The Beauty of Humanity Movement (66 page)

T
is deeply embarrassed by the behaviour of this dandy peacock. It is shameful. No better than a beggar harassing a tourist in the street. From what he has seen of the contemporary art scene so far, he can only conclude it is a world of arrogance and greed.

They walk back to the Hotel Metropole together in silence as if Miss Maggie, too, has been depressed by what they have seen.
T
would like to apologize, but he’s not sure exactly what he would be apologizing for.

“You did well, T
,” she says.

“Oh?”

“You protected the interests of your client. You didn’t let him manipulate her with his hard sell. It can be an aggressive business. You don’t want people to feel pressured into buying.”

Maggie sinks into the steaming water of the bath holding a wineglass aloft. She plugs the dripping tap with her big toe, and listens to the wind rattling a pane of glass in the reception room. She smells the chicken Mrs. Viên down the hall must have cooked for dinner; she hears the monotone drone of a radio in the distance.

Perhaps it was the rare treat of company all day, but Maggie feels lonelier than usual this evening. These are the hours that should be spent with family and friends, sharing food and news of the day. Maggie wonders where T
lives, whether his mother irons his sagging hipster jeans for him, whether he has a girlfriend and if T
s mother and the girl’s mother are plotting to see their children marry.

Maggie’s mother had spent years asking when she and Daniel were planning on making things proper, making her proud. Daniel was an installer at the Walker Art Center—a gentle loner a few years older than her whom she had come to know when he hung the pieces for the first exhibition she curated. Daniel had an expansive brain and an enthusiastic heart—even going so far as to spend three years studying Vietnamese in order to impress her mother—but he was also burdened with a capacity for such sadness that it could, on occasion, replace him at a table, in conversation, in bed. There were dark walls
Maggie had to stroke with a delicate hand, particularly when it came to his own family.

Maggie was twenty-six when she met Daniel, thirty-five when they were driving to the wedding of a university friend of his in Ann Arbor and he suddenly divulged the fact that his father, a man he’d simply referred to as dead up to this point, had served in Vietnam. Had served but in some ways never returned. The body yes, but not the rest of him.

It ended right there, really, on the road to Ann Arbor, Maggie staring out the window at a salt-stained world, realizing that Daniel’s attraction to her was obviously so much more complicated than she had ever known and in some ways had nothing to do with her.

She couldn’t bring herself to talk about it initially, especially with her mother. As betrayed as she felt, she saw herself a failure. That somehow, she should have known. It cast doubt on all her relationships, forcing her to wonder what she represented to other people, whether people saw her at all.

“Another girl?” her mother eventually had asked.

Maggie nodded, an easy way out.

“American?”

“What’s that got to do with it?” Maggie snapped.

“Better to stick with your own kind,” said her mother. “Better for the children.”

Maggie realized in that moment what her mother and Daniel shared. Their feelings always dominated. And she catered to them both.

The relationship with Daniel had broken down almost three years ago now, and apart from two dates with a man who evoked no great feeling in her but whom she slept with nevertheless, Maggie has retreated from the possibility of love. Since her mother died two years
ago, finding a connection to the past has seemed of more fundamental importance. She needs an anchor to weigh her down, a sense of place and belonging. To be grounded before she begins anew.

As far as Maggie knows, her mother never entertained the possibility of another romance in her own life, though she does remember a particular look of longing Mrs. Trang’s husband used to give her mother whenever she and Maggie came into their restaurant. It was as if he were an animal in a shelter in need of a new home. Perhaps that was enough flattery to keep her mother going.

Her mother was such a beautiful woman, so elegant and refined, it had pained Maggie to see how often people dismissed her as just another immigrant—a cleaning lady with little English, someone just off the boat, that Chinese lady, an anonymous and slightly sad woman pulling a bundle buggy full of vegetables bought in Chinatown down the street, yanking her heavy load up the steps onto the bus, searching for her bus pass, the driver shouting at her or over-enunciating as if he thought she were deaf or of little intelligence.

Nhi had worked diligently for years as a cleaner at the hospital, and while she’d seen her pay increase steadily and had gained more responsibility over time, language always held her back. She only ever mastered the most basic of phrases, never had a bank account or a credit card, and she spoke more Cantonese than English in the end, thanks to the ladies with whom she played mah-jong.

Maggie paid her mother’s bills, renewed her bus pass, filed a tax return on her behalf. Twice a year she took her to Target and J.C. Penney to replenish her wardrobe. Maggie was her mother’s bridge to America and without that bridge, Nghiêm Nhi stayed rooted on immigrant shores.

Maggie remembers how her mother used to sit at the vanity with the oval mirror in her room every night, silver-backed brushes and jars
of Korean whitening and anti-aging creams lined up upon it. She would remove her impeccable makeup with cotton balls, unpin her chignon and brush her long hair. She still looked elegant stripped of her makeup, just less able to conceal the disappointment that showed in the lines around her mouth.

Every time Maggie looks in the mirror she fears seeing evidence of that same disappointment. It’s both a surprise and a relief to see her father’s eyes reflected back at her. A glow of obsidian. Animated and alive.

H
ng stacks firewood between the foot of his mattress and the wall in preparation for breakfast tomorrow. He had hoped to distract himself with chores this evening, but that devastating trip home to his village that is no longer a village has been replaying itself over and over again in his mind.

The memory of it had begun as he stared at the water pouring into the pool this morning. It accompanied him as he pushed his cart over to the TV tube factory in B
i, where the workers are on strike. Happy as he was when his customers eventually turned up, seeing them reminded him of returning to his shop after that trip home all those years ago, of trying to go on, to serve breakfast as usual despite the song of helplessness and devastation ringing in his head.