by Camilla Gibb
Mindanao is telling Miss Maggie that the Party regularly closes down his shows. This might be one of the first times in Ts life that he thinks the Party is one hundred per cent right. “The economy might be post- communist, but the cultural climate certainly isn’t,” Mindanao says. “I’m constantly being charged with depicting social evils and undermining public morality, both by the Ministry of Culture and Information and other artists alike.”
He carries on, boasting about getting fined, being followed by the Bureau of Social Vice Prevention and having his studio regularly ransacked. “What’s saved me,” he says, “is the support I get from foreign institutions, because they aren’t subject to the same kind of scrutiny. But it gets exhausting. I’m considering moving to Hong Kong. It’s where most of my work sells, in any case.”
He leads Miss Maggie over to a series of lacquered panels perched on easels, which he says he’s doing as a commission for a gallery in Singapore. He explains his technique: he has cut up old propaganda posters—“Nixon’s Headache,” “Greater Food Production Is the Key to Expelling the Americans,” “It Looks as if Uncle H Is with Us in the Happy Day”—changing the order of the words and distorting the messages, then overlaying these with the brown resin of traditional lacquer.
“I refuse to produce this benign nationalistic art the Party still encourages,” he says. “All those soft pictures of girls in áo dàis, rice paddies, water buffalo and the like. It’s just crap. They all do it, virtually every one of my contemporaries. Even the ones with talent. I would rather see shit on a canvas.”
“Do foreigners actually buy that man’s art?” T whispers to Miss Maggie when Mindanao leaves her to wander around the room.
“Sure,” she says. “Quite a number actually. I take it you don’t like it?”
“I think it’s disgusting,” T cannot refrain from saying. “Disgusting and useless.”
“Well,” she says, “at least he’s got a point of view. Time will be the judge in the end.”
So much for Zen. The palindromic prime numbers T calculates as he walks over to Phng’s house this evening are overrun by a torrent of words. Time will be the judge? She cannot be serious: time will only reveal a guy like that as an animal! Nationalistic art or pornography— are these really the only two artistic choices? One portrays the country as backward; the other portrays the country as perverted. Why would artists willingly engage in either if they weren’t backward or sick themselves? He knows he crossed a line by expressing his disgust to Miss Maggie, but he couldn’t help it. He was equally appalled by her calm reaction to that freak’s work. She might look Vietnamese, but her tastes are evidently very American.
T takes a run at Phng’s bedroom door; he cannot continue to manage all these thoughts on his own. He smashes his shoulder into the skull and crossbones, once, twice and a third time, when the door finally gives way. He collapses onto the mattress where Phng is lying in the same heart-covered boxer shorts he was wearing days ago, again with his headphones on, the bottle of rice whiskey within reaching distance nearly empty.
T doesn’t even greet his friend. He rubs his shoulder and says, “You should see some of the crap that gets passed off as art today. These deviants are getting paid thousands of dollars to shit all over canvases! I couldn’t hold my tongue today, Phng. The Vit Ki’êu lady from the hotel was admiring this artist’s work and I told her exactly what I thought of it.”
T lies back and covers his eyes with the crook of his elbow. “I bet he comes from Saigon,” he says, and they both know what that means— drugs and prostitution flourished there during the war, ruining the morals of one generation then the next.
Phng sits up straight on his mattress. “Put these on,” he says, passing T the headphones. “Listen to the words.”
It’s some gangsta rap about a killing spree. Alleys full of dead niggas and pregnant hos.
T is nodding his head to the beat when Phng suddenly yanks the headphones off his friend’s ears. “Ugly, no?” he says. “And violent. Very, very violent.” Phng’s eyebrows are flying up his forehead. “So maybe the U.S. is not just tall buildings and Disney World and movie stars. It’s not all progress and pretty.”
That’s very true, thinks T. It’s a world without morals and dignity. Miss Maggie’s indifference to the insult and indecency of Mindanao’s work tells him more than he needs to know about Americans. How can he possibly continue with this tour? His New Dawn facade has officially cracked. What if more of his opinions start leaking out? He’ll be fired; perhaps his tourism licence will be revoked. Better he should make a pre-emptive move and quit this assignment, despite the request coming from so high up.
“Cheers, my friend,” Phng says, reaching for the nearly empty bottle. He drains it, then burps. “Do you ever think you might not get married?”
T raises his eyebrows. What’s this all about? Of course T doesn’t think this; not getting married is not an option.
“Did I ever tell you how my parents met?” Phng continues. T knows Phng’s father was a soldier when he met his mother, a village woman. He had an awful job with the People’s Army, scouting for land mines along the border with the South. Phng’s father used to tell him about how he would be sent on ahead of the troops and usually find himself in some village at night, where people were obliged to feed him and give him a bed because he was one of the good soldiers fighting for the freedom of the country.
“My father was sleeping in this house one night, and he got up to go and pee outside. When he came back inside he climbed into the nearest of the son’s beds. Except it wasn’t their son he crawled into bed with, was it?” says Phng. “It was their daughter.
“But how was he supposed to know? All the children were bald; their heads had been shaved because of lice. The girl screamed and my dad was so terrified he slapped his hand over her mouth to quiet her. They stayed in this position all night, both of them trembling with fear.
“The next morning, the girl’s father wouldn’t look at either of them. He just said, ‘Take her. Take her away.’
“But what was my father supposed to do? He said to this man, ‘Look, I’m a soldier. My job is to locate land mines. This is the middle of the war. I sleep in a different bed every night, if I sleep at all. I can’t possibly take the girl with me.’
“The girl’s father said, ‘Take her or I will kill her.’”
“Ôi z’ôi ôi,” says T. “That girl is your mother?”
Phng nods. “He had to take her,” he says, shrugging. “He threw her over his shoulder and ordered her to stop screaming. She was only eleven years old. He had to hide her in holes and tunnels, and he left her with water and rice cakes, and he always promised to return, even though every time he went to search for land mines he thought he would be killed. She’s never forgiven him.”
“But they’ve been married forever,” says T. “And they have you and your sister.”
“Still,” says Phng.
Is this why Phng can’t commit to any girl? Is this why he’s been depressed? Whatever Phng’s reason for telling him this story, T finds himself pausing in the doorway of his own family’s kitchen when he gets home, watching his parents play dominoes on the floor.
They defy astrology; whatever the planets are doing, his parents remain at peace with each other. It’s both comforting and frustrating. T knows marital relations are not always so smooth. He doesn’t find his parents’ example particularly instructive. Divide the chores, show respect to each other, spend time together playing dominoes and drinking tea. His father cooks as much as his mother does; they both have full-time jobs and they see themselves as equals.
T cannot imagine romance between them, but his father once told him that his mother was the only girl at the factory who did not giggle and turn her head away when she spoke to him. She neither covered her mouth nor fluttered her eyelashes in obedience. “It was very rare for a girl to look you in the eyes back then,” he said. “Very rare and very powerful.”
; T was mortified to hear this. Her direct gaze meant his mother felt passionately toward his father—and who wants to think of one’s mother in this way? But he is grateful that his parents chose each other, when so many marriages of their generation were forged by arrangement or circumstance. He is particularly grateful after hearing Phng’s sad story.
Ts parents have had their struggles, but these are ordinary struggles. A difficult life was normal in the dark days before Ði mi, when all they could afford was a room in the Old Quarter separated by a curtain from a family in the next room. Ts father pointed out that room to him once because T didn’t believe it when his father said that all the people in the rooms of four adjacent buildings had had to share a pit latrine and an outdoor kitchen. Their water even had to be carried from a communal pump three streets away.
Sometimes their old neighbours from those days come to visit, and T listens to them reminisce, making light of hard times, laughing when they say things like: Can you believe sixteen of us shared that one small pot of rice? And ôi z’ôi ôi, the rats, do you remember? How did the vermin get so fat when we were all so hungry? Remember the time Anh wove a hammock for the colicky babies? It cured them all completely. And then when my wife had the liver pains, Anh managed to find liquorice root.
“Sometimes I miss when the world was like this,” one of Ts father’s old friends says, “when neighbours cared about neighbours, and someone would cut someone else’s hair, and in return, the one with the new haircut would massage the haircutter’s feet. Now, I have to say, that is a very fine television you’ve got there, very fine indeed. Do you have satellite?”
Ts mother will sometimes put a stop to all the reminiscing, saying there are many chapters in a life, not all of them happy, but they are lucky to have the assurance that another chapter will come even if it is in the afterlife when the soul takes up residence in a new body.
T has personally not given much thought to the afterlife. A strange thought occurs to him in that moment: What if his soul were to be reborn in a Vit Ki’êu’s body, or even that of a total foreigner? Would life be fundamentally different? It certainly would be if he could choose the particular body, because he’d opt for someone wearing football cleats, a striker who boots the winning goal in the FA Cup— Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! the crowd going wild.
“T, I kept the fish warm,” says his mother, pointing toward a clay pot.
T kneels and spoons rice and a few nice chunks of white fish and ginger in broth into a bowl, then sits down on the floor with his parents. He lifts a few grains into his mouth.
“I meant to tell you, I dropped in on the old man after work today,” says his father. “He seems a bit worn down by his accident, don’t you think? Did you notice the absence of coriander among the herbs this morning?
“Everything I said seemed to drag him back to the past. I suggested that perhaps I could build him a better cart. He pointed at each of the wheels, and the axle, and every single wooden board in turn and told me this long, meandering story about how he had acquired each piece.”
This sounds like one of Hng’s wandering metaphors, something his father would never understand. Bình is a straightforward man who puts one foot in front of the other day after day. He is quietly resigned to what is past and he accepts most of the present. Sometimes it frustrates T that his father doesn’t speak out, doesn’t even complain when the Party introduces some ridiculous new law like the one they’re proposing to force everyone to wear motorbike helmets next year.
Ts father would have preferred to hear Hng say, Excellent. Thank you very much. This cart is really just a heavy piece of crap I built out of scraps forty years ago. I can’t wait to replace it.
“And then you know what, T?” says his father. “After he has worn me down with this very long story about his cart, after he has refused to consent to me building him another one, he suddenly says to me, ‘Did I ever tell you that you had a baby brother?’”
“What?” T says, putting down his bowl.
“That was my reaction,” says his father. “My mother apparently had another son a few years after me but he lived for less than an hour.”
“But why tell you now?”
“I have no idea.”
T hates to think it, but it sounds like Old Man Hng is unburdening himself of secrets. His father is too close to see it.
Hng is not one for drink, but Bình left him a bottle of rice wine, suggesting it might relieve the pain in his leg. Hng does feel pain. Not just in his leg, but in his chest. He is lying on his straw-filled mattress, a single candle burning for Ðạo, seeking comfort in the quiet babble of voices in the dark beyond his shack, sipping from a glass—strictly for medicinal purposes.
Over the years, Hng has tried to strike a balance between painting a portrait of Ðạo that gives Bình some sense of the man’s importance, and apologizing for his behaviour as a father. “He was busy fathering a movement when he might have been fathering a son,” he once said to Bình. How could Bình possibly understand that his father’s neglect was not personal?
While Hng has tried his best to keep Ðạo’s memory alive for Bình, the introspection of the past few days leads him to the sad conclusion that he has failed. What was he doing giving Bình a baby brother with one hand then taking him away with the other? The only true portrait of Ðạo is one that includes his poetry, the poetry that ran like blood through him, but Hng no longer has any of it, neither in his possession nor in his memory.
Hng’s greatest regret in a life of considerable regrets is that it never occurred to him to write Ðạo’s poems down while he still could. Instead, he shared them with a girl who proved herself unworthy. He was deceived into believing love mattered more than legacy. He squandered the thing that mattered most.
Our Place in Buddha’s Universe
T and Phng are standing behind a giant potted palm in the lobby of the Metropole waiting for Miss Maggie. T sees his friend eyeing her up and down as she shakes the hand of a European man in a pinstriped suit before walking over to them.
“She’s an important person, Phng,” T hisses. “VIP.”
“So? She’s still a woman,” Phng says, stuffing his hands into his pockets and fiddling with the keys at the end of the chain hooked to his belt loop. His forearms are tanned, and thick veins disappear beneath his shirtsleeves above the elbows.
For a minute, and not for the first time, T hates his best friend.
“Good morning, Miss Maggie,” T says brightly. “Please let me introduce one of the finest drivers from the agency.”
“Pleased to meet you,” she says in English.
“Phng doesn’t speak English,” T takes some pleasure in saying. “It is why he is just the driver and I am the guide.”
“So, are you ready to go?” Miss Maggie asks, switching to Vietnamese.
“Actually, Miss Maggie, I wanted to have a word with you about the current arrangement.”
“Is there a problem?”
“I just don’t think I am the best tour guide for your purposes.”
“Sorry,” she says, shaking her head, “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I would like to resign from this assignment.”
“Oh,” Miss Maggie says. “What’s the problem exactly?”
“No problem, Miss,” says T, desperate to escape without confrontation.
“Well, there obviously is.”
T stammers and looks to Phng for help.
“Miss,” Phng says, rallying for his friend, “T has found some of the art he has been exposed to over the past couple of days deeply offensive on a personal level.”
“Oh,” says Miss Maggie. “I’m sorry, T. I’m really sorry to hear that.”
T just wants to flee. “I better get back to my regular job,” he says, slinking backward.
“Can you come back at the end of the day?” she asks. “We can chat about it and settle up then, okay?”
T consents with a slight bow.
As he sits
in a café down the road from the hotel sipping a second Coke through a pink straw, T wonders if he should go and visit Old Man Hng. He, of all people, would understand why T could not continue with the art tour. He feels compromised: he has never quit an assignment in his life. Perhaps Hng could offer him some kind of absolution. But T would feel embarrassed if his need were obvious. He needs a pretext for an unexpected visit.
I know, T thinks; Hng has to walk great distances in those awful slippers every day, surely he could use a better pair of shoes. Old men don’t normally wear running shoes, but then Hng is no normal old man. T knows just the place to get a good knock-off pair of Nikes. He pays for his Cokes and sprints with purpose out the door.
Half an hour later, he is walking toward Hng’s shantytown, whistling while he swings a plastic bag containing a bright-white pair of size seven knock-off Nike Air Force high-tops. Walking this route only confirms the wisdom of his choice of gift for the old man. It is three kilometres southwest of the Old Quarter, at least two of them on cracked asphalt, open drains running at the edge of the roads, and oops!—that’s unfortunate—there goes a small dog disappearing into a sewer without a grate.
T turns down the dirt track toward the pond. The old woman who slipped in the mud the other night is collecting stones from the road, dropping them into her extended apron; a young man is tugging at small tufts of grass. There’s no litter along this track, not a single plastic bag or battered tin, or any dogs or cats for that matter either.
T finds the old man at the pond’s edge, scrubbing his big pots. It’s muggy here, mosquitoes circling Ts head as he squats down beside him. He hopes Hng no longer eats the fish from this pond—they must be radioactive with poisons from the tire factory on the other side of the railway tracks—look at that cloud shimmering over there like soy sauce in a hot pan.
“T,” Hng says, surprised. “You don’t have work today?”
“I did,” says T. “It’s a long story.”