by Camilla Gibb
Maggie has just arrived, and so have Phng and his father. T knows Phng, at least, will give him an honest answer about the broth.
“It’s good,” Phng says, clearly surprised.
“What kind of good?”
“The kind of good where I would like to eat it again tomorrow.”
“That is good,” T says, smiling with relief.
Maggie climbs the stairs with her steaming bowl carefully balanced between her thumbs and middle fingers. She waits on the landing and inhales from the bowl while Hng’s visitors file out of T’s room.
Bình sits with the old man, their bowls empty and abandoned at the side of the bed. Hng pushes himself upright with Maggie’s arrival, Bình fluffing up and repositioning the pillow behind the old man’s back.
“How are you?” she asks, setting her bowl down on top of the bookshelf.
Hng throws back the bedcovers to reveal his old man’s leg. It is swollen and as purple as an eggplant. Maggie pulls the bedcovers back over his leg and smooths them across his chest. His shirt is unbuttoned and he is so thin that the skin between his ribs flutters with his heartbeat.
“You have lovely hands,” says Old Man Hng, looking mournful for a moment. But then he suddenly brightens, grabs hold of one of her hands, shakes it. He frantically pats his shirt pocket with his other hand, the bedcovers, his thighs.
“Are these the clothes I was wearing when you found me?” he asks Bình.
“Well, no,” says Bình, “those have been laundered.”
“Can you bring me the shirt?”
Bình rises and opens T’s armoire and pulls out Hng’s shirt.
“Check the pocket,” says Hng.
Bình pulls out a frayed business card stamped with the insignia of the Hotel Metropole, as well as a piece of paper folded into four. He unfolds it to find Ðạo’s faded portrait, removed from both its frame and its place on the altar.
“Trn it over,” says Hng. “Contributors, March 1956,” Bình reads from a page with a torn edge. “Here is Ðạo, listed as one of the poets, Phan Khôi as editor, and yes, look at this: Lý Văn Hai. The illustrator.”
“Oh my God,” says Maggie, standing up to look over Bình’s shoulder. She covers her hand with her mouth. She coughs. Her eyes fill with tears. There he is: Lý Văn Hai, the artist, her father. Alive. In the company of a circle of men of great talent and courage and feeling.
Hng pushes himself upright. “This is the reason I was coming to see you, Maggie. Rushing through the rain that day like a man possessed.”
Bình turns the paper over to look again at his father’s faded portrait.
“It was the only paper I had to offer the woman who drew it, Bình. It’s the endpaper from Fine Works of Spring. You’ll draw a new portrait of Ðạo, a far better one. Despite your claims to the contrary, Bình, you are an artist.”
“And you, my dear,” says Hng, patting Maggie’s hand, “are the daughter of Lý Văn Hai, illustrator of Fine Works of Spring.”
Community Service
Hng chomps his dentures back into place after breakfast the following morning and reclines against the pillows of T’s bed. He has the satisfaction of having delivered Maggie a hero, but has begun to feel diminished himself. There’s something humiliating about being in this room with its posters and books and toys. It is the room of a boy. Hng cannot imagine being such a boy, a boy of 2007. Everything in the room seems alien to him—even the Vietnamese words on the poster of a kitten clinging to a tree branch seem like they’re written in a foreign language. What does this mean: “Hang in there, baby?” Don’t give up? Does T really need this kind of mantra?
When Hng was T’s age, he ran a restaurant, lived alone, had not the time nor the opportunity for leisure or friendship or girlfriends. Occasionally, he might have caught sight of a girl through the window of his shop, one who moved in such a way that the fabric of her áo dài snaked about her hips as she turned to speak to a companion, or one with a button undone at the neck revealing a tantalizing glimpse of collarbone, but these were more like mystical visions than anything real.
Hng put his senses to use making soup instead, as his Uncle Chin had taught him, poking the beef rump to ascertain its freshness, inhaling the scent of star anise to ensure it was fragrant, tasting the broth each morning before anyone else.
Hng was a man of soup; he still is. These have not been the most lucid or comfortable days, but a broken leg won’t stop him. Why would it? Nothing ever has.
“Hang in there, baby,” he says, saluting the mewling kitten on the wall just as T enters the room. He sits down on the edge of the mattress and pulls a notebook from his knapsack. “There is something I want to show you,” he says, flipping to a page.
Hng squints and peers at the page with his right eye. It’s a list of names, a good number of them familiar—artists he knew either in person or by reputation in the days when he still had his shop.
“You wrote this?”
“They were customers of Mr. Võ’s,” says T. “I want to add the names of the artists you remember.”
But Hng does not want to be associated in any way with that traitor Võ. Years ago, shortly after beginning his new life as an itinerant ph seller, Hng had been making his way down Nguyn Huâu Huân Street when he smelled the weak but distinctive aroma of coffee. His reaction was primal, as if recognizing one’s illegitimate offspring in the street. He rushed forth in recognition, abandoning his cart, pushing his way past a man idling in the doorway of Café Võ.
He hadn’t been in there in years, and it was barely recognizable as the same place with its bare and cracked plaster walls largely stripped of art, most of it by then hidden away.
“Võ,” Hng said, waving to the owner standing at the back of the deserted room.
“Hng? Hng!”
They grabbed each other by the shoulders, greeting each other like long-lost brothers, but then suddenly, awkwardly, they snapped apart. They had never really spoken before, knew each other only by reputation through mutual customers. They were rivals, in fact, and only desperate circumstances, not familiarity, had drawn them into such an unusually affectionate embrace.
“They haven’t closed you down?” asked Hng.
Võ shrugged.
“But how is it they allow you to remain open?”
“I give them information they’re looking for from time to time,” he said.
Hng couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Võ,” Hng said, “you do understand, don’t you? They are using you as an informant.”
“I do my revolutionary duty, that is all,” said Võ, launching into a lecture on the subject.
Hng had turned away in disgust. He walked back to his cart and resumed pushing his load, though one considerably lighter. His brazier and pots had been stolen during those brief dispiriting moments inside the café.
Handing T back his notebook, Hng says only this to the boy: “Ask yourself how it is that Mr. Võ has been able to hold on to his shop, how the place was not taken from him, how he kept his doors open through all the worst years.”
“He’s sold the shop now. His wife is dying. They decided to go back to their village.”
The man is lying, Hng thinks. He is quite sure Võ never had a wife.
Managing two jobs leaves T feeling capable and exhausted in equal measure. Only time will tell whether he will collapse or adapt to this new schedule and workload. He finds some genuine satisfaction in serving a grateful public, in filling the house and people’s stomachs with warmth and good flavour and sending them off into the day— greater satisfaction, he has to admit, than he has experienced serving foreigners lately at work.
After a week he is operating like a well-oiled machine, and perhaps the ph was really only on the okay side of good in the beginning, because now people are paying compliments like: Ah, that satisfies. Ah, the old man has taught you well.
At the start of the following week, though, they have uninvited guests. People are strewn about t
he kitchen noisily slurping their broth when they hear a knock against the frame of the open door. T’s customers drop their spoons into their bowls and raise their shirt collars to conceal their faces. T’s ladle droops in his hand. His mouth hangs open.
“Do you have a licence to operate a business?” one of the officers asks without inflection.
T must confess, no. “We are just helping out a friend for a short time.”
“Helping him run a business.”
“It’s more like a community service,” says T.
“Where money changes hands.” The officer shakes the tin can on the table, then tips it over, pocketing the money they are collecting to buy a new cart for the old man.
“This is a donation box, comrade,” says T. “For our friend because he has been in an accident. For the doctor’s bills.”
“And who is this friend of yours?”
“Old Man Hng,” T says, then curses himself for having given away the old man’s name.
“Of course,” says the officer. “We should have known.”
“Sir, you have to try this,” T says, stepping forward with a bowl, remembering how his father had seduced the foreman of the crew at the hotel under construction on West Lake. “It will—”
The officer smacks the bowl out of T’s hand, sending noodles and broth in the direction of some of his customers, who duck but are not, unfortunately, spared. The old man hears the crash and is thump- thumping above with his cane. “What’s the matter?” he shouts from the second floor.
The officers are up the stairs before T has a chance to reply. The exodus of customers begins, but not before they voluntarily pay a second time for this morning’s ph, stuffing coins and damp bills into T’s hands.
Hng stares at the yellow ticket in his hands. Three million đ’ông for operating a business without a licence? Hng is tempted to screw the yellow paper up into a ball and swallow it. To delight in shitting it out the other end. Has anything really changed since the Party’s bold proclamation of greater freedoms? At least he is not on his way to prison right now for calling the officer a machine rather than a man—blind to the beauty of humanity, cold to the touch. Not long ago the police would arrest you if your brother had committed a crime. They would arrest you for wearing the wrong shoes or receiving a letter from abroad. They would arrest you on suspicion of anti-revolutionary sentiment if you were heard to have complained that the rice you stood in line waiting for all day was full of maggots.
Hng tears the yellow ticket in half lengthwise and stuffs the inky fibres into his mouth.
T is worrying about the fine, but also mulling over the question Old Man Hng posed about Mr. Võ the other day. A theory forms in his mind. Was Mr. Võ really an informant? Had he made a deal with the Party so that he could keep his shop: betraying his customers, reporting their activities to the Party?
T tries out his theory on Maggie.
“It wouldn’t be all that surprising, would it?” she says. “People have always protected their interests. It’s human nature.”
T finds this deeply disturbing. If we were ruled by human nature there would be anarchy. Everything in a communist life tells you so.
“Self-interest isn’t always a bad thing,” Maggie says. “It can be a great motivator. And it can be used to improve the lives of others— that’s true in the best cases of capitalism. It can lift a whole country out of the mud.”
“Maggie,” T says, interrupting her lesson, “Mr. Võ remembered your father—I’m certain he did. He was afraid to admit it because he was probably the one who reported Lý Văn Hai to the Party.”
“But why my father? Countless artists took their coffee at his shop.”
“Your father was recruited by Hng’s crowd to help them with the journal, to do the illustrations. He left Mr. Võ’s orbit.”
T looks at Maggie, hoping she understands.
“You don’t think it’s a coincidence that he sold that whole collection immediately after our visit, do you,” she says, casting her eyes to the floor.
T shakes his head, “I don’t.”
A Note Hangs in Mid-Air
Hng can determine a menu through his nose. He can smell shallots being minced, ginger being shaved, the slow caramelizing of sugar over a flame. It is T down below making caramelized fish according to his instructions. Hng can hear the yelp of the young man’s frustration as he pours the fish sauce into the pan and the sugar crystallizes and clumps.
“Trn the heat up as high as it will go!” Hng shouts down the stairs. “And use a whisk, not a spoon!”
He must refrain from offering further advice, but how he itches to know: Did T buy a very fresh fish? Did he poke it and make sure the flesh bounced back in response? Did he smell its skin, make sure its eyes were clear and protruding, its gills bright red and moist? Is it a fish with enough fat underneath its skin?
Anh arrives home from the butcher shop—Hng can hear the thwack of a good two pounds of rump landing on the wooden cutting block. He need not worry about T in the kitchen any longer, Anh is a very good cook; he has been enjoying her dinners for days now. If he were at home, he would be dining on only rice, rice with a splash of fish sauce, all an old man needs, but Anh’s dinners seem to be knitting the bones of his leg back together in a way that a bowl of rice each night might not accomplish so quickly.
Perhaps the pace of his healing also has something to do with the company. He does not wish to burden anyone. Since the death of Uncle Chin more than sixty years ago, Hng has lived alone and only once imagined it would ever be otherwise.
It suddenly occurs to Hng that Lan might be worried by his absence, but no—did T not mention that he and Bình had spoken to her? She must know his whereabouts, that his stay here is not permanent, that soon he will be home. They may have been silent neighbours for decades, but he still does not like the thought of her feeling abandoned.
The smell of sesame oil wafts up the stairs, and oh, how it makes him long to get back to cooking. He worries he will lose his knack and resolves to exercise the muscles other than those in his broken leg. He can rotate his wrists and neck, bend his other knee, even attempt certain tai chi poses from his prone position.
“Don’t strain yourself,” he hears T say as he enters the room. He’s carrying a small white bowl in his hands.
“Tell me if I’ve got the balance of flavours right,” the boy says, kneeling beside the mattress and offering Hng a spoon with which to taste his shrimp broth.
Hng doesn’t need to taste it; his nose tells him everything he needs to know. “A little more lime juice and it will be perfect.”
T sniffs the broth. “Of course, Chef Hng.”
“Hah!” Hng laughs. “I am nothing more than a simple country cook.”
“From not such a simple country.” Hng cocks his head to get a better look at T’s face. It’s not the face of a boy anymore. “Listen,” Hng says conspiratorially, “if you want to really enhance your broth add a pinch of ground, dried anchovy.”
“But that’s not very Vietnamese,” T says, his mouth falling open.
“Not so simple, are we.”
Phng arrives at their house dressed, uncharacteristically, in skinny jeans. He’s trying to get used to the clothes; he’ll top the skinny jeans with a white shirt, black jacket and skinny tie for his Vietnam Idol audition next week. “What do you think?” he asks T, pointing at a picture of a guy with a shaggy Korean-style haircut on a page of a magazine.
With that haircut and a pair of glasses with rectangular rims, he’ll resemble the best-looking member of a very squeaky-clean Asian boy band. Girls will be waving signs that say: I Phng, and the government censors will think Phng an appropriate role model for youth today and everyone will be shocked at the grand finale when Hanoi Poison shows up in his place and starts rapping about freedom of expression and respect for human rights.
Phng is going to perform his audition piece for the family this evening. He has decided to stand upon their table as if
it were a stage. They have cleared away the bowls and wiped the rings of fish sauce from the wooden surface. T is pleased to see everyone leaning back in their chairs, contented after such a good meal.
Phng asks T to press play on the CD player he has brought with him—a recent purchase and a real Sony, no Chinese imitation—and the musical accompaniment begins. It is a track of synthesized violins and whispering ghostly voices. It’s like being inside a temple full of ancestors. Phng’s falsetto floats there among the voices and then—boom— drops an octave and takes charge with a melody that is beautiful, a tone that is rich.
He has taken a traditional song and transformed it into a modern and emotional ballad even better than the one from Titanic by Céline Dion. As he reaches the chorus, the old man above begins banging his cane on the floor, clattering energetically, so much so, in fact, that he is interrupting their concentration.
Maggie leaps up from where she is sitting, rushing over to the staircase, the first among them to realize that Old Man Hng is actually banging his way down the stairs.
Phng stops singing. A note hangs in mid-air. T presses the stop button on the CD player and everyone rushes over to the staircase, each of them reprimanding the old man: “It’s too soon for you to walk.”
“Stop right there.”
“Are you crazy?”
“You’re only going to injure yourself.”
But the old man is determined, hopping down one more step and leaning into his cane. And he is singing! Singing in a terrible, loud voice like a very drunk man doing karaoke.
T’s father is tugging the old man’s shirtsleeve: “Hng, Hng, let’s sit you down,” but the old man carries on bellowing the words, having lost track now of all tune. And then he loses control of his body, clutching his chest, gasping for breath, leaning into his cane as if he will fall over. T’s father wraps his arms around him and together they crash to the floor.
T and Phng kneel beside them. “Don’t move him,” Bình wheezes from underneath Hng. “Get an ambulance. I think he’s had a heart attack.”