The Beauty of Humanity Movement

by Camilla Gibb

  T is looking at a pretty but by now familiar scene of a village depicted through a gauze-like veil of rain. He’s not sure what Miss Maggie means. Sure, these are images you see in the countryside, but you also see highways, factories, ports, manufacturing facilities, mines, airports, industrial parks and resorts being built along the coast. And what about the cities? These artists don’t seem to paint the cities. He worries that if this is all foreigners see, lazy rivers and poor people ploughing fields by hand, they will think Vietnam a backward country.

  “What do you think?” Miss Maggie asks. “Would you ever have a painting like this in your home?”

  “But these are not for a Vietnamese home,” T says.

  “You’re right about that,” says Miss Maggie. “Ninety-eight per cent of the contemporary art produced here leaves the country.”

  T, who likes a statistic, says he’s not at all surprised. He checks the photocopied piece of paper for the price of this piece, which is a heart-attack-making eight thousand dollars. Wait until he tells Phng. They could eat 11,428 and a half bowls of ph for that amount of money. They could eat ph every day for thirty-one years and three months. Even for a more-than-average-earning Vietnamese person to make that kind of money it would take close to twenty years. Twenty years without eating or a roof over one’s head or a motorbike or a change of clothes. But T doesn’t know any Vietnamese who would buy such a thing, in any case. If you had eight thousand dollars to spend you might rent a shop for a year or invest in a business or buy a better motorbike and some land or pay for a wedding or a funeral.

  Something’s not right with this business. Someone is getting very very rich.

  The woman who lives next door to Phng’s family is whacking crab claws on the sidewalk with a mallet. She passes a thin pink sliver over her shoulder into the eager mouth of the toddler standing behind her. T high-fives the toddler before slipping down the alleyway and turning right into a courtyard. Phng’s bedroom light beams through the bars of his window above.

  T bounds up the stairs, nearly knocking over Phng’s sister on the landing.

  “He won’t talk to any of us,” she says. “He won’t even come down for dinner. You talk to him. It’s probably some stupid thing about a girl.”

  T pushes open his friend’s bedroom door. He finds Phng lying on his mattress, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts covered in red hearts—a birthday gift from his last girlfriend. Phng has had many admirers and many dates, but not actually many girlfriends, none he’s ever introduced to his family, in any case.

  The fan creaks each time it reverses direction, pushing perfumed waves of incense in Phng’s direction. He doesn’t seem to hear T come in; he’s wearing his headphones and T can hear the tinny treble all the way from the doorway. Phng is staring at the ceiling, a bottle of ru, rice whiskey, a small jug of and a bowl of hardened rice on the floor within reach of him on the mattress.

  T has never seen his friend like this, even over a girl; Phng dismisses girls after the initial flirtation, using American expressions like she was “dirt cheap” and “crumpling my style.” Music will always come first in his life, which worries his parents and sometimes T as well. Family is always first in Vietnam; why does Phng have to be so contrary?

  T nudges Phng’s foot, which is hanging over the end of his bed.

  “Mmm?” Phng moans, raising his head. He immediately collapses back onto the mattress.

  “Phng,” T says, lifting the headphones off his friend’s ears. “What’s wrong?” He sits down on the edge of the mattress. “What are you listening to?”

  “Sex Pistols,” says Phng.

  “What does that mean?”

  Phng shrugs. Even if he knows, he’s not in the mood to talk. He wants to get high.

  They climb up the stairs to the third floor and, with a quick nod to the ancestors’ altar, ascend the metal stairs to the roof. Two of Phng’s father’s shirts have been left to dry on the line, the chickens are quietly clucking in their cages and the dog they are fattening up for Tet is licking his balls. The smells of kerosene and cooking oil float up from the street.

  Phng uses the light that spills from the neighbour’s roof to help him roll a joint. The man they always use for cyclo tours in the Old Quarter supplies him. T is not one for this mood-altering practice himself; he prefers the predictability of good and cheap old-fashioned bia hoi at happy hour, which can sometimes make you tired or fill your stomach too much to eat dinner and make your mother angry, but most times it just makes you happy with an urge to sing karaoke.

  It is wrong to be smoking marijuana overtop of the ancestors, you certainly wouldn’t swear or have sex on top of them either, but it does at least get Phng talking.

  “Have you ever noticed how many promises foreigners seem to make?” he says, exhaling to the clouds.

  “What are you talking about, Phng?”

  “How many times has some tourist said to you, Give me your e-mail address, let’s stay in touch. There’s a CD or a DVD or a book I’m going to send to you when I get home. Or even, Hey, you should really come and visit me in New York or Berlin or wherever.”

  Sometimes there is a brief exchange of e-mails in the first month, but when that stops, as it inevitably does, T no longer really takes it personally.

  “Do you remember that Australian?” Phng asks.

  How could T forget? T had found him very aggressive, both in manner and body. His neck was thick as a tree trunk and a blue vein in his forehead throbbed like it had a heart of its own. He’d caused T a great deal of embarrassment at H Chí Minh’s mausoleum with his short pants and rude voice and his mocking laughter at the fact that Uncle H is sent to Russia every year for a bit of preservation, but T had to save face for Phng’s sake—the guy said his sister was a music producer in Sydney.

  “That asshole didn’t even take my CD, T. You heard him—he said he was going to give it to his sister, but then when I was cleaning out the van the other day? I found the CD jammed between the seats. I’ve wasted all this time thinking that this might be my big break, I even went to the consulate to look into getting an Australian visa, when this guy just abandoned the CD in the van like it was some piece of shit.”

  Phng’s little sister pops her head through the door in the roof just then. Phng stubs the joint out in a pot of coriander. She sniffs the air and asks if they want some food. She is carrying the leftovers from dinner on a tray. She crouches down on her knees and lays pieces of fatty-skinned broiled fish onto the rice in two bowls. She has just washed her hair and it hangs damp around her shoulders, turning her loose white shirt translucent. T cannot help but stare at her nipples, more grape seeds than the raisins of the girl dressed as Santa’s helper.

  T turns the conversation to the subject of the last couple of days, news he is by now desperate to share. He tells his friend about Hng’s accident and Miss Maggie Lý, the Vit Ki’êu who has now called the agency and booked his services for the rest of the week.

  “Can you believe it?” T asks, his whole body a question mark.

  “No,” says Phng, deadpan.

  “I don’t know what this lady’s story is, but she’s got some kind of connection to Hng,” says T.

  “But how does Hng know a Vit Ki’êu?” Phng says. “Especially one working at a place like that. I mean, we don’t even know any Vit Ki’êu, T.”

  “I don’t know,” says T. “Maybe you can help me figure it out.”

  “Yeah, okay,” says Phng.

  Hah! T feels he has very cleverly led Phng back into the daylight. And hopefully back to work. Now all that is needed is a bowl of Old Man Hng’s ph in the morning and Phng’s balance will be truly restored. They will be back to normal, the A-team smiling with the New Dawn.

  An Inverted World

  Hng can see the sheen at the bottom of the kidney as he pushes his cart onto the hotel construction site in the dark before dawn. Absent for just a day and they’ve begun to fill the pool with water. He has faced the inevi
table need to move on for so many decades that he is resigned to it. Other things are more worrying. The price of meat, for instance, which just continues to rise. He has dealt with the meagrest of rations, crops lost to weather or war, the indignities of bullying, bribery and black markets over the years, but somehow the inflation that came with Ði mi is proving the toughest challenge of all.

  Hng is spared some expenses living as he does, collecting his own wood and not having an “official” residence or place of business. Still, the gang leader who claims to be policing the shantytown demands protection money every month, threatening to have their names added to some register that would otherwise recognize their shacks as residences and tax them accordingly.

  Hng knows how much worse it is for people in the countryside, especially the farmers, when fuel is so expensive and taxes are so high. Often the only other people awake when Hng pushes his cart through the city before dawn are groups of children traipsing in from the countryside, children whose families cannot afford to keep them in school, who must come and shine shoes or sell peanuts or worse in order to keep their parents and siblings clothed and fed. Those children whose homes are far away might rent a room, ten or twelve of them together, sleeping in shifts, peeing in a bucket, lice jumping from one head to the next.

  Hng can recognize them at a distance, almost see himself in them. How lucky he was to have had an Uncle Chin. What indignities and deprivation it must have spared him.

  When Hng arrived home in the village for the first time after being sent to his uncle in the city, his father had openly embraced him. A gentle but nervous man, Trong Tri had always quietly loved and pitied his ninth child, privately telling Hng he was the one most like him. But his love for Hng was no match for his wife’s ire, for her attachment to superstition and village gossip; his love for his son was a lonely beacon.

  Hng’s father wiped the celebration off his face and focused his attention on the sheer weight of the plump sack of coins Hng had deposited onto the table as soon as he entered the house. “So business is good,” he said with admiration.

  “Uncle Chin has many many customers. The shop is always very busy,” said Hng.

  “Well, I know you are a great help to him,” his father said, making Hng feel unusually proud.

  His mother swooped in then and scooped the sack off the table. She tossed it in the air, catching it with alternate hands. “My, my,” she said. “What a rich new world you inhabit.”

  Hng’s father quietly advised him to keep his birthmarked cheek to the wall when he greeted his mother in future, and Hng found that when he did so on subsequent visits, his mother even managed to smile at him, suggesting he might want to bathe or lie down after his long journey—after he unburdened himself of his heavy sack of coins. He would spend one night with his family before making the three-day return journey, a night when his mother would cook something good and tell him news of the village, treating him like the visiting relative from the city he had quickly become.

  Hng’s father would whisper to him upon his departure, “I am proud of you, my son. But I would be proud of you without the coins. Please believe that.”

  And Hng did believe that. He returned to the city each time with the satisfaction of knowing he was helping his family.

  The respect Hng had for his father mutated into pity as he got older, pity for a man bullied by his wife’s small-mindedness, a man who could have had much more from life if circumstances had allowed. Ironically, his father had created for his blemished son a chance of a far better life than any Hng ever would have led in the village.

  Later, after Uncle Chin became sick, it became impossible for Hng to leave the shop and return home to his family’s village. His uncle spent more and more time resting in the backroom, but the rest seemed to age rather than heal him. Just a few days before he died, Uncle Chin reached out and touched the mole on his nephew’s cheek. “You’ve been a blessing to me,” he said, “not a curse.”

  Hng’s parents periodically sent one of his brothers to the city to collect the money from him after Uncle Chin’s passing. This brother never did stay for breakfast, despite Hng’s insistence, or offer more than the barest news. Throughout the winter of 1954, in the months after liberation, his brother failed to appear. Hng socked away a portion of his rapidly declining proceeds for his family each month and worried about them more and more.

  Land reform was now underway in the countryside, and although Uncle H had promised this would liberate the peasantry, it was the peasantry who were proving most resistant to the idea—with good reason.

  “You can’t just impose the Russian model on a country like Vietnam,” Ðạo kept repeating. “We simply don’t have the vast tracts of arable land that it would take to create these large collective farms.”

  Hng thought through the implications for his village. He certainly couldn’t imagine wealthy families like the Changs ever relinquishing their land. What would it take to revolutionize his village— any village for that matter? What would it take beyond theory?

  “They would have to merge hundreds of small farms,” Hng said over Ðạo’s shoulder as he leaned in to replenish the small jar of fish sauce on the table.

  “That’s what worries me,” Ðạo said. “It would take charging every one of those small landholders as a class enemy if they showed any resistance at all.”

  The need to get the sum of money he had amassed over the months into his parents’ hands became more urgent as a consequence of this conversation. The next day, for the first morning in twenty-five years, the last eleven under Hng’s ownership, Ph Chin (& Hng) was closed for business. Rather than straining the oxtail bones, peppering his silken broth with cloves, drinking a fortifying tea of ginseng just before the early-morning rush, Hng was on a motorbike, gripping the broad back of a man he had paid to transport him back to his village.

  The ravages of war with the French were evident along much of the three-day journey south of Hanoi, but for the most part, the driver avoided the pockmarked and battle-scarred roads and travelled along rural tracks, which made for a bumpy 320 kilometres. At the port city of Vinh, however, the devastating evidence of recent history was unavoidable. The city had been virtually flattened: the French had even bombed their own factories; sea, land and sky were the colour of ash.

  The driver would take Hng no farther than Vinh, blaming impossible tracks muddied by autumn rains. Hng was thus forced to travel the last and most familiar kilometres on foot. As a boy, he had cycled the nineteen kilometres on his rickety Chinese bicycle to the industrial port every morning to attend school, pedalling the distance back to his village every afternoon. But the landscape displayed an alien nakedness now. Quyt Mountain stood bald, without its crown of cooling pines. The terrain was a lonely grey, devoid of shadows.

  Hng walked along the buffalo track by the Lam River as it snaked its way through the tentative new growth rising from the scorched earth. This was troubled land at the best of times: Uncle H country. Hng could understand the great man’s desire for revolution because he too came from this poor place where the farmers were engaged in ongoing and often losing battles with the chalky soil, the hot, dry Laotian winds, the storms that tore inland from the Gulf of Tonkin, not to mention the landlords constantly driving peasants to produce more despite the mercilessness of the environment.

  While Hng believed it was time for the humbling of people like the wealthy Changs with their orchid-white skin, gold teeth, cruel taunts, vast acreage and team of beleaguered workers, he was genuinely worried about the fate of smaller landowners in the village like Widow Nguyt. After Hng’s parents had laboured for fifteen years in her fields, Widow Nguyt had felt moved to grant them a plot exclusively for their own use. His parents had erected a shrine in her honour in that field as if she were their own ancestor. It was from that plot that they’d been able to earn the money for the shared use of a water buffalo and to have school uniforms made for the last of the boys—Hng, despite the curse upon his c
heek, included.

  Hng had continued to wear that school uniform long after he was sent to Uncle Chin in Hanoi. While Hng felt proud of the implication that he had had some education, Uncle Chin’s chief dishwasher called him over one day and asked if he knew how ridiculous he looked—like an oversized, provincial schoolboy who’d been expelled from school years ago but didn’t have the heart to tell his parents.

  Hng burned with shame. He didn’t have any other clothes, certainly nothing respectable enough to wear while serving in a restaurant in the city.

  “Give the uniform to me,” the dishwasher said more gently. “I’ll make you a shirt from it. Ask your Uncle Chin for plenty of đng and I’ll buy the material to make you a pair of trousers as well.”

  As if to ward off any further expectation of kindness, she looked at his birthmark and quickly added, “Shame we can’t cover up that mud stain on your future.”

  Hng raised his hand to his face as he walked the last kilometre toward his family’s village. He caressed the soft fur of the auspicious mole with the tips of his fingers, a sensation that often gave him comfort.

  He could see no water buffalo in the fields, no conical hats floating above the green paddies, no women moving down the track carrying buckets of water balanced on either end of bamboo poles. Only the dead ancestors in their marble tombs remained in the rice paddies. Nothing but the frogs that croaked at night was audible, as if day and night had been reversed.

  He was relieved to see the rise of the pagoda just ahead, the landmark at the edge of the village. A thin stream of incense, woody and sweet, reached his nose.

  Hng carried more than a month’s worth of earnings in his pockets. He stuffed a fifth of that total into the wooden box at the foot of the pagoda, reached up to rub the toe of the gleaming white Buddha, bowed his head and raised his hands. Mid-recitation, he heard someone grunt to his left. An old woman was shuffling down the path, head bent, firewood weighing down her shoulders, feet gnarled and splayed.