The Beauty of Humanity Movement (18 page)

M
aggie’s taxi is now wedged into a jam of idling engines. She wants to reach over the driver, punch the steering wheel and join the chorus of horns. On any other day she would simply lean her head back against the seat, resigned to the futility of fighting Hanoi’s traffic, but she feels renewed this morning, more hopeful than she has in months. That faint glimmer of recognition in the old man’s eyes as he repeated her father’s name had been like finally seeing a sliver of light peek out from under an iron curtain. She’d wanted to slip her hand underneath, whatever the risk of being crushed, to grope around for a hand to take hold of on the other side.

She’s spent a frustrating and painful year combing through archives that have yielded no evidence of her father. She’s found no reference to him in the archives of the Fine Arts Museum, not even a single catalogue for an exhibition where his work might have been shown. Even his
presence at the city’s former École des Beaux Arts is in question—there’s no record of his attendance at the school. The censors literally cut the names of dissident artists out of registries and publications. They’ve been systematic and thorough revisionists, leaving a history full of holes.

The records would suggest Lý Văn Hai never existed. But if that is so, whose daughter is she? And who was the man with the hands gnarled like a boxer’s from an accident he refused to talk about, the one who taught her to write the English alphabet with a pen gripped between the knuckles of his index and middle fingers, the one who sketched crude animals for her with his claw, trying to guide her own hand in imitation as they knelt side by side on the floor of their room in Saigon?

He used to hold her hand every morning as they walked down the street together even though he had no grip. People referred to him as her grandfather because he was relatively old when she was born, the fourth and only one of her mother’s pregnancies to result in a child. His hair had turned completely white during the three years he’d been interned in a re-education camp after returning from the U.S.

For a Vietnamese man, Maggie’s father displayed what she knew even then to be an unusual amount of public affection, kissing her on the forehead when he dropped her off at school on the base every morning—a school for the children of the friendliest of friendly Vietnamese, those who were working directly for the Americans. Her mother worked as a nurse, and her father as a translator because, although he could no longer paint, he could speak English thanks to the four years he’d spent studying in Chicago in the early 1950s.

“I missed you today,” he would often say when he picked her up.

“But, Daddy, I was here at school the whole time. Just where you left me.”

There were days when there was no school and the three of them stayed in their shuttered room, her father kneeling on the cracked linoleum floor, bending over paper and sketching a story for her with his claw while her mother cooked over a kerosene burner, the smell of rice mixing with the incense they burned to mask the stench of sewage beyond the bamboo curtain.

Her parents would whisper at night, Maggie lying on one mattress, her parents on another, discussing the progress of the war, making plans. Maggie’s stomach would flutter as if full of fish. “
If
we have a choice,” her mother would whisper, and the fish would get rough with their tails.

Only when they were standing on the tarmac at Tân S
n Nh
t air base in 1975 about to board a U.S. military plane did Maggie realize a choice had been made. Her father had stepped out of line as they approached the plane, joining the other men gathered to one side. Maggie broke free from her mother, running toward her father, mashing her forehead into his stomach and digging her nails into the back of his thighs.

“Little one,” he said, trying to loosen her grip with his claws. “Listen.” He squatted so that he could face her. “We have no choice, Maggie. The men who did this to my hands? The men from the North? They are coming to Saigon.”

The heat rising from the tarmac wavered like water and the fumes of the plane made Maggie feel woozy. She buried her face in her father’s neck and inhaled the peppery smell of his sweat and the starch from the collar of his shirt.

“It is women and children first to safety,” her father said, patting her back with his claw. “I will be coming on another plane.”

Maggie looked over her shoulder at her mother in her nurse’s uniform, holding a baby that was not her own. Lined up behind her were
hundreds of nurses and nuns holding the hands of children and cradling a great many crying babies.

“You go back to your mother now. You keep her company. Be strong,” he said, giving her a gentle push.

“But, Daddy—”

“She needs you, Mouse.”

When Maggie stepped out of the arrivals building at Hanoi’s airport a year ago, the combination of jet fuel and sweat and the starched shirts of men had caused her to drop her bags and bury her face in her hands. The smell of home was indistinguishable from the smell of leaving home: each inhalation a mix of familiarity and fear.

The recognition ended there. Maggie entered a city so much brighter and busier than the cold and dark portrait of Hanoi she had inherited from her mother. The optimism and energy of the place, with its doors thrown open to the West, its new wealth and possibilities—her mother wouldn’t have believed the spirit, the surging adrenalin of three and a half million dreams being pursued simultaneously with little concern for what is stirred up in their wake.

Maggie found herself in a world of teenagers, a generation fuelled by hopes and hormones, people who had no interest in being dragged back to the past. They face forward, the future, the West. The past is abandoned: the pain of it, perhaps; the shame of it. It’s old men Maggie must turn to now, old men with their ailing, fading memories and their fears.

A few months ago, an artist whose work Maggie has on display in the hotel gallery had directed her to just one such old man, telling her about a café that served as an informal gallery of artwork from the dark days before Ð
i m
i. Maggie had made her way to Nguy
n Huâu
Huân Street later that same day. She paused in the doorway for a few minutes as her eyes adjusted to the light. Huge cracks ran across the tiled floor as if the building had survived an earthquake, and the thick metal bars on the windows gave it a penal air. A few men sat on low wooden stools drinking coffee and a fluorescent light buzzed overhead, casting a greenish pall over the room.

The walls were crammed with pieces of art hanging so closely together it was as if they formed a continuous mural. Maggie moved around the room, looking at each piece in turn, noticing how many of them were neither signed nor dated.

As she neared the kitchen, the café owner, Mr. Võ, shuffled forth in black slippers, broom in hand. She introduced herself, but he did not smile. Older Hanoians have recoiled at her American accent before, but his lack of warmth made her particularly cautious. According to the artist, Mr. Võ was notoriously wary of foreigners, especially those interested in art. He’d been hounded by dealers and collectors in recent years.

“I was told this is where you could see the real old Hanoi,” she said, which did at least soften his expression. “You knew all of these artists?” She gestured at the walls.

“Of course,” he said.

“Did you ever know a Lý Văn Hai?”

Mr. Võ’s bottom lip curled upward. “He must have been one of H
ng’s,” he said, with a shrug.

Maggie shook her head, not understanding.

“He’s a ph
seller,” said Mr. Võ. “Years ago he had a shop where a lot of artists ate breakfast, but now he’s on the street, always moving.”