. A bowl of ph can offer critical sustenance and a reason to get up in the morning, even in the most troubling of times. Certainly, a wife or mother could provide breakfast if need be, though most did not and still do not bother with the effort of ph, and wives and mothers, furthermore, did not have the news.

  Under his ownership, Hng is proud to say, the ph shop continued to be as much a place for conversation as for food, much of it by then bubbling up in the dark, southwest corner of the room around an outspoken young man named Ðạo. There was something special about this young man—Hng had noticed it immediately—an aura of light seemed to spill from him and suspend anyone in the vicinity in a state of grace.

  Ðạo was the most articulate critic Hng had ever heard. “Yes, of course we must rid the country of the French,” he said to his colleagues when the colonialists returned after the Japanese withdrew in 1945, “but we must fight just as hard against the Confucian norms that have enslaved our people for centuries. The enemy lies within us as much as it lies out there.”

  Hng found himself forgetting his tasks whenever Ðạo commanded the room; he stopped and listened along with everyone else. Ðạo made the complicated politics of the time seem perfectly intelligible.
“Politics must not be the domain of the learned and the privileged,” he insisted, “but that of every man and woman, especially the ones behind the ploughs.” No longer did the conversations in the shop strike Hng as somewhat removed from the experiences of people of humble origins; Ðạo was speaking both about him and to him.

  Hng found whatever excuse he could to be near the man— replenishing the fish sauce on his table more often than necessary, making sure to clear his bowl the moment Ðạo laid his chopsticks across the rim.

  When he wasn’t speaking, Ðạo was writing in his notebook. Hng would cast his eyes discreetly over the man’s shoulder and take in some of his lines. One day Hng read a poem he found particularly striking. It was Ðạo’s ability to capture something between bitter and sweet that caused Hng to speak directly to him for the first time. “The balance of yin and yang,” Hng said.

  Ðạo turned in his chair and looked up at Hng. “Just like your ph,” he said.

  Hng felt the rare heat of flushed cheeks in that moment and averted his eyes. Ðạo, meanwhile, copied the poem onto another page of his notebook, tore out the page and pressed it into Hng’s hands.

  This single gesture made Hng want to improve himself. He began to gather the newspapers the men left behind each morning and read them for company at night, the company he had longed for since his uncle’s passing. He read them by lantern light, lying on the mattress he used to share with his uncle in the windowless room at the back of the shop.

  One morning, Ðạo handed Hng a package. “I brought you these,” he said. “I noticed you have quite an appetite for reading.”

  “You are too kind,” said Hng, all but silenced by the gesture. He had never been the recipient of a gift in his life.

  The package contained a collection of mimeographs. Essays about the history of the Vietnamese alphabet and the birth of modern Vietnamese poetry. Articles about the Russian revolution, the theories of the German thinker Marx, notes on Leninism by the great revolutionary H Chí Minh.

  It took months of Hng’s labouring at night to finish reading them, longer still to really understand them. On certain points he needed clarification. He would underline the relevant sections and look to Ðạo the following morning.

  “Here,” Hng would point, “where H Chí Minh speaks of revolutionary ethics, is he appealing to Confucian notions of duty?”

  “It’s his way of communicating new ideas without alienating those who are very attached to the old,” said Ðạo. “You’ll find he does the same with certain elements of village culture.”

  Where Hng could not follow the path from a concept to its realization, he would put it to Ðạo. “But we are not a nation of factory workers,” he said one morning. “Where will the Party find the proletarian masses?”

  “Ah, this is just as Mao said of China,” Ðạo explained, taking time to sit with Hng after breakfast and explore how the various theories of communism could be applied in Vietnam. “Mao shifted the emphasis away from industry to agrarian reform, tailoring it to the Chinese situation,” Ðạo said. “Our man will no doubt do the same.”

  Their man was the great H Chí Minh, who had further escalated the intensity of the war against the French with the declaration of the Democratic Republic’s independence in 1945.

  “What is this Atlantic Charter H Chí Minh keeps speaking of?” Hng remembers asking Ðạo.

  “It’s an agreement between the Allies that nations have a right to self-determination. It’s the chairman’s way of convincing the Americans that they have to recognize our independence.”

  “He’s very smart to use their language,” Hng had said. “It’s just like he did when he began our Proclamation of Independence with the words of the American Declaration: ‘All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’ Uncle H strengthens his case by appealing as much to their sentiments as to their political sensibilities.”

  “Nicely put,” Ðạo said, eyebrows raised. Hng had surprised them both with this first expression of opinion. “And good memory,” Ðạo added, tapping his temple.

  “I’ve memorized many things,” Hng said. “I know most of your poems by heart.”

  “You honour me,” Ðạo replied.

  Silence fell between them. Hng had meant to honour, but Ðạo’s attention made him glow with embarrassment. He did not mean to boast.

  There was so much Hng did not know, leading him to study in even greater detail the essays contained in the pamphlets Ðạo shared with him. In part, he felt the need to compensate for the fact that he was not out there alongside the Vit Minh soldiers, risking his life in battle.

  In 1954, the war was won. The French were finally defeated by the Vit Minh at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Hng was prepared to give his soup away for free, to keep the shop open all day so that the men could drink and play games in celebration, but they would not relax, would not linger, least of all Ðạo, who immediately turned the conversation to the realities of a free Vietnam and the role learned men like them would play within it.

  It appeared the Workers’ Party had already given some thought to this question. In the days immediately after liberation, the Party issued a series of proclamations calling upon artists and intellectuals—people literate and educated in ideology—to lead the masses toward awareness of their enlightenment and teach and disseminate the principles of Lenin and Marx. Spokesmen sought to recruit them by shouting about revolutionary duty from rooftops; officials plastered posters onto the walls of Hng’s shop.

  “But wait a minute,” Ðạo was the first among the men in the shop to say. “Is this really the job of the artist? To be a Party mouthpiece, a sloganeer?”

  In the end he was punished for posing such questions.

  Had Miss Maggie’s father also risked his life in this way? Hng wonders. In all likelihood yes, since he was sent to a camp the same year Party officers came for Ðạo and his colleagues. But if he suffered the same fate as Ðạo? Then Lý Văn Hai never returned.

  Old Man Hng is sitting in a chair in a linen closet. He is snoring, his mouth wide open and toothless, an untouched glass of green tea sitting on a shelf. Maggie closes the door quietly and the old man wakes up, looking froglike and confused.

  “My teeth,” he says, patting his lips.

  “The doorman found them lying beside you on the road,” says Maggie. “I don’t think they’ll be of any use now, I’m afraid.”

  “Never fit right anyway,” Hng mumbles.

  “And these,” Maggie says, offering him the battered remnants of his glasses.

  The old man turns the glasses around in his hand as if they are unfamiliar to him, then tucks them into his shirt pocket with a self- conscious word of thanks. He cups his knees as if he’s about to stand up. His pant leg is torn and grease-stained, and Maggie sees a nasty cut running down the length of his thin, hairless leg.

  “Don’t get up,” Maggie says, her hand against his shoulder. “You’re bleeding, Mr. Hng. I’m going to get the doctor to see you.”

  The old man dismisses this with a wave, saying he’s quite all right, nothing broken, just a little scraped and bruised. He apologizes for wasting her time.

  But what was he doing pushing his cart up Ngô Quyn, one of Hanoi’s busiest streets? Maggie wonders. Surely this isn’t the route he takes home after breakfast. “Were you coming to see me?” she asks tentatively.

  The old man hangs his head. The thin grey hairs barely cover a scalp battered by decades of sun and rain. Yes, he was coming to see her. Unfortunately he still has no recollection as to why.

  “Did you have something you wanted to tell me?” she asks hopefully.

  “Perhaps I did,” he says, nodding at his knees.

  “Listen. I’m going to get you a room so you can rest up a bit. Get off that leg.”

  “No, no.” He waves his hand. “That really isn’t necessary.”

  But s
he doesn’t want to let the old man go. She made the mistake of assuming she would have more time with her mother; she’s not about to repeat it.

  ——

  Hng has never seen a bed so big. Even after bathing in hot water, he fears dirtying these white sheets. He rubs the balls of his feet into the thick, green carpet and opens all the cupboards one by one. Empty but for two lonely white robes and matching pairs of slippers. So much room. Everything he has ever owned could fit into one of these cupboards, but nothing he has ever owned would be good enough to be kept here.

  He pulls on the trousers of the bellhop’s uniform Miss Maggie has left hanging behind the door. They’re too long and a bit tight at the waist, but he admires the gold piping that runs down each leg. Very smart indeed.

  He tests the corner of the bed, which yields unexpectedly to his weight, then lies back against a cloud of plush pillows. He stares at the wooden beams of the sloping ceiling and wonders how one’s back fares with such a lack of support and how many ducks lost their feathers to the pillows on this bed. He reaches for the booklet on the pillow to his left. It is a menu for something called room service. Miss Maggie had said he could just dial nine and order anything he wanted to eat. Anything at all. But Hng has never used a telephone. He has never operated a television either and is reluctant to press any of the buttons on the device she referred to as the remote control.

  When Miss Maggie stops by in the early afternoon to check on him, she presses a button on the device and turns the television on for him. “These arrows,” she says. “This is how you change the channel. Now, what can we get you to eat?”

  On the last page of the room service booklet, he finds a list of items translated into Vietnamese, but unfortunately, little of the food is familiar to him. He has never tasted Club Sandwich or Caesar Salad or Cheese Plate. He opts for ph, curious to know what a ph might taste like when made from ingredients where money is no object.