The Beauty of Humanity Movement (45 page)

It would take eleven years to rebuild the hospital, a generation to rebuild the neighbourhood of Khâm Thiên, but less than a year before the pond, without human intervention, began to show signs of new life. A film of algae appeared on the surface. The colour green returned to the palette of Hanoi.

Somehow it was only after the shock of the devastation of that winter bombing that the fear really set in. H
ng held his breath, listened for the drone of another wave of bombers. He prayed for an
end to the war, prayed for the mercy of a God who was said to no longer exist.

H
nger forced him to breathe again, to venture beyond the shantytown to forage among ruins, to dredge muddy craters, to drag home dead dogs, to eat the roots of upturned trees. There were losses in the community: those who died of the blood in their lungs, of the rot in their intestines, of septic shock and suicide and starvation. H
ng did what he could to keep himself and his neighbours alive, turning over rubble in search of snails, digging for earthworms, boiling and reboiling rank water and making a weak green broth from the lichen he scraped off rocks.

Though H
ng no longer spoke to Lan, he would not let her go hungry. If she did not appear among those survivors who gathered for one of his neighbourhood suppers, he would simply wrap a portion of his share in a banana leaf and leave it on her doorstep in the middle of the night. He did this throughout the years of the war.

In April of 1975, black vans drove throughout the city, announcing the withdrawal of American troops. The Liberation of Saigon was imminent and victory would belong to the People’s Army. The puppets of the South would be crushed.

“Rise up, comrades,” Party spokesmen shouted through the windows of the vans, “for the homeland will soon be unified in the name of the revolutionary father. There will be new life in the new dawn. New light.”

They had been waiting more than twenty years for this moment.
The skin of a fruit, discarded; a skinless fruit
, Ðạo had once written of his divided country. H
ng has not since had the heart to abandon an orange peel, or even the useless dull-red rind of a lychee. Because of Ðạo’s words, H
ng’s life has been governed as much by metaphor as economics.

How H
ng wished Ðạo could have been there to see it. A future united. Whole fruit.

Of course, the deception of whole fruit is the rot that can be concealed beneath its skin. The victory of 1975 was tainted, as victory always is, by opportunists. Smugglers of uncertain origin came to the squatter settlement on the edge of the pond. A team of sharply dressed men and women walked past the shacks, luring people into the light with shouts of “Who wants a future for their children? Who wants relief from suffering?” The Americans are crazy for Vietnamese children, they said, they are scooping up all the orphans in Saigon and giving them medicines and making them strong. Sell yours to us and we will take them south and get them onto the planes and they will grow up rich.

H
ng was struck numb as he watched one young woman after another pass a swaddled newborn into the arms of an uncertain future. Where the young woman could not do it herself, her mother or mother- in-law stepped in. Whatever their feelings about the war, they must not have hated the thought of their children growing up rich in America. Perhaps they simply felt they had no choice. They were starving and the smugglers were waving money before their eyes. In less than a week, all the baby girls were gone.

The shantytown throbbed with the ache of loss, and those who had not sold babies because they had none to sell seethed with anger and refused to speak to those who had, calling them traitors of the worst possible kind—worse than the Catholics and the selfish cowards who had fled south.

A good nine months of silence passed before the tension began to ease. New baby girls were born, and many of these new arrivals were named after their sisters who were growing up rich in America.

H
ng has only once seen an American, at least someone he was sure was an American, and even that was from a distance. This man
was lying on the shore of Trúc Bạch Lake draped in parachute silk. He’d been dragged to shore by men just like H
ng, poor men fishing farther along the shore, fishing despite the danger, because when bombs fell, fish rose—dead, not always intact, but in good numbers nevertheless.