The Beauty of Humanity Movement

Camilla Gibb

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781848877948
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857893918
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The Beauty of Humanity Movement is a keenly observed and skillfully wrought novel about the reverberation of conflict through generations, the enduring legacy of art, and the redemption, and renewal, of long-lost love. Tu' is a young tour guide working in Hanoi. As he leads bands of Westerners on 'war tours' through the scarred landscape of Vietnam, he wonders what it is that his clients see - and what they miss entirely. Maggie is Vietnamese by birth but has lived most her life in the U.S. Returning to her homeland, she sifts through history for clues as to the fate of her dissident father. Witness to both their stories, Old Man Hung has lived through decades of political upheaval. But Hung has found a way to provide hope in his waterside community: The Beauty of Humanity Movement.

New Dawn

Maggie had deliberated about returning to the old man for breakfast this morning. She doesn’t want to push, but she’s impatient. You left him your card, she reminds herself. He knows how to get in touch if anything comes to mind.

She stops in the kitchen to thank Rikia for directing her to Hưng yesterday, then battles her way into her office holding a cup of coffee at shoulder height. The room is a bit of a disaster, crammed with pieces of art she has pulled out of storage leaning four deep against each wall. She has to tear through a forest of cardboard and brown paper just to reach her desk, spilling half her cup of coffee as she does.

She’s eighty-five per cent of the way through cataloguing the hotel’s collection—an incomparable body of work from the colonial era found stashed in the bomb shelter beneath the hotel. The art had survived both the war and the decades of the hotel’s service as a Communist Party guesthouse, during which the building had deteriorated into a rat-and bat-infested dump.

The story of the collection’s discovery had reached her through a colleague at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. “There’s a real opportunity there,” he had said, and Maggie had known this to be true in her gut. A hidden vault of art in her father’s city. The opportunity to bring its contents to light. Her mother no longer alive to dissuade her. And Daniel’s feelings no longer a consideration before her own.

Maggie came up with a proposal, which she pitched to the French management company undertaking the Metropole’s refurbishment, to open a contemporary gallery in the hotel. Her timing couldn’t have been better. Interest in contemporary Vietnamese art has surged over the last decade—having a gallery at the hotel made sound business sense. So did having a Vietnamese-speaking curator with a master’s degree in curation from the Art Institute of Chicago who could do the work of preserving and cataloguing the original collection.

She spent her first month and a half in Hanoi below ground in a metal chamber with a flashlight. Her first weeks were all cool surfaces, taut canvases and a pounding heart. She pored through work that spanned the five and a half decades from the hotel’s opening in 1901 to the expulsion of the French in 1954—her father’s era, the world into which he was born, the one in which he drew, grew up, painted.

She was hopeful then. But that hope grew heavy, canvas by canvas, sheet by sheet, until it hung above her like a leaden cloud. And then finally a sliver of light. An old man. A phở seller. Mr. Hưng.

Maggie lifts a black-and-white painting and props it on the arms of a chair. A string of barbed wire made up of Chinese characters runs across the canvas. She was looking for this piece yesterday; it’s by the Hoa artist she represents. Maggie is a collector of lost sheep: artists like this one who fall between cracks. In Vietnam, her Hoa artist is not recognized as Vietnamese, but in China, where he spent his adolescence after his people were expelled from Vietnam, he isn’t recognized as Chinese either.

Maggie can relate. While she might look Vietnamese, this only gets her so far. She has had shopkeepers quadruple their prices as soon as she opens her mouth, people mock her accent, gossip behind her back and treat her with a great deal of suspicion. They call her Việt Kiều—some watered-down and inferior species of Vietnamese—a sojourner, an exile, a traitor, a refugee. However people might regard her, Maggie has to content herself with the knowledge that her roots are here, the family stories, as remote and inaccessible as they might be.

Maggie’s mother was not a storyteller. She revealed very little over the years, and it was only after suffering a stroke two years ago that she offered anything unprompted. “Your father didn’t feel entirely Vietnamese,” she said one day from her hospital bed. “His experience in the U.S. changed him. He felt it had made him a better artist and a better person, and he wasn’t going to let anyone take that away from him.”

They had been speaking about apples just the moment before; she was craving the tart juice of a hard, green variety she had eaten as a child. It had taken Maggie a minute to follow: to move from the taste of fruit to this rare mention of her father. She seized the opportunity then, exhaling the question that had haunted her for the thirty years since that day she had said goodbye to him on the tarmac.

“What happened to him in the camp? His hands?”

Her mother turned away at the question.

Maggie sat down on the bed and leaned her chin upon her mother’s silken head. She felt a tremor run through her mother’s body as if she had just exorcised a small ghost.

The truth her mother revealed to her that afternoon is one Maggie has since kept caged in her chest. There was a time when she might have shared that painful story with someone—with Daniel—but that time had passed.

“They might have broken Hai’s hands but they could not touch him inside,” was the last thing Maggie’s mother said before she drifted off to sleep that afternoon, the weak sun through the blinds casting prison bars across her bed.

Her mother died in that bed, suffering another stroke in the night. Maggie felt she had been struck down as well, made an orphan.

The phone rings once, twice, three times before Maggie makes a move to answer, bending at the waist and prostrating herself over the corner of her desk in order to reach it. There’s some kind of problem, though the young man at the front desk is having difficulty articulating precisely what it is. From what Maggie can make out, it seems someone has been involved in an accident in front of the hotel. But why would they call her?

“Is it one of our guests?” she asks.

“No,” says the young man.

“One of the staff? An artist of mine, a client?”

“No. I think he is some kind of homeless man.”

It’s one of the uncomfortable truths of working in a hotel like this that the doormen are under instruction to clear the street of beggars and the homeless. The official line is that it’s done so that guests don’t feel uncomfortable, but it’s part of both the government’s efforts to promote tourism and a wider Party policy that sweeps the streets of humanity periodically, particularly in advance of the arrival of foreign dignitaries.

“Did he injure himself on hotel property?” Maggie asks, still unsure why this is being brought to her attention.

“No, on the street,” says the young man at the front desk.

“Is he okay? Does he need to go to hospital?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “He’s asking for you.”

Hưng feels like his leg has its own heartbeat. He’s ashamed to be sitting here in this room with his trousers muddied and torn, particularly since his little accident seems to have knocked the reason he was coming to the Metropole in the first place right out of his head.

A taxi had swerved to the right as he neared the hotel, tearing a corner off the front of his cart and causing it to roll backward, trapping his trouser leg and sending him crashing to the ground. He rubs the back of his head now—sticky, a bit of blood. Perhaps the reason he is here at the Metropole is still lying out there on the street like a log parting a river of traffic, just as he was for a few minutes before the doormen hauled him to the pavement and onto his feet.

He came to tell the Việt Kiều girl something, but what? It must have had to do with her father, something compelling enough for him to wheel his cart around and push it in the opposite direction from the pond, barrelling his way toward the hotel after breakfast with a great sense of urgency—and recklessness, it would appear.

Now he is just a mess of pain and shame and frustration. How humiliating it is to be here in this condition. He has never stepped inside this building before; this is not a building for men like him with its grandeur and ghosts of Indochina.

He cannot now even recall her father’s name. He could tell her what he remembers about 1956, he supposes, the year she said her father was sent to a camp, but as he used to feel with Lan, he would rather tell her about the decades that preceded it, the years of the liberation struggle, a time when people still believed they had the power to influence the course of history, that words could change the world.

What an unfamiliar and intoxicating new world Hưng had discovered upon being sent by his parents to work for his Uncle Chiến in the city in 1933. At eleven years old, Hưng found himself in the midst of a noisy, boisterous circus where men shouted at one another over breakfast, leaping to their feet in mid-sentence if the spirit moved them. The air was filled with competing voices, and great clouds of cigarette smoke spiralled with the dizzying rotation of the ceiling fans above.

Hưng had initially cowered in the corner, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of their voices. There was none of the polite bowing and deference toward elders that he was used to. Nothing he had been exposed to in village life had prepared him for the heat of such exchanges, their speed.

“Come,” his uncle said, luring him out of the shadows. “They might roar like tigers, but they have the soft fur of kittens, I promise you.”

Uncle Chiến seemed immune to the volume and violence of the men’s voices. He darted around the room, ducking under gesticulating arms while balancing a full bowl of phở in each hand, sidestepping sudden movements, changing his direction mid-step. Uncle Chiến was a dancer, keen to teach his nephew the steps.

“Your height is an advantage,” he said kindly. Hưng hardly had to bend to lift empty bowls, replenish water glasses and bottles of fish sauce, replace clean spoons and chopsticks in canisters and wipe sticky rings off the surfaces of the low tables.

Under Uncle Chiến’s calm and steady direction, Hưng grew accustomed to the tone of the room. Soon it was no longer a wilderness of ferocious animals, but an orderly zoo. The same people congregated at the same tables each morning, certain men commanding more attention than others. They spoke of liberating the peasantry, the class struggle, the proletariat and bourgeoisie—ideas that might not have meant anything to Hưng, but certainly became familiar to him through their frequent repetition. As did the names of foreign men with big ideas: Stalin, Marx, Lenin. Zhū Dé, Zhōu Ēnlái, Máo Zédōng.

Hưng no longer flinched when someone stood up abruptly, throwing back his chair and bursting into spontaneous verse, or set the spoons on a table jumping as he pounded a fist for emphasis. He performed his tasks proudly and began to find the grace in his own feet. His height also gave him a further advantage his uncle had not foreseen. He could study the texts the men placed on their tables, make out the words they jotted down in their moleskin notebooks, marvel at the sketch of a tablemate’s likeness—the magic of pencil on a page.

Hưng was captivated. These men were different from all the men he had ever known, and it was not just the absence of ploughs. Their foreign ways piqued his curiosity and he took it all in, eyes and ears aflame.

Hưng’s limited education had given him the basic ability to read, though he’d had little opportunity to use this skill since arriving in the city. His uncle, illiterate himself, looked upon an abandoned newspaper as nothing more than good fortune for his fire. As he got older, Hưng found himself attempting to read over the men’s shoulders. He found himself repeating, furthermore, some of their more well-worn phrases at night before his uncle came to bed: We must overthrow the forces of oppression and degradation. Communism is key to our liberation. By means of guerrilla warfare, if need be. Our allies are the Comintern and the Communist Party of China, but the future must be fashioned by Vietnamese hands.

Through years of repetition, Hưng shed his provincial accent, acquiring some sense of the liberation about which these men always spoke. He never revealed this transformation to his Uncle Chiến, who still spoke with a peasant’s accent, still betrayed his humble origins as a matter of principle perhaps, despite all his years in Hanoi. Not until his uncle passed away did Hưng dare to speak in the clipped tones of the Hanoi dialect to which he did not feel entirely entitled.

Hưng was twenty-two years old when he inherited his uncle’s shop, and while he missed his uncle more than he knew it was possible to miss someone, he was ready to do his memory proud after apprenticing under him for eleven years. It was 1944, a world war going on. Hồ Chí Minh’s Việt Minh, the People’s Army, were fighting the Japanese who had occupied the country three years earlier, displacing the embattled French, but people still needed to eat breakfast, perhaps more so than ever. A bowl of phở can offer critical sustenance and a reason to get up in the morning, even in the most troubling of times. Certainly, a wife or mother could provide breakfast if need be, though most did not and still do not bother with the effort of phở, and wives and mothers, furthermore, did not have the news.

Under his ownership, Hưng is proud to say, the phở shop continued to be as much a place for conversation as for food, much of it by then bubbling up in the dark, southwest corner of the room around an outspoken young man named Ðạo. There was something special about this young man—Hưng had noticed it immediately—an aura of light seemed to spill from him and suspend anyone in the vicinity in a state of grace.

Ðạo was the most articulate critic Hưng had ever heard. “Yes, of course we must rid the country of the French,” he said to his colleagues when the colonialists returned after the Japanese withdrew in 1945, “but we must fight just as hard against the Confucian norms that have enslaved our people for centuries. The enemy lies within us as much as it lies out there.”

Hưng found himself forgetting his tasks whenever Ðạo commanded the room; he stopped and listened along with everyone else. Ðạo made the complicated politics of the time seem perfectly intelligible. “Politics must not be the domain of the learned and the privileged,” he insisted, “but that of every man and woman, especially the ones behind the ploughs.” No longer did the conversations in the shop strike Hưng as somewhat removed from the experiences of people of humble origins; Ðạo was speaking both about him and to him.

Hưng found whatever excuse he could to be near the man—replenishing the fish sauce on his table more often than necessary, making sure to clear his bowl the moment Ðạo laid his chopsticks across the rim.

When he wasn’t speaking, Ðạo was writing in his notebook. Hưng wou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note of Grace
• A Seam Between Worlds
• New Dawn
• The Beauty of Humanity
• Whole Fruit
• The Quiet Inside
• An Inverted World
• Dandy Peacocks
• Propaganda and Political Education
• Shit on a Canvas
• Our Place in Buddha’s Universe
• The Memory of Taste
• The Campaign to Rectify Errors
• The Real Vietnam
• A Proper Friend
• The Walls
• An Emotional Vocabulary
• Bright Star
• The Lady Next Door
• The Rainbow That Fell to Earth
• Community Service
• A Note Hangs in Mid-Air
• Voices of the Dead
• A Stone in His Heart
• Provenance
• An Old Man’s Destiny
• The Afterlife
• Pho Nhan Van
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgements