The Beauty of Humanity Movement (21 page)

“I can see the dove,” Lan would say, her mouth hanging open. “The whole dove, not just the tail.”

“This man would describe what he’d seen in the sky and then someone like my friend Ðạo might find himself inspired and spontaneously give birth to a poem.”

Admittedly, H
ng elevated his own status in these stories by referring to Ðạo as a friend. He knows he was never the man’s equal. H
ng had spent years in awe of Ðạo, who, despite being five years his junior, had been something of a mentor to him. Ðạo took an interest in H
ng’s aborted education, encouraging his desire to read and engaging him in the debates of the time. He had shown H
ng a respect to which he was unaccustomed.

“My friend Ðạo believed everyone had a right to an opinion,” he told Lan and her grandmother. “Wherever he came from. Or she. ‘Let’s hear what H
ng has to say on the matter,’ he used to say.

“The men seated at the table with him laughed at first. Laughed and pointed at me. Why was this learned young man they all looked up to soliciting the opinion of a simple country boy turned cook? they wondered.

“‘Stop it,’ Ðạo would say, batting his hand in the air as if he was swatting at flies. ‘I think his perspective could be useful here.’ I remember him turning to me and asking, ‘What do you think, H
ng? Should all things cost the same? One pair of shoes, one watermelon, one bowl of ph
?’

“They were all staring at me, waiting for an answer,” H
ng told the girl and her grandmother. “I did not know what Ðạo expected of me, so I simply said what I knew to be true. ‘You come here for some reason. There is cheaper pho.’

“‘You see?’ Ðạo raised his finger and smiled. ‘We are hypocrites where it suits us. We will always be willing to pay the difference for a superior bowl.’”

Lan laughed like a bird might laugh, a giddy twitter she stifled with her hand.

Lan’s enjoyment of H
ng’s stories made Ðạo real again, leading H
ng to feel both the pain of Ðạo’s absence and the simultaneous relief from that pain. The girl was a balm to him: both her desire for his stories and her improbable beauty. Even though much of the latter was concealed by the government-issue black pyjama bottoms and shirt she wore, when she was bent over washing pots in the pond, her spine, as delicate as that of a fish, pressed into the back of her shirt, he would think how much better she deserved—an
áo dài
of luxurious silk to grace her frame, gold for her elegant wrists and fingers, a pearl necklace, a garland of jasmine for her hair.

H
ng prayed she was old enough to understand her impact, though he guessed her an innocent of no more than eighteen. She
called him Uncle, but H
ng’s feelings toward the girl were not those of an uncle. He was almost forty then—a middle-aged man in love with a girl half his age—an ugly man, a poor man, a man in love for the first time in his life.