The Beauty of Humanity Movement Read online

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,” Bình 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-shirts 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-fashioned 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 Ðô’ng Ða 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.

  Bình and Anh had been employed at the Russian KAO factory for years, dutiful proletariat manufacturing Ping-Pong balls 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 balls 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 Ði 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 assistants, 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, Bình 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 pâté coating her tongue, the soft chew of pork sausages, the buttery 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 Huê: 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 classical đàn 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 illustrious friendship.

  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 Ði 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.

  The tourist will then turn his blue eyes to his companion and say, Really. I had no idea.

  In 1926 by Mr. Erik Rotheim, chemical engineer, T might add. He also attempts to wow with statistics—a communist education encourages such things—the land area of each administrative division in the country, for instance, the number of university graduates from various faculties, the lengths of the Mekong and Red rivers and the Great Wall of China.

  Really.

  It was Phng who pulled him aside one day and said, “When they say really, it actually means that is very boring.”

  “Really?” T asked.

  “Really.”

  T believes it is shared wisdom like this that has made them the A-team. But he is still learning, and perhaps that is what he likes best about his job. No pain, no gain, as the Americans say.

  This morning, he and Phng are escorting a middle-aged Canadian couple to some nearby villages. T likes the Canadians, even if their most exciting invention was only the garbage bag. (Really. In 1950 by Mr. Harry Wasylyk of Winnipeg, Manitoba.) They are generally kind, though it always amuses him how they introduce themselves with variations of: Hello, nice to meet you, we are from Canada, see the maple leaves sewn onto our knapsacks? Our country might be right next door, but it’s a world apart from its southern neighbour; in fact, we offered refuge to a great many draft dodgers who did not believe the Americans should be in Vietnam—horrible, horrible war, hor
rible, horrible U.S.A., horrible, horrible George Bush, and Iraq, now don’t get me started on Iraq …

  Yes, yes, T will nod and smile, because he does not want to speak a truth they will find complicated or disagreeable. This is what is meant by saving face. The war was a long time ago, well before T was born, and besides, in his opinion, an opinion shared with most of his friends, everything great was invented in the U.S. Blue jeans, for example. And Nikes and Tommy Hilfiger. And MTV and Nintendo and the Internet. And furthermore, the Vietnamese beat the Americans; they don’t go around boasting about it, but it’s true. It wasn’t like the Chinese, crushing the Vietnamese for a thousand years, or the French who tortured and killed for decades, making the Vietnamese slaves in their own country and taking every decision out of their hands.

  While such thoughts might fly around like a Ping-Pong ball inside Ts head, none of his clients would ever suspect it. T works hard to impress them with his good nature and exemplary customer service, and is ever-ready with his New Dawn smile.

  Today’s Canadians are from Quebec, the first French Canadians T has ever met. “We too were colonized by the French, as I am sure you are aware,” he said when he met them in the lobby yesterday, attempting to establish some common bond.

  Their reaction had caused T to spend most of last night in an Internet café. Today he hopes to redeem himself with sensitive insights into their unique history and culture. He will need to, because Phng, green with hangover, does not look like he will be of any particular help.

  T is indebted to his friend for changing his life, and he considers Phng a brother. He envies him like a brother too. Phng is taller and leaner, but it’s not Ts fault he inherited his father’s slightly bowed legs. The baggy jeans fortunately help disguise this. And at least both his eyes are real; there is no danger of inheriting his father’s glass eye. T doesn’t have nearly as white a smile as Phng’s, his upper teeth having been stained from taking antibiotics when he was a kid, but again—not his fault. And his hands? A little small, but surely more than made up for by the size and enthusiasm of his penis, as his future wife will discover.

  Currently there are no candidates for that job. An introduction through family is always best, and even if Phng prefers random girls for himself, as Ts honorary older brother, he introduces him to girls from time to time.

  Last Christmas there was this one girl Phng kept chatting about, and while T was interested at first, the more stories about her charitable work that Phng recounted, the less interested T became. By the time Phng finally introduced them, T was expecting someone with a shaved head in a flowing saffron robe who had no interest in romance or other worldly (i.e., carnal) matters. Instead, he was introduced to a cute girl dressed as one of Santa’s helpers. She was wearing a short, fuzzy red-and-white miniskirt and her hair was tied into flirty Japanese-schoolgirl-style ponytails underneath her floppy Santa’s hat. T suddenly felt very shy. He felt other things too, but very shy was perhaps second on the list.

  It was Christmas Eve and the three of them were standing among two thousand other Buddhists facing St. Joseph’s Cathedral with its blazing neon-blue manger. There were balloons and streamers and ribbons of fake snow floating through the air above, a rainbow of coloured lights beaming off the top of the church and music blaring over giant loudspeakers on the church steps, but all T felt was the fuzzy warmth of the girl’s skirt as she stood wedged between them, all he smelled was her perfume beyond the plastic scent of her clothes, all he felt, suddenly, was her hand on his hand, her head on his shoulder, all he heard was her whispering in his ear, “You can kiss me, you can touch me, if you’d like.”

  T was shocked: there they were wedged together in the crowd when she turned toward him, barely an inch between their noses, and took his hand and placed it on her breast, which was like a perfect brioche from a French bakery, the nipple like a hard raisin. She then slipped her hand down between them and, although she had no room to manoeuvre, she managed to rub his penis through his jeans. In thirty seconds he erupted, making a sound like a small sneezing dog.

  He never saw the girl again. He tried to call her the next day but her cellphone number didn’t even exist. It was only then that he asked Phng, “That girl, she wasn’t …? Phng, you didn’t … did you?”

  “Merry Christmas, my friend.”

  T had been extremely embarrassed about the whole thing and wondered if this is what Phng had meant when he referred to her “charitable work.” Still, he does savour the memory of it and dream of the meal that will come when he marries, because if he ever does get that close to a real girl, he will certainly be marrying her, although he doesn’t want to marry that kind of girl, he wants a quiet and traditional girl, one he can introduce with pride to everyone in his family, one who will belong among them, for she will come to live with him and his parents as tradition dictates, because T is the first-born and only son.

  Above all, his future wife must show great respect to Old Man Hng. The old man is patriarch of their family in a unique and complicated way, beyond blood. Ts father has known Old Man Hng since boyhood, since before he was Old Man and was just Hng. He is the one who kept Grandfather Ðạo’s flame burning, holding it close through decades of poverty and war, and waiting patiently for the day when he could share it and pass it on.

  Old Man Hng has been present at every important occasion of Ts life. From his birth to every Tet holiday to his graduation. Given how much the old man seems to have aged over the past few months, T worries the remaining occasions are numbered. He means no disrespect to Grandfather Ðạo, but on such occasions, and even in the day-to-day, T feels Hng to be more of a real grandfather to him than the legendary poet whose image sits enshrined on an overturned crate inside Hng’s rickety old shack on the shore of a manky pond.

  Introducing a girl to Old Man Hng would be the ultimate test of her moral character. Hng is poorer than poor, and the wrong girl would be put off by the association and might begin to worry about the security of her future. Even if T is ashamed by the old man’s poverty himself at times, the truth is, T is looking for someone who is a better person than he.

  Mr. and Mrs. Henri Lévesque have just entered the lobby, putting an end to this introspection. “You’ve slept well?” T asks. “Had a satisfactory breakfast? You have enjoyed some of the amenities of the hotel such as the free Wi-Fi? You have your camera in your bag there? This is our driver, Phng, and he will be taking us to the ethnic minority craft villages this morning. First in our journey, we will be crossing the Red River via one of the city’s three bridges. The Red River comes to us from China through the Honghe Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan Province and runs in a southeasterly direction for a total of 1,175 kilometres before emptying itself in the Gulf of Tonkin.”

  “Really,” mumbles Phng, as he leads the couple down the steps toward the van.

  Hng pats his shirt pocket. The young woman’s business card is nestled there alongside Ts, which the boy insists Hng keep on his person at all times. He indulges T with the solemn promise to do so, even if he does find the implication somewhat patronizing.

  Hng uses all his strength to push his cart through the streets toward the Hàng Da Market, where he will visit Bình’s wife, Anh, at her butcher stall. She is very good company, always up for a bit of conversation over a calming cup of jasmine tea, but there is a particular urgency to his pace this morning: he hopes the business card might reveal a clue. His desire to remember something, anything about this girl’s father feels so acute it could lead a man to fanciful thoughts, if not outright fabrication. He needs to work with the few pieces of information he’s been given.

  When Hng tires of pushing his wooden cart, he turns it around and pulls it, his arms stretched out behind him like the yoke that harnesses an ox. He can feel the road rough against the sole of his left foot; time once again to replace a slipper. Fortunately, being far from fashionable, these black vinyl slippers are cheap. He remembers a time in the not-too-distant past when everyone wore t
hem and had no choice. For a few years they were the only shoes you could buy in the government shops. One was rarely lucky enough to find the right size or a matching pair, but since everyone faced the same predicament, people were always prepared to engage in a frantic yet good-natured exchange in the street.

  Such communality is rare these days. Now Hng passes a new shoe shop every day, where shoes with prices marked in both đng and U.S. dollars hang like ripe fruit. The streets of the Old Quarter shine with imported merchandise, where not long ago they only gave off the fumes of disintegration, the smell of rot. At times the glare seems far too bright.

  Hng grinds to a halt in front of the market. He has overexerted himself and needs a moment of rest. He lifts the biggest of his pots from his cart and inverts it, plunking it down with a hollow boom on the sidewalk. He plants his bottom firmly upon it, his legs spread wide apart, and waves to the sugar-cane seller, gesturing for a cup of juice. He rests his knees on his elbows and rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. What a dramatic and emotional morning it has been.

  Seeing Bình rise and approach the foreman had cast him right back to those heady days in the early 1950s when Ðạo and the circle of artists and intellectuals who gathered around him would congregate for breakfast in the shop Hng had by then inherited from Uncle Chin.

  Bình, tiny then, would sit on a low wooden stool at his father’s side, looking terrified of splashing his white shirt as he bent his head over his bowl and tried to manipulate a pair of long chopsticks between his small fingers.

  Ðạo and the other men completely failed to notice the boy’s travails, consumed as they were with news of the liberation struggle and engaged in heated debates about the future of Vietnam. After abandoning his bowl, little Bình would sit patiently beside his father, who was alternately scribbling in a leatherbound notebook or arguing a point by jabbing the air with the burning end of his cigarette.

  Hng, alone, saw the boy. And Bình’s invisibility gnawed at his heart.