The Beauty of Humanity Movement (149 page)

“You are longing to get back to cooking, aren’t you,” he hears Bình say as he and T
approach.

“Even in my dreams I am making ph
.”

Bình sits down on the edge of H
ng’s bed. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could have your own ph
shop again,” he says. “Just like the old days.”

Why is Bình saying this? What is the point?

“What if you had that shop today?” T
asks, joining his father.

“Today it would be very different,” says H
ng, indulging them. “For one thing, we would have running water.”

“And a refrigerator, maybe even a freezer,” says Bình. “You’d get a lot more life out of your food.”

“Those stainless steel counters are good,” T
adds, “really easy to clean.”

“If you put the kitchen in the back and had a door to the alley, you could take deliveries,” says Bình. “Anh could just send the meat up every morning.”

Bình and T
continue to build this fantasy shop, discussing square footage and the relative merits of various locations. T
reckons you could fit twenty tables with four chairs each on the ground floor of your average tube house in the Old Quarter.

And then they introduce reality—the cost of it all—and H
ng stops them there. “Enough now. Don’t agitate an old man’s heart.”

But they are grinning like children at Tet in the days when the government still allowed firecrackers. What is the matter with them?

Bình puts his hands between his knees and bends forward; he has a speech to make, it would seem. But what he says could do more than agitate an old man’s heart; it could break it completely. “We have the money for your shop.”

But where does such an extraordinary amount of money come from?

“It doesn’t matter where it comes from,” Bình says. “It matters that it comes as a gift. It matters that you accept it as a gift, because it is destiny, and one must not hide from destiny. What is rightfully yours, what was taken from you long ago, is being returned.”

H
ng feels the weight of loss in this moment. Of those men who taught him more about the world than a simple peasant ever could have hoped to know.

“Perhaps it is too late,” he says.

H
ng sinks back into his pillow and closes his eyes for just a minute. He thinks of Lan. Perhaps things do return, but never in the form that they left you. Lan is an old woman now, an old woman to his old man.
The years of poverty have humbled her. She is a better person for it, H
ng supposes, but in some ways, he wishes she could have lived in a world where it was possible to be young and vain. Like Vietnam today. Like these spoiled children with their cellphones and gadgets and new clothes, and their desires for bigger, faster motorbikes and their dreams that they will go to Saigon and become famous. Will they be better for it? Sometimes hardship forces humility and virtue where it might not naturally arise.