The Beauty Of Humanity Movement Part 1

The Beauty of Humanity Movement.

Camilla Gibb.

For Phng, Lan and Bao.

A Note of Grace.

Old Man Hng makes the best ph in the city and has done so for decades. Where he once had a shop, though, he no longer does, because the rents are exorbitant, both the hard rents and the soft-the bribes a proprietor must pay to the police in this new era of freedom.

Still, Hng has a mission, if not a licence. He pushes the firewood, braziers and giant pots balanced on his wooden cart through the streets of Hanoi's Old Quarter in the middle of the night and sets up his stall in a sliver of alleyway, on an oily patch of factory ground, at the frayed edge of a park or in the hollow carca.s.s of a building under construction. He's a resourceful, roving man who, until very recently, could challenge those less than half his age to keep up.

When he is forced to move on, word will travel from the herb seller, or the noodle maker, or the man delivering newspapers, to the shopkeepers along Hang Bong Road who make sure to pa.s.s the information on to his customers, particularly to Bnh, the one who is like a son to him, out buying a newspaper or a couple of cigarettes in the earliest of morning hours, returning home to rouse his own son, T, slapping their bowls, spoons and chopsticks into his satchel, jerking the motorbike out of his kitchen and into the alleyway, and joining the riders of three million other motorbikes en route to breakfast, at least forty of them destined for Hng.

His customers, largely men known to him for a number of years, are loyal, some might say dependent. He is loyal and most certainly dependent. This is his livelihood, his being, his way in the world, and has been ever since he first came to apprentice in his Uncle Chi'n's ph shop at eleven years of age.

It was 1933 when his father sent him from the rice fields to the city, getting Hng well out of the way of a mother who cherished him least of all her ten children. She'd kept him at a distance ever since a fortune teller had confirmed her suspicions that the large black mole stretching from the outer corner of Hng's left eye to the middle of his cheekbone was an inauspicious sign. Tattooed with the promise of future darkness, the fortune teller had decreed.

Hng had come to his Uncle Chin with no name other than "nine," denoting his place in the birth order, becoming Hng only in Hanoi, under the guardians.h.i.+p of his uncle, a man who neither subscribed to village superst.i.tions nor could afford to turn help away.

This morning, Hng has set up shop in the empty kidney of a future swimming pool attached to a hotel under construction near the Ng Xa Temple. It has taken several attempts to get his fire started in the damp air, but as the dark grey of night yields to the lighter grey of clouded morning, the flames burn an orange as pure and vibrant as a monk's robe.

Some of his customers have already begun to slip over the lip of the pool, running down its incline with their bowls, spoons and chopsticks, racing to be head of the queue.

Hng works like the expert he is, using his right hand to lay noodles into each bowl presented to him, covering these with slices of rare beef, their edges curling immediately with the heat of the broth he is simultaneously ladling into each bowl with his left.

"There you go, Nguyn. There you go, Phuc, little Min," and off his first customers shuffle with their bowls to squat on the concrete incline, using their spoons and chopsticks to greet the dawn of a new day.

Ah, and here is Bnh, greeting him quietly as always, bowl in hands, never particularly animated until he's had a few sips of broth. Although he is well into his fifties, Bnh is a man still so like the boy who used to accompany his father, o, to Hng's ph shop back in the revolutionary days of the early 1950s. The world has changed much since then, but Bnh remains the same mindful, meditative soul who used to pad about after Hng, helping him carry the empty bowls out to the dishwasher in the alleyway behind the shop.

"There you go, Bnh," Hng says, as he does every morning, dropping a handful of chopped green herbs into his bowl from shoulder height with exacting flourish.

"Hng, what happened to your gla.s.ses?" Bnh asks of the crack that bisects the left lens.

Hng, loath to admit he inadvertently sat upon them last night, shrugs as if it is a mystery to him too.

"Come"-Bnh gestures-"let me fix them for you."

Hng dutifully unhooks his gla.s.ses from his ears and hands them to Bnh's son, T, who is waiting beside his father with his empty bowl. T tucks them into his father's s.h.i.+rt pocket, and Bnh shuffles left, making way for his son.

T, just twenty-two years old but so full of confidence, greets Hng with more words than Bnh ever does and waves his chopsticks left and right as he tries to calculate the size of the pool. This is very much like him-T loves numbers in a way that seems to pain him. He used to teach math at a high school, but he has abandoned that recently in favour of entertaining tourists. Hng is not sure all that foreign interaction is good for the boy, but he trusts Bnh is monitoring the situation.

Hng indulges T with a challenge this morning: "I'd like to see you calculate the pool's volume in terms of the number of bowls of ph that would be required to fill it."

T grins as he manoeuvres his way carefully across the pool, holding his bowl right under his nose, the steam rising like incense smouldering in a temple to bathe his face.

Hng has taught T, Bnh and Bnh's father, o, before him that you can tell a good broth by its aroma, the way it begs the body through the nose. And ph bc-the ph of Hanoi-is the greatest seducer, because of the subtle dance of seasonings that animates the broth. It is not just the seasonings that make ph bc distinct, it is provenance, a lesson Hng would happily deliver to anyone interested in listening.

The history of Vietnam lies in this bowl, for it is in Hanoi, the Vietnamese heart, that ph was born, a combination of the rice noodles that predominated after a thousand years of Chinese occupation and the taste for beef the Vietnamese acquired under the French, who turned their cows away from ploughs and into bifteck and pot-au-feu. The name of their national soup is p.r.o.nounced like this French word for fire, as Hng's Uncle Chin explained to him long ago.

"We're a clever people," his uncle had said. "We took the best the occupiers had to offer and made it our own. Fish sauce is the key-in matters of soup and well beyond. Even romance, some people say."

It was only with the painful part.i.tioning of the country in 1954 that ph went south; the million who fled communism held the taste of home in their mouths, the recipe in their hearts, but their eyes grew big in the markets of Saigon and they began to adulterate the recipe with imported herbs and vegetables. The phs of Saigon had flourished brash with freedom and abundance while the North ate a poor man's broth, plain and watered down, with chicken in place of beef as the Party ordered the closure of independent businesses like Hng's and a string of government-owned cafeterias opened in their place.

Terrible stuff it was, grey as stagnant rainwater in a gutter. Those who are old enough to remember it thank Hng for getting rid of the mouldy taste in their mouths. Kids of Ts generation probably can't even imagine it. T was born just before the government's desperately needed economic reforms of 1986, when the market was liberalized in order to alleviate starvation and independent owners.h.i.+p once again became a possibility. Only then could the true potential of ph be realized.

The challenge for Hng now has less to do with the availability of ingredients than with the need for restraint. Hng sees himself as a guardian of purity, eschewing bean sprouts and excessive green garnish in accordance with northern tradition. They may well have opened their doors to the world, but that does not mean they must pollute their bowls. An bc; mc nam, they say-eating as in the North; clothing as in the South-something so fundamental must be respected through deference to tradition.

Hng is a man governed by such principles rather than any laws, particularly those ones keenly enforced by the police that are of greatest inconvenience to him and those he serves. When the officers come to ticket him for trespa.s.sing or operating without a licence after he has had the peace of setting up shop in the same location for a few consecutive days, his customers will be forced to run off clutching their bowls, slos.h.i.+ng broth against their freshly pressed s.h.i.+rts, losing noodles to the pavement, jumping aboard their motorbikes and lurching into the day.

Hng's crime is the same every day, but sometimes the police are in more of a mood to arrest a man than fine him. "Where did you relieve yourself this morning?" an officer in such a mood had asked him a few months ago.

Hng had shaken his head. The question made no sense. "Where did you pee, old man?" The officer raised his voice, threatening to arrest Hng for resisting a police officer if he didn't answer the question.

Hng reluctantly pointed toward a patch of gra.s.s and asked, "Has peeing now been declared a crime?"

No, but that very patch of gra.s.s, as he was no doubt well aware, was the consecrated site upon which the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs would soon be erecting a new monument to honour the revolution's martyrs and devotees. And so Hng was promptly arrested for insulting the Communist Party, which is to say, the only party there is.

Hng considered that night behind bars, lying on concrete and p.i.s.sing into a communal bucket, mild punishment compared to the previous time he'd been charged with insulting the Party. Then, they had disciplined his mouth by punching out most of his front teeth with the b.u.t.t of a rifle.

"Why this waste of money on statues?" he shouted after Bnh had paid the bribe to release him from prison the second time. "Why yet another monument for the revolution? It's been fifty years of this. Oh, if they could read the insults in my mind ..."

"They used to claim they could read minds," Bnh said, and off they wandered, mumbling together like two old men despite the almost thirty years between them, two old men who had indeed once believed in the Party's telepathy.

Hng serves the last man among today's early s.h.i.+ft of customers and looks over at Bnh and T, the younger still making calculations in the air with his chopsticks, the elder concentrating on his bowl. He wonders whether it isn't time for T to marry. He hopes Ts mother, Anh, is giving this matter some attention; if not, T may well be the last in this family line Hng will serve.

The comforting clatter of metal spoons against ceramic is suddenly interrupted by a booming voice that floods the bloodless kidney, bouncing from side to side. Noodles slap against chins and silence falls. "What the h.e.l.l are you all doing here?" a man yells, stepping down in heavy workboots. "I've got a project to supervise. I'll have you all arrested if you don't pack up and leave immediately!" He smacks a crowbar repeatedly against his thick-skinned palm.

Bnh rises to his feet and all eyes turn toward him. "Sir, you have to smell this," he says, nodding at the bowl in his hands.

Hng feels a hot rush of pride fill his cheeks. Bnh really is a son to him, if not by blood, then certainly through his devotion. What is blood without relations.h.i.+p, without life shared, in any case? Hng has come to believe it is little more than something red.

A hush vibrates around the pool as the foreman steps toward Bnh and demands to know their business. This is private property; what are they all doing squatting here like it's mealtime on some communal farm?

"This is Hanoi's greatest secret," Bnh says, his eyes lowered in deference. "Seriously. You have to know. It will change you."

Despite the threat of the rusty crowbar, despite his familiarity with the pain such an instrument can cause, Hng knows this is his moment. He shuffles forth across the concrete in his slippers. He holds his own bowl under the foreman's nose, steam rising to envelop them both. His customers inhale as if sharing one set of lungs. No one makes a sound as the foreman licks his lips and takes the chopsticks Hng offers. The foreman thrusts those chopsticks to the bottom of the bowl and lifts the noodles into the air, creating a wave that plunges the herbs to the bottom before they float back to the surface, infusing the noodles in the broth, just as every mother teaches her child.

The foreman proves he is just like every mother's son. He leans over the bowl and inhales as he lays the noodles back down to rest in the broth, then clutches a few strands between his chopsticks and raises them to his mouth. The construction workers stand around the rim of the pool, watching their boss in silence. The foreman slurps broth from the spoon, lifts up a few more noodles with his chopsticks, curls them into his spoon, picks up a thin slice of beef, lays it on the bed of noodles, tweezes a piece of basil from the broth and places it on top of the beef, then puts this perfectly balanced combination, this yin and yang, into his mouth.

And then he grunts.

"I see what you mean," he finally says to Bnh, handing the bowl back to Hng.

"Bring your bowl tomorrow. Tell your men, too," Hng says quietly, squinting at the workers on the rim. His left eye is clouded over; his right discerns the outline of a row of men. "Half price for them," he says, "free, of course, for you."

"I'll pay you full price," says the foreman. "Just as long as you and your customers are out by seven."

"Yes, sir," says Hng, shuffling back to the fatter end of the kidney to extinguish his fire. He feels a tremor of nervous laughter rattle beneath his ribs. He dares not look over at Bnh. He smiles into the fire, sharing the victory with its embers instead.

It is not yet half past six-still plenty of time left to serve the latecomers who have just arrived, which Hng does now with good humour and renewed concentration, laying noodles and beef into each bowl with his right hand, pouring ladlefuls of broth over top with his left, his rhythm as even and essential as a beating heart.

Hng recognizes each man by the state of his hands: the grease moons under the nails that mark a mechanic, the calluses of one who works a lathe, the chewed nails of a student writing exams.

But then whose lovely hands are these amidst this parade of manly paws? The delicate hands of a woman who has, improbably, never engaged in manual labour. And the bowl. s.h.i.+ning. Translucent. Porcelain.

He looks up. The young woman before him is a cla.s.sic beauty with delicate, balanced features, and although she is not one of his regular customers there is something familiar about her face.

Perhaps Bnh sees it too, for he coughs in that moment and pulls his son away by the s.h.i.+rtsleeve-no time for gawking, time to get to work.

"You've come to me for breakfast before?" Hng asks, turning his attention back to the young woman before him.

"No," she says, revealing herself a foreigner with just one word. Her black suit and crisp white s.h.i.+rt also set her apart; she is dressed like a serious businesswoman, and those teeth-white as the snow that used to fall on Quyt Mountain when he was a boy, straight as the pines that crowned it.

"Maybe I knew you when you were a child?"

"I don't think it's possible, sir. I grew up in the U.S. But perhaps you knew my father-Ly Vn Hai."

"Ly Vn Hai," Hng repeats. The name is not entirely unfamiliar to him, but it is a sound far away, a temple gong ringing in a distant valley.

"He was an artist here in the fifties."

Hng stops the movement of his ladle. Wait. Who is this woman? And what does she want? Does the government now employ beautiful young women with foreign accents as spies? Has she been hired to trap him, all these years later, to have him admit some collusion with the men of the Beauty of Humanity Movement?

Hng straightens his back, ready to defend himself, when he suddenly sees all the colour drain away from her face.

This girl is no spy.

"I'm sorry," she says quietly. "I know this must seem like it's coming out of nowhere, but I heard you knew many of the artists back then, and I've spent a year searching and n.o.body knows anything and I just ..." Her voice evaporates and her shoulders slump. "I just hoped that maybe you knew him."

Hng clears his throat. He does not know what to say. The professional businesswoman has transformed into a girl defeated. A girl in search of her father. "A Hanoi man, was he?"

She glances up, turning Hng into a frozen portrait of a man holding a ladle in mid-air. She looks so vulnerable-her eyes s.h.i.+ning like rare black pearls, a slight tremor to her chin-her face far too revealing.

"He grew up in Hi Phng, but he moved here to train at the ecole des Beaux Arts in the late 1940s," she says.

It has been decades since a beautiful young woman has looked at him in such a way. Not since Lan, the girl who used to raise her eyes to him for answers. It is almost unbearable. If only he could offer this young woman-and himself-some relief. But he cannot honestly say he remembers anything about Ly Vn Hai, except perhaps that combination of short syllables.

"His name is vaguely familiar," says Hng, leaning in closer. "What else can you tell me about him, dear?"

"He was sent to a re-education camp in 1956."

"So many of them were," Hng says quietly.

"He was in good company then."

"Oh, he would have been, yes," Hng says. "Some of the very best." He feels the urge to tell her just how good, to boast about the poetry and the essays and the artwork the Beauty of Humanity Movement produced, the fearlessness the men he knew had displayed in the face of opposition, the reach and inspiration of their work.

"Come again," he says to the young woman instead. "Perhaps I will remember him."

She pulls a business card from her pocket and hands it to him.

Hng squints at the English letters and bows his head respectfully, not recognizing a single word.

T sits behind his father on the seat of the Honda Dream II as they head back toward the Old Quarter after breakfast, wending their way through the congestion of motorbikes, bicycles, cyclos, pedestrians, cars, wooden carts and back-bent widows peddling food in baskets hanging from bamboo poles, blazing a trail through air thick with diesel fumes and morning fog.

"You've never seen her before?" T shouts, as his father slows down to turn a corner.

"I told you-no," Bnh yells over his shoulder.

"But what do you think she was doing there?"

"No idea," his father yells. "Strange morning."

Strange indeed. Auspicious even. Ts father seems possessed with the strength of the new moon-look at his victory over the foreman this morning, after all. Although his father is a naturally reserved man, T has seen him overcome his inhibition when it counts. It is their job to protect Hng, particularly now that he is getting older. Hng's eyesight has deteriorated recently, his movements have become stiff and slow; it pains T to realize that Hng is no longer the invincible street warrior, but a man showing the vulnerabilities of his age.

T squeezes his father's shoulder affectionately before hopping off the back of the bike in front of the Metropole, Hanoi's finest hotel, once the finest in all of Indochina. He skips up the steps and enters the lobby. The giant potted palms, chandeliers and ceiling fans keep the grand colonial air of the place alive. Phng, Ts best friend and partner in capitalist adventure, stumbles in just after him, looking foul-tempered with the stink of late-night karaoke. He has neglected to shave and his lips appear glued together. Phng has clearly not been fortified with the bowl of ph that is vital for one's daily performance.

"You missed some real drama this morning," says T.

"I've had quite enough drama of my own already this morning," says Phng.

Phng is the driver, and T, because of his better English, is the guide, but together they are the A-team employed by the New Dawn Tour Agency in their matching company T-s.h.i.+rts and knock-off Chinese Nike Shox Jungas with soles the colour of ripe mango. On the job, Phng goes by the name Hanoi Poison, Hanoi P for short. He says it's for the benefit of the tourists who can only seem to spit his real name, but the truth is it's his rap name and he's planning on becoming a famous rap artist. Phng has solid musical training behind him, a growing reputation and many, many fans, but most of all, he's got talent. He tries to mess with Ts name as well-T-Dangerous, TaT-but T is not interested. "I'm old-fas.h.i.+oned that way," he says, "leave it be."

T met Phng a couple of years ago when they were both teaching at the high school in o'ng a district. T was twenty years old and had just made the depressing discovery that loving math was a very different thing from loving teaching it. He was dreading the thought of the next forty-five years until retirement, but when he thought of the drudgery his parents had endured in their early working lives he was overcome with guilt.

Bnh and Anh had been employed at the Russian KAO factory for years, dutiful proletariat manufacturing Ping-Pong b.a.l.l.s for a pittance. Ts father had worked with celluloid, his mother had tested for bounce and T had had a cardboard box full of misshapen white b.a.l.l.s to play with as a child. But in the 1980s, the bones of the Soviet Union began to rattle. Soviet aid ran out and the factories began to close, leaving Vietnam friendless and hungry and in trouble. And so began i mi-Vietnam's very own perestroika-the economic reforms that allowed a free market to develop and have since changed all of their lives.

Ts father now has endless carpentry work. He employs two a.s.sistants, four skilled woodworkers and an apprentice, but still, with so much construction going on he must say no to jobs on occasion. Despite his enthusiasm for private enterprise, Bnh is still more craftsman than businessman.

Ts mother, meanwhile, had knocked on the doors of every one of the new butcher shops that opened in the 1990s until she found one proprietor who was obliged to listen because he came from the same village as her mother. The story is now legendary in their family. "Tell me nine ways to prepare pork for Tet and I'll consider hiring you," the butcher said. And so Ts mother recalled the pork dishes they used to eat during the holidays at her grandmother's house. She described the sensation of her teeth collapsing through fried rice paper into the soft ground pork middle of a spring roll, the crisp saltiness of pig skin fried with onions, the silk of the finest pork and cinnamon pate coating her tongue, the soft chew of pork sausages, the b.u.t.tery collapse of pig's trotters stewed with bamboo shoots, the ticklish texture of pig intestines resting on vermicelli and the fill of sticky rice, pork and green beans boiled in banana leaves. Just when she was about to falter, she remembered how her father used to reminisce about the dishes his mother made for Tet during his boyhood in Hue: pork bologna, fermented pork hash, pig's brain pie ...

The butcher raised his finger. "You're hired. Stop there before I fire you."

T did not have to do time in a factory: he grew up in a world where he was free to choose a career for himself. What right did he have to complain about his teaching job? But then he'd met Phng, a part-time music teacher a few years older than he who taught cla.s.sical an ba'u two days a week. Phng, moping in the teachers' lounge, had called theirs a thankless profession. This had unleashed a sympathetic torrent from T, marking the beginning of an ill.u.s.trious friends.h.i.+p.

Phng had the spirit and imagination of an artist and entrepreneur, enough to inflate the dreams for two. By the end of that school year, once Phng had lobbied Ts father for consent, they had both submitted their resignations and registered for a diploma course at Hanoi Tourism College.

You are the i mi generation, the instructors at the college told them, the children of the renovation, the future of Vietnam-a future that depends on opening even more doors to international trade and relations. T feels the elation of being poised at the vanguard of the future as a proud, fully fledged, nationally accredited tour guide shaking the hands of the world.

Ts English might be better than Phng's, but T knows that in many ways it was Phng who taught him what foreigners really want. T prides himself on being an excellent memorizer, and initially relied on the vast and readily accessible number of facts stored in his brain. He has memorized, in particular, The Big Book of Inventions, so if a tourist comes from, say, Norway, he can impress him by asking, Do you know the invention for which Norway is most famous? The aerosol spray can.