The Beauty of Humanity Movement (28 page)

H
ng felt the rare heat of flushed cheeks in that moment and averted his eyes. Ðạo, meanwhile, copied the poem onto another page of his notebook, tore out the page and pressed it into H
ng’s hands.

This single gesture made H
ng want to improve himself. He began to gather the newspapers the men left behind each morning and read them for company at night, the company he had longed for since his
uncle’s passing. He read them by lantern light, lying on the mattress he used to share with his uncle in the windowless room at the back of the shop.

One morning, Ðạo handed H
ng a package. “I brought you these,” he said. “I noticed you have quite an appetite for reading.”

“You are too kind,” said H
ng, all but silenced by the gesture. He had never been the recipient of a gift in his life.

The package contained a collection of mimeographs. Essays about the history of the Vietnamese alphabet and the birth of modern Vietnamese poetry. Articles about the Russian revolution, the theories of the German thinker Marx, notes on Leninism by the great revolutionary H
Chí Minh.

It took months of H
ng’s labouring at night to finish reading them, longer still to really understand them. On certain points he needed clarification. He would underline the relevant sections and look to Ðạo the following morning.

“Here,” H
ng would point, “where H
Chí Minh speaks of revolutionary ethics, is he appealing to Confucian notions of duty?”

“It’s his way of communicating new ideas without alienating those who are very attached to the old,” said Ðạo. “You’ll find he does the same with certain elements of village culture.”

Where H
ng could not follow the path from a concept to its realization, he would put it to Ðạo. “But we are not a nation of factory workers,” he said one morning. “Where will the Party find the proletarian masses?”

“Ah, this is just as Mao said of China,” Ðạo explained, taking time to sit with H
ng after breakfast and explore how the various theories of communism could be applied in Vietnam. “Mao shifted the emphasis away from industry to agrarian reform, tailoring it to the Chinese situation,” Ðạo said. “Our man will no doubt do the same.”

Their man was the great H
Chí Minh, who had further escalated the intensity of the war against the French with the declaration of the Democratic Republic’s independence in 1945.