The Beauty Of Humanity Movement Part 8

"And my sisters?"

"I lost track of who was killed and who just ran," the old woman said, hanging her head. "I don't know where they went. Up into the mountains, perhaps, or out to sea, what does it matter now?

"Have you any plastic?" she asked, a moment later.

"But why?" said Hng.

"Because then I can suffocate myself."

Hng kissed her forehead, the skin as thin as rice paper, and bid her goodbye.

He reached the far end of the village. The temple was no longer standing guard between the village and the world beyond; it had been torn apart, limb by red limb, to serve the fires of the starving. He heard a nightingale sing the song of an inverted world. He inhaled the scent of a rare, night-blooming flower, a smell that would forever be a.s.sociated with the village he would never return to again.

Dandy Peac.o.c.ks.

T makes his way to the Metropole on foot, his thoughts numbed by revving engines, the insistent beeping of horns, the crowing of street vendors, the racket of hammering and sawing, the spark-flying screech of metal cutting metal. "Dancing Queen" blares through giant speakers on the sidewalk of a cafe where schoolboys and office workers sit under a green-and-white striped awning dripping with Christmas lights, steaming bowls of ph perched on their knees.

T takes a moment to adjust to the hush of the Metropole, idly scanning the front page of the Vietnam News lying on a table in the lobby, the headlines declaring the imminent launch of the "Learn and Follow the Exemplary Morality of President H Chi Minh Campaign," and the president's posthumous awarding of the Gold Star Order to two former Party officials for their effort and dedication to the cause of national liberation in the late 1940s.

He throws the paper down and walks along the corridor to Miss Maggie's office. He finds her having breakfast-a cup of black coffee and a b.u.t.tery French pastry-and adding red dots to her map. At her invitation, T takes a seat. They visited five galleries yesterday, perhaps only a quarter of the locations she has marked on the map.

This morning she has made appointments to meet two artists at their studios. The first of these artists turns out to be one Miss Maggie represents in her gallery. He works in an old stilt house that has been lifted beam by beam from his mother's village in the North and rebuilt in the middle of a housing block near West Lake. He has old-fas.h.i.+oned manners and no cellphone, or wife, but given the prices of his paintings T wonders just how honest he is, because what the h.e.l.l does he do with all that money?

T leads Miss Maggie to the next atelier marked on her map, turning down one of the narrowest lanes in the Old Quarter. Miss Maggie has never met this artist, though she says he is very famous, which must mean famous in the ninety-eight per cent international sense because T has never heard of him.

"Here's what I want us to do," she says. "Let's pretend I'm your client and you're taking me on a tour of various galleries and studios. I'm just trying to get a general overview of the contemporary art scene, I haven't committed to buying anything yet.

"Oh," she adds, "and I don't speak a word of Vietnamese."

T repeats these instructions to himself as they pa.s.s through a set of iron gates. They've entered a garden full of Buddhas-two hundred or more Buddhas-laughing happy Buddhas, Buddhas with crumbling faces, bright orange, bronze and marble Buddhas, stone Buddhas covered in moss. This artist is certainly crazy for Buddhas. Or maybe he's just plain crazy, thinks T, because he appears in the garden wearing a flowing silk robe, more like a lady's ao dai than anything a normal man would wear.

"Wow," Miss Maggie says. "He's a real dandy."

T will look up the word dandy in his dictionary when he gets home. For the moment, he chooses to interpret this as "peac.o.c.k." The man is like a strutting peac.o.c.k, displaying his colourful plume of feathers.

"Welcome! Welcome!" the artist bellows as Miss Maggie greets him in English. "Please"-he waves his arms-"Coffee?"

It would seem he has quickly exhausted all the English he knows. "How serious is she?" the artist asks T quietly, still smiling.

"She has a serious interest in art," T replies.

"I mean as a buyer. How serious is she about buying?"

T fears an honest answer would cause the bellowing man in women's clothes to do something unpredictable, so he responds with what he knows in English to be called a white lie, even though for him white hardly seems an innocent adjective, symbolizing death as it does. "She takes buying very seriously," T says, nodding and matching the artist tooth for tooth with his New Dawn smile.

"Sit! Sit!" the artist says to Miss Maggie, once they have followed him up the stairs to his studio.

Miss Maggie sits down on a stool that swings 360 degrees, enabling her to view the art covering three walls of the rectangular room of this renovated tube house. At the far end of the room a team of workers are standing at a long table. Nine young men and women wearing splattered ap.r.o.ns are each working on a different painting. The last artist worked alone, but then, thinks T, perhaps that is because he was not so famous.

T begins to translate. Does the artist mind if they ask some questions?

"Yes! Yes!" the artist says, jumping up to pull a heavy black book down off a shelf. Photos of pieces currently on display in galleries in Hanoi and Saigon, Singapore and Hong Kong. s.h.i.+pping to the U.S. only $150.

"Please! Please!" he says, flipping through the first few pages for them.

T translates Miss Maggie's questions about method and materials and themes he likes to explore and why those themes and who are his influences and why does he think contemporary Vietnamese art is receiving so much attention and what does he consider uniquely Vietnamese and what does he attribute to the French and Chinese and is the evolution in Vietnamese art different from the evolution in Chinese art and does he feel his expression restricted today by Party concerns and what about his own journey to becoming an artist?

"Please! Please!" he says, flipping some more pages of his black book for them. To T, he says, "Why so many questions? She is exhausting my creative energy. Please, enough."

"He wonders if you would like to see the pieces he is working on now," T says, pointing to the long table at the back of the room.

The artist jumps up with relief and gestures for them to follow.

Miss Maggie looks over the shoulders of the young artists, watching them work. The paintings seem very similar to the ones they saw in the galleries yesterday.

"Excellent!" the artist says, picking up a paintbrush. He adds his initials in black to the corner of a newly completed piece of work.

A young woman with hair cut short like a boy places a tray of coffee on a corner of the long table. T would like to ask her why she has cut her hair, because she will never get a husband looking like that. He hopes for her sake that she is not married to the artist, who may have insisted she maim her appearance in this way so that no other man will look at her. Imagine all that flesh hovering above you. T shudders, repulsing himself with the thought-as oppressive as China pus.h.i.+ng its weight down upon Vietnam.

While Miss Maggie waits for the black drip of her coffee to finish, she moves around the room studying the work on the walls.

"Bill Clinton!" says the artist, pointing at a painting at eye level.

"Ah, so this is the one," says Miss Maggie.

"Bill Clinton bought this painting?" T asks, very impressed.

"Well, he bought one just like it. They now call it Bill Clinton style. Isn't that depressing?"

T isn't sure how he is supposed to respond. What is depressing about Bill Clinton? He is something of a hero to young people in Vietnam. He threw a giant burning log on the slow fire of i mi when he lifted the trade embargo with the U.S., and he was the first U.S. president to visit Vietnam since the war.

Miss Maggie finishes her cup of coffee, stands up and thanks the artist for his time.

"I thought you said she was serious," the artist reprimands T while handing Miss Maggie his card. "But she is clearly a philistine."

T does not know the meaning of this word, but the artist has said it in a French way, and he thinks it must be some kind of insult because Miss Maggie has raised her eyebrows in a very American expression of doubt.

T is deeply embarra.s.sed by the behaviour of this dandy peac.o.c.k. It is shameful. No better than a beggar hara.s.sing a tourist in the street. From what he has seen of the contemporary art scene so far, he can only conclude it is a world of arrogance and greed.

They walk back to the Hotel Metropole together in silence as if Miss Maggie, too, has been depressed by what they have seen. T would like to apologize, but he's not sure exactly what he would be apologizing for.

"You did well, T," she says.

"Oh?"

"You protected the interests of your client. You didn't let him manipulate her with his hard sell. It can be an aggressive business. You don't want people to feel pressured into buying."

Maggie sinks into the steaming water of the bath holding a winegla.s.s aloft. She plugs the dripping tap with her big toe, and listens to the wind rattling a pane of gla.s.s in the reception room. She smells the chicken Mrs. Vien down the hall must have cooked for dinner; she hears the monotone drone of a radio in the distance.

Perhaps it was the rare treat of company all day, but Maggie feels lonelier than usual this evening. These are the hours that should be spent with family and friends, sharing food and news of the day. Maggie wonders where T lives, whether his mother irons his sagging hipster jeans for him, whether he has a girlfriend and if Ts mother and the girl's mother are plotting to see their children marry.

Maggie's mother had spent years asking when she and Daniel were planning on making things proper, making her proud. Daniel was an installer at the Walker Art Center-a gentle loner a few years older than her whom she had come to know when he hung the pieces for the first exhibition she curated. Daniel had an expansive brain and an enthusiastic heart-even going so far as to spend three years studying Vietnamese in order to impress her mother-but he was also burdened with a capacity for such sadness that it could, on occasion, replace him at a table, in conversation, in bed. There were dark walls Maggie had to stroke with a delicate hand, particularly when it came to his own family.

Maggie was twenty-six when she met Daniel, thirty-five when they were driving to the wedding of a university friend of his in Ann Arbor and he suddenly divulged the fact that his father, a man he'd simply referred to as dead up to this point, had served in Vietnam. Had served but in some ways never returned. The body yes, but not the rest of him.

It ended right there, really, on the road to Ann Arbor, Maggie staring out the window at a salt-stained world, realizing that Daniel's attraction to her was obviously so much more complicated than she had ever known and in some ways had nothing to do with her.

She couldn't bring herself to talk about it initially, especially with her mother. As betrayed as she felt, she saw herself a failure. That somehow, she should have known. It cast doubt on all her relations.h.i.+ps, forcing her to wonder what she represented to other people, whether people saw her at all.

"Another girl?" her mother eventually had asked.

Maggie nodded, an easy way out.

"American?"

"What's that got to do with it?" Maggie snapped.

"Better to stick with your own kind," said her mother. "Better for the children."

Maggie realized in that moment what her mother and Daniel shared. Their feelings always dominated. And she catered to them both.

The relations.h.i.+p with Daniel had broken down almost three years ago now, and apart from two dates with a man who evoked no great feeling in her but whom she slept with nevertheless, Maggie has retreated from the possibility of love. Since her mother died two years ago, finding a connection to the past has seemed of more fundamental importance. She needs an anchor to weigh her down, a sense of place and belonging. To be grounded before she begins anew.

As far as Maggie knows, her mother never entertained the possibility of another romance in her own life, though she does remember a particular look of longing Mrs. Trang's husband used to give her mother whenever she and Maggie came into their restaurant. It was as if he were an animal in a shelter in need of a new home. Perhaps that was enough flattery to keep her mother going.

Her mother was such a beautiful woman, so elegant and refined, it had pained Maggie to see how often people dismissed her as just another immigrant-a cleaning lady with little English, someone just off the boat, that Chinese lady, an anonymous and slightly sad woman pulling a bundle buggy full of vegetables bought in Chinatown down the street, yanking her heavy load up the steps onto the bus, searching for her bus pa.s.s, the driver shouting at her or over-enunciating as if he thought she were deaf or of little intelligence.

Nhi had worked diligently for years as a cleaner at the hospital, and while she'd seen her pay increase steadily and had gained more responsibility over time, language always held her back. She only ever mastered the most basic of phrases, never had a bank account or a credit card, and she spoke more Cantonese than English in the end, thanks to the ladies with whom she played mah-jong.

Maggie paid her mother's bills, renewed her bus pa.s.s, filed a tax return on her behalf. Twice a year she took her to Target and J.C. Penney to replenish her wardrobe. Maggie was her mother's bridge to America and without that bridge, Nghiem Nhi stayed rooted on immigrant sh.o.r.es.

Maggie remembers how her mother used to sit at the vanity with the oval mirror in her room every night, silver-backed brushes and jars of Korean whitening and anti-aging creams lined up upon it. She would remove her impeccable makeup with cotton b.a.l.l.s, unpin her chignon and brush her long hair. She still looked elegant stripped of her makeup, just less able to conceal the disappointment that showed in the lines around her mouth.

Every time Maggie looks in the mirror she fears seeing evidence of that same disappointment. It's both a surprise and a relief to see her father's eyes reflected back at her. A glow of obsidian. Animated and alive.

Propaganda and Political Education.

Hng stacks firewood between the foot of his mattress and the wall in preparation for breakfast tomorrow. He had hoped to distract himself with ch.o.r.es this evening, but that devastating trip home to his village that is no longer a village has been replaying itself over and over again in his mind.

The memory of it had begun as he stared at the water pouring into the pool this morning. It accompanied him as he pushed his cart over to the TV tube factory in Bi, where the workers are on strike. Happy as he was when his customers eventually turned up, seeing them reminded him of returning to his shop after that trip home all those years ago, of trying to go on, to serve breakfast as usual despite the song of helplessness and devastation ringing in his head.

Back then, his customers had berated him for his disappearance. They did not ask where he'd been for a week, did not notice Hng had turned inward; they simply wanted the a.s.surance of breakfast every morning. They wanted him to do his job.

Only little Bnh and his father paid Hng any attention. Bnh eagerly relayed the news of the alleyway: the pink flower that had sprouted up between the rocks beside the back door, a spider's web with fifty rings, the rumour of a man who was said to be sleeping in the alley at night. o, meanwhile, lingered after breakfast asking for Hng's input on a play he had begun working on in Hng's absence.

"What might you say if you were a peasant who owned a rice paddy across the river from your village and a Party official told you that from now on you'd be working for a share of the harvest on a collective on your side of the river, only that farm was fifty kilometres away? I just need a few lines. Something that sounds natural. Realistic."

Hng felt his intestines tighten. His parents were peasants who owned a rice paddy and they had nothing but that rice paddy and the one water buffalo they shared with another family, and it would appear they had been killed because of it. Did o really have no idea what it was like to be a poor peasant? For all his talk about equality across cla.s.s, his invitations to Hng to share his point of view, o was still, in the end, an educated young man of Hanoi, schooled in the western way, who had never done manual labour or gone hungry. o could feel outraged by things in the abstract that he would obviously never feel in his bones.

Hng walked away from o in lieu of replying, marching through his bedroom and out the back door into the alley to check how much water remained in the rain barrel. He was flapping flies out of his hair and berating a young man urinating against the side of the building when he heard o speak his name.

"Hng," said o, touching his elbow. "What happened to you? Where did you disappear to last week?"

Hng turned to face the man who had taught him so much yet knew so little of the real world. "You'll forgive me," he began.

"You're a Hanoian, Hng, you should free yourself of that country habit," said o.

"These problems with land reform that you have been addressing?" Hng continued.

"They are not just theoretical. They affect real people in real ways."

"Which is why we need real people like you to tell us what you have seen with your own eyes," said o.

But Hng could not speak of the horror he had just witnessed. He refused, furthermore, to be treated as o's token friend from the country. He did not say that words could never capture the devastation. That he believed a knife through the stomach would more effectively communicate the pain than anything one could produce with a pen. Hng could not say such things to a man still so resolutely optimistic that words could change the world.

"What is it, Hng?" o asked, his eyebrows knitted in confusion.

"That is the question," Hng said cryptically. "For nothing is as it seems."

o opened his mouth as if to speak but then closed it. He turned away and stepped through the door, returning to join the other men in the shop.

o's faith in words remained unshaken. Over the next couple of weeks, under o's direction and the keen editorial eye of an aging revolutionary named Phan Khoi, the men in the shop committed themselves to producing a literary journal they would publish and distribute.

When Fine Works of Spring was released later that month, it immediately drew to Hng's shop the officers of the newly created Department of Propaganda and Political Education. Like flies to feces, Hng couldn't help but think as he watched the men in uniform descend upon copies of the journal lying open on the low tables.

They confiscated everything they could: sketchbooks, notebooks, newspaper. They stroked the shafts of their guns. They spoke in a language at odds with the threat of their presence, smiling as they stressed the importance to the revolution of having men like o and his colleagues join their ranks as ideological educators. They needed artists- as ill.u.s.trators, sloganeers, balladeers.

"And you are just the type of man we need to lead the new Literary a.s.sociation for National Salvation," they said, pointing at o.

Hng, standing firmly rooted with his hands on Bnh's shoulders, watched the men in the shop watching o. o stared at the wall just beyond the officers' heads, his jaw firmly set. He remained silent until the officers were out the door.

"What is art if its creation is dictated?" he said angrily to the men who surrounded him. "What is art if the critical eye turns blind, if we can no longer use it to comment independently on the state of the world?"

The same officers appeared the next morning and every morning after that. They promised status within the Party and priority in government housing to those who would fulfill their revolutionary duty by submitting themselves for re-education.

Hng did not close his doors that day until the men had exhausted themselves with debate, and for Bnh's sake he did his best to radiate a calm he did not feel. The boy had already proven himself a capable a.s.sistant-ducking beneath gesticulating arms and the plumes of smoke that billowed from nostrils and mouths in order to slip empty bowls off the tables-but when the officers began to turn up, Hng gave Bnh additional jobs to distract him-refilling water gla.s.ses, collecting clean chopsticks from the dishwasher in the alleyway, the same woman who, decades before, had sewn Hng his first decent s.h.i.+rt.