The Beauty of Humanity Movement (32 page)

He doesn’t need an X-ray. He needs the right food; food is the best medicine. Obviously his qi has been depleted. He needs to eat congee with tofu and perform some yoga or tai chi; he has neglected to do his exercises of late.

He is relieved when the doctor departs and Miss Maggie returns. She brings a cup of tea for each of them. English tea in a china cup. She pulls a chair up close to the bed and sits down. She asks him how he is feeling and what he thought of the ph
.

“Just fine,” he says, “just fine.” He does not want to be impolite or seem ungrateful.

“You’re being polite, aren’t you,” she says.

He is taken aback. Is this the American style? He can only imagine so, having never met an American before. “Well, ahem,” he says, clearing his throat. “Of course there is always room for improvement.”

“Do you remember why you were coming to see me this morning?” she asks.

“I regret, Miss Maggie, that my memory is not what it once was. It is no doubt a consequence of my advanced age.”

“The doctor seems to think there might be something more serious going on, Mr. H
ng. Maybe it’s not your memory, but something to do with the amount of oxygen getting to your brain.”

Breathing exercises, he thinks. Tai chi. Flow.

“Perhaps you know this already,” H
ng begins, “but back in the days when I had a ph
shop I had a regular group of customers who came in for breakfast—artists and intellectuals all. You said your father was sent to a camp in 1956? Well, that is the same year that these men began to publish their work. They produced a literary journal and six issues of a controversial magazine. They saw these publications as platforms for artistic expression and political debate, but of course the Party was not interested in such things and they were condemned for squandering their energy on something other than the revolutionary message. They refused to produce the socialist realism the Party demanded of them. This was their crime.”

“Are you suggesting that my father might have been part of their circle?” she asks, leaning forward in her chair, her delicate hands on her knees, a hopeful smile on that lovely face.

He is reminded again of Lan in the days when she was eager for his stories, the way she looked to him for more.
Tell me
, she would say.
Teach me. Why does Ðạo say love is like a game of Chinese chess?

H
ng has a horrible dawning realization that it may be this intoxicating similarity to Lan that has led him here to the hotel. He might have remembered something about her father, but the urgent need to make his way here could just as well be rooted in something more selfish.

He feels ashamed for thinking Miss Maggie beautiful. For the fact that her desire to know something about great men of a lost time reminds him of someone else. He still cannot actually say with any certainty that he knew her father.

“My shop was not the only place where such conversations took place,” he says, “but it was known. It had a reputation. It attracted people interested in art and debate, but I’m afraid it’s impossible for me to recall all of their names.”

“Do you know if any of them are still alive?” she asks.

Such a painful question, made all the more so by its directness. H
ng searches, but can find no poetic device that will serve him here.

“Those who were not successfully re-educated were either killed or tortured to such an extent that they soon died from their wounds,” he says plainly. “That is the tragic truth of it.”

“Or they managed to escape,” says Miss Maggie.

What a notion, H
ng thinks, as he leans back against the cloud of pillows and casts his eyes upward. This is the top floor of the hotel; beyond it, perhaps some colonial idea of heaven. Escape is not a possibility H
ng has ever considered before. He has never even heard it suggested, not even in a whisper, that anyone ever escaped from the camps. But then it would hardly have been in the Party’s interest to advertise such a thing, to suggest re-education was not always successful,
that there were those who would have preferred to flee south or even board a leaky boat heading out into the treacherous waters of the South China Sea than submit themselves to a course of ideological enlightenment.

“So your father—he managed to escape?”

“My mother was a nurse at the re-education camp,” she says. “She got him out and they fled south. He lived for another fifteen years.”

Isn’t that interesting, thinks H
ng. All these decades later a Vi
t Ki
u girl raised far away in America has offered the possibility of an alternative outcome. In fact, she has gone beyond possibility and offered proof. What if Ðạo had managed to escape their clutches? What if Ðạo had had fifteen more years?