The Beauty of Humanity Movement (26 page)

H
ng no longer flinched when someone stood up abruptly, throwing back his chair and bursting into spontaneous verse, or set the spoons on a table jumping as he pounded a fist for emphasis. He performed his tasks proudly and began to find the grace in his own feet. His height also gave him a further advantage his uncle had not foreseen. He could study the texts the men placed on their tables, make out the words they jotted down in their moleskin notebooks, marvel at the sketch of a tablemate’s likeness—the magic of pencil on a page.

H
ng was captivated. These men were different from all the men he had ever known, and it was not just the absence of ploughs. Their foreign ways piqued his curiosity and he took it all in, eyes and ears aflame.

H
ng’s limited education had given him the basic ability to read, though he’d had little opportunity to use this skill since arriving in the city. His uncle, illiterate himself, looked upon an abandoned newspaper as nothing more than good fortune for his fire. As he got older, H
ng found himself attempting to read over the men’s shoulders. He found himself repeating, furthermore, some of their more well-worn phrases at night before his uncle came to bed: We must overthrow the forces of oppression and degradation. Communism is key to our liberation. By means of guerrilla warfare, if need be. Our allies are the Comintern and the Communist Party of China, but the future must be fashioned by Vietnamese hands.

Through years of repetition, H
ng shed his provincial accent, acquiring some sense of the liberation about which these men always spoke. He never revealed this transformation to his Uncle Chi
n, who still spoke with a peasant’s accent, still betrayed his humble origins as a matter of principle perhaps, despite all his years in Hanoi. Not until his uncle passed away did H
ng dare to speak in the clipped tones of the Hanoi dialect to which he did not feel entirely entitled.

H
ng was twenty-two years old when he inherited his uncle’s shop, and while he missed his uncle more than he knew it was possible to miss someone, he was ready to do his memory proud after apprenticing under him for eleven years. It was 1944, a world war going on. H
Chí Minh’s Vi
t Minh, the People’s Army, were fighting the Japanese who had occupied the country three years earlier, displacing the embattled French, but people still needed to eat breakfast, perhaps more so than ever. A bowl of ph
can offer critical sustenance and a reason to get up in the morning, even in the most troubling of times. Certainly, a wife or mother could provide breakfast if need be, though most did not and still do not bother with the effort of ph
, and wives and mothers, furthermore, did not have the news.