The Beauty of Humanity Movement (58 page)

H
ng can see the sheen at the bottom of the kidney as he pushes his cart onto the hotel construction site in the dark before dawn. Absent for just a day and they’ve begun to fill the pool with water. He has faced the inevitable need to move on for so many decades that he is resigned to it. Other things are more worrying. The price of meat, for instance, which just continues to rise. He has dealt with the meagrest of rations, crops lost to weather or war, the indignities of bullying, bribery and black markets over the years, but somehow the inflation that came with Ð
i m
i is proving the toughest challenge of all.

H
ng is spared some expenses living as he does, collecting his own wood and not having an “official” residence or place of business. Still, the gang leader who claims to be policing the shantytown demands protection money every month, threatening to have their names added
to some register that would otherwise recognize their shacks as residences and tax them accordingly.

H
ng knows how much worse it is for people in the countryside, especially the farmers, when fuel is so expensive and taxes are so high. Often the only other people awake when H
ng pushes his cart through the city before dawn are groups of children traipsing in from the countryside, children whose families cannot afford to keep them in school, who must come and shine shoes or sell peanuts or worse in order to keep their parents and siblings clothed and fed. Those children whose homes are far away might rent a room, ten or twelve of them together, sleeping in shifts, peeing in a bucket, lice jumping from one head to the next.

H
ng can recognize them at a distance, almost see himself in them. How lucky he was to have had an Uncle Chi
n. What indignities and deprivation it must have spared him.

When H
ng arrived home in the village for the first time after being sent to his uncle in the city, his father had openly embraced him. A gentle but nervous man, Trong Tri had always quietly loved and pitied his ninth child, privately telling H
ng he was the one most like him. But his love for H
ng was no match for his wife’s ire, for her attachment to superstition and village gossip; his love for his son was a lonely beacon.

H
ng’s father wiped the celebration off his face and focused his attention on the sheer weight of the plump sack of coins H
ng had deposited onto the table as soon as he entered the house. “So business is good,” he said with admiration.