The Beauty Of Humanity Movement Part 11

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 cafe down the road from the hotel sipping a second c.o.ke 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 a.s.signment in his life. Perhaps Hng could offer him some kind of absolution. But T would feel embarra.s.sed 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 c.o.kes 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 ap.r.o.n; a young man is tugging at small tufts of gra.s.s. 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 s.h.i.+mmering 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."

"Come, we'll have some tea," says Hng, turning his pots over to dry. He cups his knees and groans as he stands, then makes his way up the slight muddy incline toward his shack.

T ducks through the doorway, then places his palms together by way of greeting his grandfather at his altar while Hng puts the kettle on to boil.

"Did I ever tell you how your grandfather got that scar on his cheek?" Hng asks.

T shakes his head. He's always thought that line was just a shadow.

"Your grandfather made a very pa.s.sionate speech, saying that if just one person read the words of their publications, if one single heart was moved, they had done their job: they had succeeded in setting the truth loose in the world.

"There was this man-he wore a beret and carried a thick book, just like they all did back then-who stepped out of the shadows in the corner of the room. He walked toward o as if he were about to shake his hand and congratulate him for such inspirational words. Once he reached your grandfather, this man raised his book without a word and smashed it with two hands across his face.

"o fell backward and everyone leapt to their feet. I was down on the floor with him, holding his head, when I saw that it wasn't a book the man had used to a.s.sault your grandfather but a brick wrapped in paper. o coughed and spat out two of his teeth. His cheek was cut just there where you see the scar. It had been deeply serrated by the edge of the brick: his cheekbone shone like a pearl. I was thankful your father did not have to witness this.

"In the commotion of it all, the stranger slipped out the door. He was a spy, that seemed certain. But o just said, 'We cannot let them intimidate us. It just makes it even more important that we carry on.'

"It was a great privilege for me to be the one who st.i.tched his face with a needle and thread. I anaesthetized him with rice whiskey and offered him a bed. He took refuge in my backroom, not wanting to alarm your grandmother or your father with his appearance. But you know, I didn't see a battered face, I saw a strong face," he says, pointing at o's picture, "that strong jaw."

T inadvertently strokes his own chin, wondering if he would ever have such courage. Everything about his life can feel petty and selfish when he thinks of the heroism of people in the past. What value is he really adding to the world? He plays some role in introducing foreigners to Vietnam, but the thrill seems to have gone out of it for him recently. More than the thrill.

"Sometimes it's hard to feel your life has any worth by comparison," he finds himself saying out loud.

"But it is not a matter for comparison, T," says Hng. "We all have our place in Buddha's universe."

T reaches for the plastic bag and pulls out the high-tops. "I thought maybe you could use some new shoes."

"Well," says Hng, clearing his throat. "They're quite something. Is this the latest fas.h.i.+on?"

"That would probably be the Nike Air Jordans, but these are still pretty cool. Do you like them?"

"Very much," says Hng, "thank you." He places them alongside Grandfather o's portrait on the ancestral altar. "I wouldn't want to dirty them, though."

-- Having sent T on his way with a small packet of lotus seeds for his mother, Hng worries he has made the boy feel insecure. He understands Ts concern about the worth of one's life. What strikes him is that he hasn't heard this type of concern expressed in a great many years. Men of o's circle might have wondered such things, but no one since would dare posit a question with the individual at its centre. It's the freedoms of i mi, Hng thinks. In some ways, Ts generation shares more with their grandfathers than with their fathers.

He should have told T that a hero is just a man, a person who makes mistakes from time to time. It is natural when speaking of the dead that we tend to remember the heroic things rather than the flawed. Hng has for so long been invested in giving Bnh a portrait of his father as a hero that it seems he has forgotten T. The boy might actually be better equipped than someone of his father's generation to understand the imperfections and contradictions that characterize a man, however great.

o had dedicated a poem to Hng in the last issue of Nhan Van, though Hng had not read it until years later. He'd never been able to bring himself to turn the pages beyond the editorial that had determined o's fate. It was Lan who finally pushed him to do so. Lan with her insatiable appet.i.te, begging him for more. He turned the page of the magazine and stared.

"What is it?" Lan asked, putting her fingertips to the paper.

Hng inhaled deeply before reading the line of dedication. "'To H who is wise in matters of soup and well beyond.'"

"H," said Lan. "Is it you?"

Hng read aloud the poem that followed.

o wrote of longing for those who had disappeared, all the innocent farmers and compromised children. He wrote in the elliptical way of a poet, without naming who was responsible. He had gone well beyond theory and found the stinging heart. o had atoned through poetry, spanning the differences between their worlds, capturing the tragedy of the countryside so viscerally that Hng could taste blood on his tongue.

Hng stopped reading and wiped his lips.

"What's the matter?" Lan asked.

"My mouth," he said, turning toward her. "Is it bleeding?"

She put her delicate finger to his chin and said, "Open." She peered into his mouth. "There is no blood. But, Hng," she added, "I can taste it too."

Hng still holds that poem somewhere deep inside him. He can share stories about the Beauty of Humanity Movement with T, with Bnh, even with a relative stranger like Miss Maggie, but he has not been able to share poetry with another soul. Not since the day he returned home from peddling his pondweed noodles to discover all his papers- the journals and the poems, every single one of them-gone.

He had torn the place apart. He had wept for years, not observably, but on the inside. The poems that he had memorized slowly bled out of him from lack of use. Is this why his chest hurts now?

He swallows a good medicinal dose of Bnh's rice wine as the sun beyond his shack sinks into the ground. He toasts o's picture upon the altar, framed and illuminated by a ridiculous pair of shoes.

T returns to the Metropole at half past five and paces the lobby while he waits for Miss Maggie. He's rehearsing a speech in his mind, one that will allow them both to save face. If she pushes, as Americans tend to push, and forces him to say something less than polite, it will be she who is at fault for not knowing the Vietnamese culture.

Miss Maggie approaches with a smile and her jacket folded over her arm. "I thought we could get out of here," she says. "Go somewhere for a drink."

"Um. Yes?" says T, disarmed by her informality.

"And please try to call me Maggie," she says over her shoulder as they snake their way up the sidewalk. "The Miss just makes me feel like a schoolteacher."

Maggie, Maggie, T repeats in his head as he follows her to a place he doesn't know even though he thought he knew almost every bar in the city. It's a funny little Russian vodka bar called Na zdorovye- "cheers"-the only Russian word T knows because they replaced Russian with English as the second language in schools in 1988.

Which is just fine with him. T finds everything Russian, apart from perestroika and glasnost, a bit sad. The c.r.a.ppy Minsk motorbikes and the cloudy potato vodka that makes you sick and all the stories of young Vietnamese who got scholars.h.i.+ps from the Russian government to study in Moscow but ended up freezing to death alone in unheated apartment blocks in winter.

That whole generation of sour-faced old men now very high up in the Party got their training in Russia, men who probably fantasize about being one of the ones whose brain is sent to Moscow after they are dead to be sliced into a thousand pieces and mounted onto Plexiglas sheets revealing many things of great importance to the scientific community.

Russia is the absolute last place in the world T would like to visit. He might even prefer to see s.h.i.+t on a canvas.

The vodka bar is stuffy and windowless, full of smoke and the clash of foreign languages. They sink into a red velvet sofa, which feels a bit damp. T checks to make sure there aren't mushrooms growing between the cus.h.i.+ons. Miss Maggie, Maggie, orders vodka for both of them, then clinks her gla.s.s against his. T is not used to women who drink, and he wonders what people in the bar must think of their unusual pairing. She is at least ten years older than him, certainly of an age where she should be married.

"So tell me," she says. "Your friend said you were offended by some of the art you saw."

T has a screed in his head about the greed and arrogance of artists like Mindanao and the one who was a dandy peac.o.c.k who are only making art for money, growing bloated and arrogant in their service of the foreign market, behaving like French plantation owners and getting rich off the backs of the Vietnamese slaves who are doing the actual work. And what about people in positions of influence like Miss Maggie? They are no better-encouraging and indulging these artists in their crude misrepresentations of the country and presumably, like all those foreign gallery owners, getting rich in this process themselves. He expects more of someone of Vietnamese heritage, but that is the deceptive lie of her face.

He is too schooled in politeness, however, to offer anything more than, "I am simply uncomfortable with the ways in which Vietnam is being represented in many of these contemporary art galleries."

"How so?" she asks.

The subject of Mindanao's p.o.r.nography is too uncomfortable to raise with a lady, even one of questionable values. "You would think we are all still pulling ploughs by hand and sleeping alongside pigs and oxen," he says.

"That's what sells, I'm afraid. A kind of timeless and romantic fantasy of Vietnam. No unpleasantness. No war."

"But we don't live like this," T stammers. "Where is the truth in it? In the past, there were artists and writers who would risk their lives to depict reality rather than some socialist utopia."

"I know," she says quietly. "My father was one of them."

"Seriously?"

"No joke."

"Huh," he says, c.o.c.king his head to the side to get a better look at her, a different angle. So who was her father? And if he was such a principled man, shouldn't she know better than to indulge these contemporary artists in their gross distortions of Vietnamese life? Ts mind floods with questions, but before he has a chance to ask any of them, she slides an envelope full of money-good crisp American dollar bills, from what he can see-across the table.

"For the days you worked," she says.

T quickly sweeps the envelope off the table into his lap. It might look like he's taking some kind of bribe, and you never know who's watching.

"So," he says quickly, changing the subject. "Your father was from Hanoi?"

Miss Maggie nods as she stares at the bottom of her empty gla.s.s. "He was an artist here in the forties and fifties," she says.

"Ah, so this is why you have such an interest in Vietnamese art."

"Yes," she says.

"Would you like another drink?" T asks, intrigue now trumping anger. "Maggie."

"I shouldn't," she says, then pauses. "Oh, all right, then." She nods her head at the waitress and points at their empty gla.s.ses.

"I understand why you find that work offensive," she says.

"And you don't?" he asks, emboldened by the drink. "Would you rather see s.h.i.+t on a canvas?"

"Hah," she laughs. "You mean Mindanao. I know. I understand what he's doing, but that doesn't mean I like it and it doesn't mean he isn't an a.s.shole."

T bursts out laughing and quickly slaps his palms over his mouth. He has never in his life heard a lady use such a word. Wait until he tells Phng.

"It's an issue of freedom of expression," she continues. "The artists and writers who used to frequent Old Man Hng's restaurant? They were shut down because the Party didn't like what they had to say. You can't really defend them without extending the right to someone like Mindanao, whatever you might think of his work."

Perhaps this is what Phng was suggesting the other night when he slapped those ugly lyrics onto Ts ears.

"Hey-did the old man know your father?" T asks, suddenly realizing the likely connection between them.

"He might have. It's possible he was part of that group, or at least known to them. Unfortunately the old man isn't sure."

"Your father might have known my Grandfather o then."

Miss Maggie smiles. A very lovely smile that causes a ripple in Ts stomach. He attempts to reciprocate, though he knows he cannot offer her comparable loveliness given the stains on his upper teeth. He imagines their ancestors looking down on them: beauty and the beast.

"That's a nice thought," says Miss Maggie. "Hng said he was in good company."

"You must come again for breakfast," says T. "The old man's memory is a bit random. Maybe next time will be your lucky day."

The Memory of Taste.

The sun has not yet risen when Maggie climbs aboard the motorbike behind T and wraps her arms around his middle. T is mortified by the erection that springs up in response to her hands. He remembers the way Phng looked her up and down as she walked toward them in the hotel lobby the other day, and his erection quickly leads to thoughts of what she might look like naked. He is forced to conjure up an unpleasant memory of the Australian who p.i.s.sed off Phng in order to kill his erection before they arrive at the Chng Dng Bridge.

This is not the best of Old Man Hng's locations, given that people use the s.p.a.ce under the bridge as a toilet and the smell of urine is very strong. Thankfully one forgets this as soon as one raises a steaming bowl to one's nose, as T a.s.sures Maggie, standing in line behind his father.

"Ah," the old man says to Maggie. "You've finally come to me again. I was beginning to worry that perhaps you did not like my ph."

"She came with me," T says proprietarily over Maggie's shoulder.

"I'm glad to see you have become friends," says Hng, making T feel self-conscious. "I'm afraid nothing has come to mind about your father."

"Actually, there was something I should have mentioned," says Maggie. "His hands. After the camp, they were like claws."

"So he could no longer paint," says Hng.

"No, not really."

"That must have been very hard for him. It reminds me of a poet I knew who lost his tongue."

"But how did he eat?" T interjects, the steam rising from his bowl.

"He used his imagination," says Hng, "his memory of taste."

Ts father asks him to hold his bowl so he can lay his windbreaker down on the sloping concrete ground for Ts guest to sit upon.

"That's not necessary," she says, "but thank you."

T wishes he had thought of this gallant gesture, but then his father is displaying rare animation this morning, obviously impressed by the new company his son is keeping. He takes his bowl from T and squats down between them, leaning over to suck back a few quick spoonfuls of broth. "Ah," he says, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. "Miss Maggie," he says then, clearing his throat. "Tell me, what is it like to grow up Vietnamese in America?"

She raises her eyebrows and T is made uncomfortable by his father's directness. In tourism college they were taught that American notions of what const.i.tutes a personal question are quite different from their own. T has learned this the hard way, through responses to questions like: And what do they pay you to be a pharmaceutical representative with GlaxoSmithKline, Mr. Clark? Is this lady your wife or your daughter? Do they have the death penalty in your state of Texas? Why are the insides of your ears so hairy?