by Camilla Gibb
Maggie realized in that moment what her mother and Daniel shared. Their feelings always dominated. And she catered to them both.
The relationship with Daniel had broken down almost three years ago now, and apart from two dates with a man who evoked no great feeling in her but whom she slept with nevertheless, Maggie has retreated from the possibility of love. Since her mother died two years ago, finding a connection to the past has seemed of more fundamental importance. She needs an anchor to weigh her down, a sense of place and belonging. To be grounded before she begins anew.
As far as Maggie knows, her mother never entertained the possibility of another romance in her own life, though she does remember a particular look of longing Mrs. Trang’s husband used to give her mother whenever she and Maggie came into their restaurant. It was as if he were an animal in a shelter in need of a new home. Perhaps that was enough flattery to keep her mother going.
Her mother was such a beautiful woman, so elegant and refined, it had pained Maggie to see how often people dismissed her as just another immigrant—a cleaning lady with little English, someone just off the boat, that Chinese lady, an anonymous and slightly sad woman pulling a bundle buggy full of vegetables bought in Chinatown down the street, yanking her heavy load up the steps onto the bus, searching for her bus pass, the driver shouting at her or over-enunciating as if he thought she were deaf or of little intelligence.
Nhi had worked diligently for years as a cleaner at the hospital, and while she’d seen her pay increase steadily and had gained more responsibility over time, language always held her back. She only ever mastered the most basic of phrases, never had a bank account or a credit card, and she spoke more Cantonese than English in the end, thanks to the ladies with whom she played mah-jong.
Maggie paid her mother’s bills, renewed her bus pass, filed a tax return on her behalf. Twice a year she took her to Target and J.C. Penney to replenish her wardrobe. Maggie was her mother’s bridge to America and without that bridge, Nghiêm Nhi stayed rooted on immigrant shores.
Maggie remembers how her mother used to sit at the vanity with the oval mirror in her room every night, silver-backed brushes and jars of Korean whitening and anti-aging creams lined up upon it. She would remove her impeccable makeup with cotton balls, unpin her chignon and brush her long hair. She still looked elegant stripped of her makeup, just less able to conceal the disappointment that showed in the lines around her mouth.
Every time Maggie looks in the mirror she fears seeing evidence of that same disappointment. It’s both a surprise and a relief to see her father’s eyes reflected back at her. A glow of obsidian. Animated and alive.
Propaganda and Political Education
Hng stacks firewood between the foot of his mattress and the wall in preparation for breakfast tomorrow. He had hoped to distract himself with chores this evening, but that devastating trip home to his village that is no longer a village has been replaying itself over and over again in his mind.
The memory of it had begun as he stared at the water pouring into the pool this morning. It accompanied him as he pushed his cart over to the TV tube factory in Bi, where the workers are on strike. Happy as he was when his customers eventually turned up, seeing them reminded him of returning to his shop after that trip home all those years ago, of trying to go on, to serve breakfast as usual despite the song of helplessness and devastation ringing in his head.
Back then, his customers had berated him for his disappearance. They did not ask where he’d been for a week, did not notice Hng had turned inward; they simply wanted the assurance of breakfast every morning. They wanted him to do his job.
Only little Bình and his father paid Hng any attention. Bình eagerly relayed the news of the alleyway: the pink flower that had sprouted up between the rocks beside the back door, a spider’s web with fifty rings, the rumour of a man who was said to be sleeping in the alley at night. Ðạo, meanwhile, lingered after breakfast asking for Hng’s input on a play he had begun working on in Hng’s absence.
“What might you say if you were a peasant who owned a rice paddy across the river from your village and a Party official told you that from now on you’d be working for a share of the harvest on a collective on your side of the river, only that farm was fifty kilometres away? I just need a few lines. Something that sounds natural. Realistic.”
Hng felt his intestines tighten. His parents were peasants who owned a rice paddy and they had nothing but that rice paddy and the one water buffalo they shared with another family, and it would appear they had been killed because of it. Did Ðạo really have no idea what it was like to be a poor peasant? For all his talk about equality across class, his invitations to Hng to share his point of view, Ðạo was still, in the end, an educated young man of Hanoi, schooled in the western way, who had never done manual labour or gone hungry. Ðạo could feel outraged by things in the abstract that he would obviously never feel in his bones.
Hng walked away from Ðạo in lieu of replying, marching through his bedroom and out the back door into the alley to check how much water remained in the rain barrel. He was flapping flies out of his hair and berating a young man urinating against the side of the building when he heard Ðạo speak his name.
“Hng,” said Ðạo, touching his elbow. “What happened to you? Where did you disappear to last week?”
Hng turned to face the man who had taught him so much yet knew so little of the real world. “You’ll forgive me,” he began.
“You’re a Hanoian, Hng, you should free yourself of that country habit,” said Ðạo.
“These problems with land reform that you have been addressing?” Hng continued.
“They are not just theoretical. They affect real people in real ways.”
“Which is why we need real people like you to tell us what you have seen with your own eyes,” said Ðạo.
But Hng could not speak of the horror he had just witnessed. He refused, furthermore, to be treated as Ðạo’s token friend from the country. He did not say that words could never capture the devastation. That he believed a knife through the stomach would more effectively communicate the pain than anything one could produce with a pen. Hng could not say such things to a man still so resolutely optimistic that words could change the world.
“What is it, Hng?” Ðạo asked, his eyebrows knitted in confusion.
“That is the question,” Hng said cryptically. “For nothing is as it seems.”
Ðạo opened his mouth as if to speak but then closed it. He turned away and stepped through the door, returning to join the other men in the shop.
Ðạo’s faith in words remained unshaken. Over the next couple of weeks, under Ðạo’s direction and the keen editorial eye of an aging revolutionary named Phan Khôi, the men in the shop committed themselves to producing a literary journal they would publish and distribute.
When Fine Works of Spring was released later that month, it immediately drew to Hng’s shop the officers of the newly created Department of Propaganda and Political Education. Like flies to feces, Hng couldn’t help but think as he watched the men in uniform descend upon copies of the journal lying open on the low tables.
They confiscated everything they could: sketchbooks, notebooks, newspaper. They stroked the shafts of their guns. They spoke in a language at odds with the threat of their presence, smiling as they stressed the importance to the revolution of having men like Ðạo and his colleagues join their ranks as ideological educators. They needed artists— as illustrators, sloganeers, balladeers.
“And you are just the type of man we need to lead the new Literary Association for National Salvation,” they said, pointing at Ðạo.
Hng, standing firmly rooted with his hands on Bình’s shoulders, watched the men in the shop watching Ðạo. Ðạo stared at the wall just beyond the officers’ heads, his jaw firmly set. He remained silent until the officers were out the door.
“What is art if its creation is dictated?” he said angrily to
the men who surrounded him. “What is art if the critical eye turns blind, if we can no longer use it to comment independently on the state of the world?”
The same officers appeared the next morning and every morning after that. They promised status within the Party and priority in government housing to those who would fulfill their revolutionary duty by submitting themselves for re-education.
Hng did not close his doors that day until the men had exhausted themselves with debate, and for Bình’s sake he did his best to radiate a calm he did not feel. The boy had already proven himself a capable assistant—ducking beneath gesticulating arms and the plumes of smoke that billowed from nostrils and mouths in order to slip empty bowls off the tables—but when the officers began to turn up, Hng gave Bình additional jobs to distract him—refilling water glasses, collecting clean chopsticks from the dishwasher in the alleyway, the same woman who, decades before, had sewn Hng his first decent shirt.
The men in the shop appeared taciturn and unmoved, only ever erupting once the officers had departed. Debate had never threatened their solidarity, but over the days, Hng could see the circle around Ðạo develop the pointed ends of an ovoid.
“Might it not be in our interests, ultimately, to co-operate?” asked a young poet named Trúc. “Give them this for now, leave us free to pursue our own work later?”
“Right,” said a balding calligrapher. “We temporarily set our own pursuits aside.”
“Weak, weak!” Ðạo shouted, pointing at each of them in turn. “If you give these things up, they will never be returned to you! Do you even hear yourselves? The Party celebrates its liberation of the peasantry while it devastates the countryside. How can you believe anything they promise?”
The next day, Hng saw the ovoid that surrounded Ðạo collapse into a straight line.
“You’re a coward,” Ðạo spat at the calligrapher.
“And you are a hypocrite,” the calligrapher shouted back, jabbing his fist in Ðạo’s face, “a self-serving anti-revolutionary.”
Hng was not the only one in the room who gasped. He immediately sent Bình to collect bowls from the dishwasher in the alleyway. He wondered how much Bình understood. Of events both in the room and the wider world. Hng walked to the back door and stood on the threshold while a disembodied voice spewed propaganda through a megaphone.
“Who are the people?” he heard Bình ask of the dishwasher. “Every day he talks about ‘the people.’”
“Well, we are,” said the woman. “All of us.”
“But why is he so angry at all of us?” Bình asked.
The woman shrugged, unable to offer the boy an answer.
The following morning, the ninth day of the officers’ appearance, the young poet Trúc rose, crossed the floor and reported himself for duty. On the tenth day, the calligrapher and his cousin followed.
“There are many different ways of fulfilling our revolutionary duties, comrades,” Ðạo pleaded with those who remained. He then turned to the officers, addressing them directly for the first time. “Why not allow us the freedom to develop a national literature? How better might we serve the revolution than to tell the stories of a people liberated from imperial rule after centuries of struggle?”
“And what qualifies you, a man who stubbornly refuses to do his duty, to know best?” one of the officers asked, jabbing a firm finger into Ðạo’s sternum.
Hng saw the anger in Ðạo’s jaw. He placed his hands firmly on Bình’s shoulders. The officer raised his gun and pointed it briefly at Ðạo’s head before nudging his new recruits out the door.
Hng has a memory of Bình holding out a small fistful of clean chopsticks just as a man fills the doorway of his shop. The light is too dim to make out the man’s face, but the row of shining medals pinned across his chest suggests he is neither an officer of the Department of Propaganda and Political Education, nor a recruiter for the Literary Association for National Salvation. He is a comrade of a different order altogether.
The men who remained allied with Ðạo had released the second issue of their journal, Fine Works of Autumn, the day before. Hng had found anonymous notes stuffed under the front door of the shop twenty-four hours later: We have been waiting for this, We are hungry, You give us hope, Please continue, read the bulk of the messages. Your disease could be fatal unless you seek immediate help, read a solitary note he did not pass on to Ðạo.
The man in the doorway thwacked the butt of his rifle on the floor. The chopsticks cascaded from Bình’s hands, clattering on the tiles. The boy’s fear was enough to propel Hng forward, but the officer simply swept Hng aside with a steely arm, walking straight over to the men seated in the far corner of the room. Three armed men followed him in, guns held tightly to their chests.
Ðạo rose, while the rest of the men remained seated, silent. Bình looked from his father’s face to the officer’s face, then up to Hng’s. Hng pulled the boy toward him, pinning him against his solid thighs.
The officer stood before the men with his feet planted firmly apart, his hands stiff on his hips. He spoke with a chilly lack of inflection. “There’s a particular scourge of arrogance and narcissism that seems to afflict artists and intellectuals,” he began. “You’ve been brainwashed by foreign ideas and been made slaves to your own egos. This sickness of the self needs curing. It has already perverted your politics. Must we really wait to see what it will infect next?”
“Comrade, sir, I assure you we believe fully in the theories of Marx and Lenin,” said Ðạo. “We believe absolutely in communism, the most wonderful ideal of mankind, the youngest, the freshest ideal in all of history. But if a single style is imposed on all writers and artists, the day is not far off when all flowers will be turned into chrysanthemums.”
Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend, Hng thought to himself. Ðạo was alluding to Chairman Mao’s invitation to artists and intellectuals to share their criticisms in order to shape and strengthen China’s new order.
But the beauty of Ðạo’s language was wasted on these men. They remained stone-faced, unimpressed. Two of them moved toward Ðạo and lifted him up by the elbows, suspending him above the ground.
“This is a warning to you,” the officer said. “If you do not cease and desist with your publications, if you do not find a way to use your energies for the revolutionary good, you will have no garden left in which to grow your stupid, ugly flowers.”
Hng felt Bình’s spine twitch against his thighs as the two men dropped his father. Ðạo winced as he went over on his ankle. The officer bent at the waist and swiftly spat into the bowl of ph in front of Ðạo, wiping his satisfied lips on the back of his hand before departing.
Hng loosened his grip on Bình, stepping forward to lift the sullied bowl off the table. Bình followed Hng through the shop as he carried the bowl out through the back door, tipped the broth into the alleyway and cracked the ceramic in half against a rock.
Ðạo appeared on the threshold behind his son. “Come, Bình,” he said, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Say goodbye to Mr. Hng. Breakfast at home from now on.”
Hng, still holding the broken pieces of ceramic in each hand, turned around and waved goodbye to the sullen boy, knowing it best, and painfully aware that the days of Bình shadowing him were unlikely to come again. The moment was bittersweet: Ðạo was finally being a father to his son, but protecting Bình meant sending him away.
The following morning, the officers were back, making a great display of throwing armfuls of confiscated copies of the journal into the burning guts of an oil barrel planted in front of Hng’s shop. Black smoke billowed in through the front door while the officers broadcast messages of condemnation over a crackling megaphone, calling Fine Works of Autumn the work of reactionaries and Trotskyites, the senile ravings of syphilitic minds.
The men in the shop did not speak or otherwise react; they simply carried on eating from their bowls. When Hng suggested the m
en might wish to leave by the back door, Ðạo said, “We will not be cowed by their theatrics. We will leave by the front door.” And so they did, the eight of them who remained: in solemn and single file.
The effects of land reform soon began to be felt in the city. The baskets of country women rattled with a few bruised apples, the price of rice became impossible, the greens in the market were limp reminders of things that had once grown in abundance, the only meat available was grey and taut with age.
Hng did without green garnish and pounded tough cuts of beef with a mallet and was simply grateful that the men did not complain, still came morning after morning to eat a soup that could not be compared to the soup of earlier times, came despite the rings of late nights beneath their eyes and the worry apparent on their faces.
They’d become a small army dedicated to thought and solemn talk. They gave up shaving, perhaps having given up returning home to bathe and sleep in their beds. They needed a faster and cheaper way to communicate with the people, a way to extend their readership and reach. They agreed to produce a tabloid-style magazine going forward, one they would call Nhân Van—Humanism.
Hng remembers inhaling the ink rising darkly from the pages of the first issue, reeling drunk from the intoxicating smell and the thrill of its daring words. Just as he was burying the issue safely beneath his mattress in his backroom, Party officers were raiding the magazine’s offices, burning books and papers and shelves and damaging the press.
Ðạo moved the giant press to a secret new location at the back of a communal house in his neighbourhood with the help of men in black masks. The men published the next two issues of Nhân Van from here in quick succession, but they might as well have fed the magazines directly into the fire given how rapidly the copies were confiscated and destroyed.
The men were quieter than Hng had ever known them to be, both exhausted by their efforts and wary of the potential presence of spies in their midst. Hng was relieved that Bình was at least safe at home with his mother, Amie; he felt sure that any day now the shop itself would be set on fire, but he missed the boy like one might miss the sense of smell. The boy had never wanted ideology or politics; he wanted the simple things a man like Hng offered: customized chopsticks, an extra dash of fish sauce, praise for a chore done well, a greeting just for him.