The Beauty of Humanity Movement (20 page)

H
ng had wrung the bird’s neck and plucked it before applying a burning stick to the leeches that had affixed themselves to his feet and ankles. He then drained the blood to make a custard, peeled off the skin and fried it into golden strips, and used the fat he’d scraped from the inside of the skin to flavour and fry the shredded breast meat. He boiled and mashed the liver with a few peppercorns he had in his possession; he stewed the duck’s feet in the juice of a single orange; he roasted the duck’s eyes and brains on the sharpened ends of chopsticks; he boiled the carcass, heart and kidneys to make a broth; he chopped the boiled heart and kidneys and dark meat of the legs and wrapped the mince in betel leaves and sautéed the remaining meat with sliced pondweed and wild leeks.

The smells enticed neighbours, and neighbours enticed those beyond, and soon a lineup of people had formed in front of his shack—shabbily
dressed, grime-encrusted men, women and children with sharp cheekbones and skin variously scabbed, pockmarked and grey. Each clutched a pair of chopsticks and bowed a head in thanks before sampling the elements of the feast H
ng had prepared.

But H
ng himself had forgotten to eat that day. He had been left without hunger or breath by the sight of the girl who emerged with her grandmother from the shack next to his, a girl with the graceful posture of a crane and skin as pearlescent as eggshell.

You do not belong here
, he wanted to say to this vision.
My God. You belong on a throne
.

He watched her eat from her bowl like the daintiest of birds, and found he was still staring in the direction of the shack where she lived with her grandmother several hours after she’d disappeared into it.

People thanked him for the feast with small gifts the next day—a piece of rusted tin, a single palm frond, a stalk of bamboo, an old newspaper, a broken pane of glass—one by one the pieces to build his shack came together. The girl next door emerged, offering him two dried rinds of star anise, dropping them into his open hand without raising her eyes. “From my grandmother,” she said in a voice as sweet as birdsong.

H
ng could scarcely believe the girl was real.

While he felt moved to thank his new friends and neighbours for their gifts, at least part of his motivation to repeat the feast the following month had been desire. He wanted to feed the girl and feel her near.

For that second feast he speared and threaded water snakes onto a spit; he grilled small, ugly fish with ancient mouths over the fire; he boiled tiny birds’ eggs in salted water; he marinated layers of those eggs in the juice of fermented berries; and he boiled snails and crayfish, offering crunchy, sliced bamboo shoots on the side.

The woman next door thanked him with a deep bow of gratitude. “It was dignified and so delicious,” she said, then pushed her granddaughter forward by the small of her back.

“Thank you, sir,” said the girl, her eyes lowered to the ground.

“This is Lan,” said the older woman.

Lan
. She was the orchid of her name, as elegant and rare. H
ng looked to the ground himself, not wanting to sully her virgin whiteness with the impurity of his gaze. “H
ng,” he said with a cough. “Just H
ng, not sir.”

The gift-giving continued, his neighbours bringing him pieces for the interior of his house: assorted single bricks, strips of soft bark from a eucalyptus tree, a woven grass mat, a pot someone had fashioned out of clay, tins once discarded by the French army, coconut shells from the beautiful Lan and her grandmother for ladling water, drinking broth, serving tea.

He made tea from artichokes—their hearts dried and cut like leaves—luring the grandmother and the girl with this brew, drawing them over from their shack to his, where it became something of a nightly ritual for the three of them to sit together on a grass mat under a starless sky. They said little initially. Sharing stories of the past, tales of where they’d come from, seemed an unnecessary expenditure of energy when survival in the present demanded such effort.

All around them were thieves stealing ration coupons, hawkers selling whatever they could, parents pressed into selling their daughters into prostitution. H
ng tuned his senses for early detection of those overdressed men who came prowling through the shantytown. As soon as he caught a whiff of hair oil he would call out to the girl and her grandmother: “Come and keep me company on this dreary day,
will you? I’ve got another story you might like. Something that will put a bit of sun in this grey sky.”

It was the fear of losing Lan to traffickers or, if he is honest with himself, simply losing her to another man that led H
ng to instigate conversation, entertaining the girl and her grandmother with anecdotes about the men who used to gather in his shop.

“I once knew a man who could look at the most ordinary sky and see such beautiful things hidden there. A river, a pagoda, a mountain, a man and his buffalo, a pair of sisters dancing in the sun.”

H
ng, Lan and her grandmother would look to the sky just at the very moment the men in suits were snaking by, and H
ng would say, “Hard to imagine it now when it is such a grey blanket, but that line there between the clouds, can you see it? It looks like the tail of a turtledove, don’t you think?”