The Beauty of Humanity Movement (19 page)

“Do you know how I can find him?”

“They say you find him with your nose.”

But it had taken more than her senses. After three months of asking virtually everyone on staff, every artist and dealer she knew, every driver or tour guide she found waiting in the lobby of the Metropole, she finally got lucky. Yesterday she met the new sous-chef who has been hired in the kitchen—a French-trained Indian woman named Rikia Saddy who speaks enviably flawless Vietnamese.

“I’ve heard he makes the best ph
in the city,” the woman said, pouring Maggie a cup of coffee as thick as melted chocolate.

“But if it’s the best ph
in the city, why don’t more people know about it?” Maggie asked, leaning back against the stainless steel counter.

“I don’t think it’s a secret, just something shared with a small number of people. My husband’s driver takes his breakfast from him.”

Rikia phoned her husband later in the day. She came back to Maggie with the name of a new hotel under construction on the east shore of West Lake. “He says to bring your bowl before seven. And be prepared to run if the police turn up.”

And so Maggie had brought her bowl this morning and introduced herself to Old Man H
ng. And seeing that faint look of recognition on his face as he said her father’s name? A seismic moment that revealed a seam between worlds.

H
ng leans all his weight into his cart to push it the last hundred metres down the dirt track to the shantytown. He parks his cart behind his shack and hauls his pots down to the bank of the pond, resting them in the mud while he goes to fetch the papaya milk he uses to wash his apron.

As he puts his key into the padlock, he sees a package jutting out
from under the corrugated tin eaves. Bình must have come by, that was good of him—here are his glasses, the wonky arm straightened, the cracked lens replaced.

There is little that can be done about the eye with a cataract, but with glasses, the sight of his right eye is measurably improved. H
ng can once again see the Cyrillic letters stamped on the canvas from which, years ago, he sewed himself a straw-filled mattress. If he leans into the scrap-metal wall of his shack, he can make out some of the headlines of the old newspapers he stuffed into the cracks to keep out the winter draft. But he has given up reading, gave that up some time ago; it just reminds him of all he has lost.

H
ng carries his bottle of papaya milk down to the pond and douses his apron with it, then rubs the material back and forth against the washing stone before rinsing it along with his cooking pots in the pond’s brown water. From where he squats at the water’s edge, he can spy a nest among the reeds, two ripe eggs waiting to be claimed. He thinks better of it, though, thinks of the long term, a luxury that has only come about in recent years.

A pond has its own ecosystem, largely unobserved by humans, except when their lives come to depend upon it. H
ng, who had drifted like some one hundred and fifty others to this muddy, buggy shore in the middle of an industrial wasteland at the edge of the city, has long been a keen and attuned observer. H
ng came from the country and the country is still in him. He knows the exact conditions that will promote the spread of algae, the precise details of the dragonfly’s life cycle and where the various pond and shore creatures bury their eggs. He’d been a student of nature as a child, a study encouraged by his father, in lieu of companionship, that he could never have known would be of such use in an urban life.

Like H
ng, the people who collected on this shore in the late 1950s had lost everything. They were eating rats and the lice from their hair. Their shacks were built of scrap metal, woven pond reeds and bamboo posts. The trees had been felled by government edict. The land had been stripped of its small dwellings and kitchen gardens in keeping with Uncle H’ô’s promise of industrial revolution. The combination of the tire factory across the pond and the construction of blocks of socialist housing co-operatives to the east produced great burning clouds of tar that floated overhead so that on a good day the sun appeared a weak orange through grey gauze.

But nature is a fighter and H
ng was a man blessed with a cook’s imagination. He had immediately seen the promise lurking beneath the surface of this pool of lazy, brown, mosquito-breeding water. No one in the shantytown would go hungry as long as H
ng was there, a fact that became apparent just shortly after his arrival when he caught a duck, the first duck anyone had seen in over a year, among the reeds.