The Beauty of Humanity Movement (44 page)

“Did you know that at the Metropole you can pick up the phone and order anything you want to eat?” the old man says. “Imagine. Anything at all.”

T
wipes the rain off his face with his shirtsleeve and wonders if the old man has lost his hearing along with his qi. That lady couldn’t have been more than a couple of metres away and that was a sharp and distinctive cry of pain. He wouldn’t just ignore her. He is clearly not himself.

M
aggie moves through the faded glory of the marble lobby of her apartment building. She steps into the rattling iron cage of an old French elevator and presses the top button. Gears click, wheels hum.

Her mother grew up in a building just like this on another tree-lined boulevard in the French Quarter. It was quite grand, though she used to lament how much it had deteriorated after her father was killed in the fight against the French. The cracks in the plaster, the leaks and broken windows, none of which they could afford to repair.

She never did see her beloved home again. Despite all the years in Saigon and Minneapolis after that, Nhi never stopped referring to Hanoi as home. It was the Hanoi of her childhood she missed, not the world it became after independence, a place where “everybody a snake, a spy.” She had never contemplated returning. She had never forgiven her family for rejecting her because of her relationship with a dissident
artist. She could not believe the country had really emerged from darkness; not even Bill Clinton lifting the trade embargo in 1994 could convince her.

“Don’t you want to see it for yourself?” Maggie had asked when they were watching the news of Clinton’s visit in 2000.

Nhi had turned her head away at the suggestion, covering her mouth.

“I could go,” Maggie said, “and if it’s safe, which I’m sure it is, you could join me.”

“Please don’t do this,” her mother had whispered through her hand.

Maggie had been reminded of her father’s words from long ago in that moment:
You keep her company, be strong, she needs you
. Those words had been prophetic. From the moment they arrived in the U.S., Maggie had led the way.

They were resettled in Minneapolis in 1975 with clothes for winter courtesy of the U.S. Army, but with little evidence of home beyond the piece of paper upon which her father had written the phone number of Margaret McGillis, his former landlady in Chicago, after whom Maggie had been named. “You call her,” he had said to Maggie’s mother. “You call her and give her your address. That way I’ll be able to find you.”

But Nhi could speak no English, and Maggie was largely limited to letters and numbers. Their first task was survival, feeding themselves from tins of things they recognized by the pictures on the labels: sliced pineapple, sections of mandarin oranges in syrup, carrots, tuna, button mushrooms. Maggie’s mother stockpiled these cans just in case—a mantra she never let go of in all her years in the U.S. Every night, for this same reason, she wedged a chair under the handle of the front door of the subsidized apartment they had been allocated.

About a month after she and her mother arrived, Maggie had been lured by the sound of a bouncing ball into the stairwell, where she discovered a Vietnamese girl very close to her in age playing a game by herself. She counted to ten in English before switching to Vietnamese. Maggie taught her new friend, Mei, the English words for eleven through thirty-two before they gave up the game and returned to the girl’s apartment, where her mother, Mrs. Minh, was making spring rolls. It was the first thing Maggie had eaten in a long time that didn’t come from a can.

Mrs. Minh took Maggie’s mother to a Chinese grocery the very next day, and both their meals and her mood began to improve. Soon after that they had a visit from a social worker accompanied by a Vietnamese translator who gave them a lengthy set of instructions. Nhi would attend English classes in a church basement, and Maggie would start first grade at the school in their neighbourhood in the fall.

“Please,” her mother had said to the translator that day, pulling the piece of paper with Margaret McGillis’s phone number on it out of her pocket. “Please will you call this lady and tell her we are here?”

But the number was out of service. According to the operator, the line had been disconnected for some time. They learned then that Americans do not stay in a house for generations, that there are few generations and little continuity, something her father must have failed to understand about America in his time there as a visitor. The future her mother had envisioned was rewritten in that instant. They no longer had the certainty of reunion with Lý Văn Hai.

Her mother had smiled and nodded politely at the translator that day and escorted her and the social worker to the door. She then wedged the chair under the door handle and lay face down on the floor
of the hallway. Her back arched and contracted in undulating waves; she was soundless, her fists clenched against her temples.

Maggie rushed to the balcony, hoping to catch sight of the translator in the parking lot, but saw no trace of her. She ran back inside and picked up the phone, yelling for help over and over in Vietnamese to a dial tone.

There was a knock at the door. Maggie dropped the receiver and climbed over her mother, unhooking the chair from under the door handle. It was Mrs. Minh, Mei’s mother, from down the hall. Mrs. Minh looked at Maggie’s mother on the floor with some surprise before sitting down very calmly beside her and resting her palm on her back. “I was going to ask if you wanted to play mah-jong,” she said, as if this were the most ordinary scene in the world.

Maggie unhinges the metal gates of the elevator and tiptoes to the end of the hall. She flicks the light switch and kicks off her heels in the foyer, padding across the parquet squares of the reception room into the kitchen in her stockinged feet. The sound of her heels on the wood floors makes the place feel too hollow and lonely. The flat came furnished with some heavy French antiques, but apart from a few kitchen utensils, Maggie has acquired nothing, uncertain of her place, or how long she will stay.

Her mother had accumulated very little over the course of thirty years in the U.S., as if her life there had only ever been temporary. Maggie realized just how true this was after her mother died. She stayed at her mother’s apartment in the weeks that followed her death, sleeping in her mother’s sheets and wearing her mother’s bathrobe, still smelling of her Chanel No. 5. She sipped tea from a chipped year
of the cat mug and spent hours staring up at the peeling border of poppies her mother had glued to the walls sometime in the 1980s, bracing herself for the task of disposing of her mother’s things.

She drank a bottle of wine one night, destroying any resolve, and called Daniel. She hadn’t spoken to him in months. “My mother died,” she said blankly.

“Oh, Mouse,” he said, piercing a heart already broken.

The regret she felt the next morning did at least give her the push she needed. She packed up her mother’s mah-jong tiles to give to Mrs. Minh, and donated her clothes and scant pieces of furniture to charity. She kept her mother’s watch and the rarely worn
áo dài
she’d had made for special occasions. It was then that she discovered her mother’s secrets. Five years’ worth of unsent letters from her mother to her father lay bundled in a shoebox at the back of the closet. Maggie had knelt down on the green carpet with the box in her lap and pulled one letter at random from the pile. The envelope was addressed to Lý Văn Hai at their old apartment in Saigon.

Maggie, still kneeling on the carpet, had wept. Her mother’s handwriting was so frail, so hesitant. She put the letter back in the shoebox with the others. They really weren’t meant for her to read. She cleared out the rest of the closet, emptying a basket of greying, utilitarian bras and underwear into a green garbage bag, only to discover more secrets her mother had withheld. At the bottom of the basket were several pieces of paper: sketches Maggie’s father had done for her as a child in Saigon. Gifts of lumbering animals he’d drawn with his clumsy claw. But her mother had taken nothing with them when they left; they had even been ordered to leave the small bag they had packed on the tarmac. Had she hidden these pictures in a pocket? They are creased and stained, perhaps with her sweat.

Why her mother had never shared them with her, Maggie will never know. But they are in Maggie’s possession now. Much the same way her mother left Vietnam thirty years ago, Maggie has returned: carrying six of Lý Văn Hai’s drawings.

H
ng lies in the dark listening to the gentle patter of rain on his corrugated tin roof, wishing he could pluck whatever it was he had hoped to tell Miss Maggie out of the weeds cluttering his mind. He falls asleep only to awake startled an hour later, the rain thundering down violently from above, catapulting him back to the time of war. The worst
of it was in December of 1972, what the Americans called the Christmas bombing, when the B-52s rained bombs for eleven days, destroying railway yards and warehouses, factories and airfields and roads and bridges and hospitals and schools and blocks of communist housing, and wiping out entire neighbourhoods like Khâm Thiên. It had seemed then that all of Hanoi was burning.

The Old Quarter fortunately was spared, but the bombs had landed so close to the shantytown you could feel the heat rising from the northwest. The squatters were saved by their dirty pond. The tire factory on the far side of the muddy water exploded and lit up the sky for several days before engulfing them in an oily black cloud. For weeks the city was dark and smouldering, and people were coughing up blood and crawling on all fours because they could not see their way.

Finally, the sky faded from black to smoking grey. For several sunless days, H
ng and the other men and women of the shantytown waded through the oily pond, tossing debris onto the shore. He remembers pausing a moment at the sight of Lan there among the foragers, a brief look of recognition passing between them as if to say: all the pond weed is gone, all the fish, frogs and birds too, but somehow, whether by accident or design, we have survived.