The Beauty of Humanity Movement (25 page)

He came to tell the Vi
t Ki
u girl something, but what? It must have had to do with her father, something compelling enough for him to wheel his cart around and push it in the opposite direction from the pond, barrelling his way toward the hotel after breakfast with a great sense of urgency—and recklessness, it would appear.

Now he is just a mess of pain and shame and frustration. How humiliating it is to be here in this condition. He has never stepped inside this building before; this is not a building for men like him with its grandeur and ghosts of Indochina.

He cannot now even recall her father’s name. He could tell her what he remembers about 1956, he supposes, the year she said her father was sent to a camp, but as he used to feel with Lan, he would rather tell her about the decades that preceded it, the years of the liberation struggle,
a time when people still believed they had the power to influence the course of history, that words could change the world.

What an unfamiliar and intoxicating new world H
ng had discovered upon being sent by his parents to work for his Uncle Chi
n in the city in 1933. At eleven years old, H
ng found himself in the midst of a noisy, boisterous circus where men shouted at one another over breakfast, leaping to their feet in mid-sentence if the spirit moved them. The air was filled with competing voices, and great clouds of cigarette smoke spiralled with the dizzying rotation of the ceiling fans above.

H
ng had initially cowered in the corner, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of their voices. There was none of the polite bowing and deference toward elders that he was used to. Nothing he had been exposed to in village life had prepared him for the heat of such exchanges, their speed.

“Come,” his uncle said, luring him out of the shadows. “They might roar like tigers, but they have the soft fur of kittens, I promise you.”

Uncle Chi
n seemed immune to the volume and violence of the men’s voices. He darted around the room, ducking under gesticulating arms while balancing a full bowl of ph
in each hand, sidestepping sudden movements, changing his direction mid-step. Uncle Chi
n was a dancer, keen to teach his nephew the steps.

“Your height is an advantage,” he said kindly. H
ng hardly had to bend to lift empty bowls, replenish water glasses and bottles of fish sauce, replace clean spoons and chopsticks in canisters and wipe sticky rings off the surfaces of the low tables.

Under Uncle Chi
n’s calm and steady direction, H
ng grew accustomed to the tone of the room. Soon it was no longer a wilderness of
ferocious animals, but an orderly zoo. The same people congregated at the same tables each morning, certain men commanding more attention than others. They spoke of liberating the peasantry, the class struggle, the proletariat and bourgeoisie—ideas that might not have meant anything to H
ng, but certainly became familiar to him through their frequent repetition. As did the names of foreign men with big ideas: Stalin, Marx, Lenin. Zhū Dé, Zhōu Ēnlái, Máo Zédōng.