The Beauty of Humanity Movement (76 page)

T
s meditation tends to be of a strictly mathematical nature. He recites pi to himself as he glides across the lanes of traffic. He’s at twenty decimal places by the time they reach the lake, fifty-two by the time they reach the Old Quarter.

The sun is putting in a rare appearance. Steam rises where shopkeepers have scrubbed and rinsed the pavement. T
puts on his
wraparound sunglasses, which instantly add swagger to his walk. He might not have Ph
ng’s good looks, but he knows how to look cool— he hopes Miss Maggie can appreciate this. He wonders if she’s ever had a Vietnamese boyfriend. She’s probably used to American-style dating: eating hamburgers before seeing a Hollywood blockbuster, maybe with Russell Crowe, and then kissing in the back seat of the guy’s car. Ahh! But they do not live with their parents, so perhaps he is inviting her back into his apartment and they are getting naked while the wide- screen television is blaring some hip hop on MTV.

The thought of none-of-this-waiting-until-married business stirs him up. How many men does the average thirty-something-year-old American woman sleep with before she is married? How many times has Miss Maggie had sex? All that experience might actually lead her to be thoroughly disappointed with a guy like him, he realizes.

They make their way down a winding back alleyway sticky with fish guts and scales. The artist they have an appointment to see lives at the dead end of this alley. Curiously, he has taken the name of a Filipino island—Mindanao, he calls himself. To change one’s name is to defy the parents and the stars; what kind of son would do such a thing? The answer soon becomes apparent.

Against the long wall of his tube house, Mindanao has a row of barrel-chested, straw-stuffed mannequins that must have been left behind by the French, all topped with papier mâché heads. A Vietnamese emperor, a legionnaire with an opium pipe in his mouth, Presidents Bill Clinton and Hu Jintao. The last of the mannequins is topped with the fishbowled head of a Russian cosmonaut.

The rest of his work is even more shocking. A series of paintings hang on the wall, all repulsive nudes with inflamed mouths and genitalia, one of them delivering a pig out his anus. There are serpentine men
poking each other with their penises through what looks to be an American flag. A mannequin with a Vietnamese face hangs from the ceiling, suspended by ropes twisted around its clay testicles. The head lolls to one side, tongue hanging out, eyes about to explode.

T
is staring aghast, stunned by this creature and his disgusting art.

Mindanao is telling Miss Maggie that the Party regularly closes down his shows. This might be one of the first times in T
s life that he thinks the Party is one hundred per cent right. “The economy might be post- communist, but the cultural climate certainly isn’t,” Mindanao says. “I’m constantly being charged with depicting social evils and undermining public morality, both by the Ministry of Culture and Information and other artists alike.”

He carries on, boasting about getting fined, being followed by the Bureau of Social Vice Prevention and having his studio regularly ransacked. “What’s saved me,” he says, “is the support I get from foreign institutions, because they aren’t subject to the same kind of scrutiny. But it gets exhausting. I’m considering moving to Hong Kong. It’s where most of my work sells, in any case.”

He leads Miss Maggie over to a series of lacquered panels perched on easels, which he says he’s doing as a commission for a gallery in Singapore. He explains his technique: he has cut up old propaganda posters—“Nixon’s Headache,” “Greater Food Production Is the Key to Expelling the Americans,” “It Looks as if Uncle H
Is with Us in the Happy Day”—changing the order of the words and distorting the messages, then overlaying these with the brown resin of traditional lacquer.

“I refuse to produce this benign nationalistic art the Party still encourages,” he says. “All those soft pictures of girls in
áo dài
s, rice paddies, water buffalo and the like. It’s just crap. They all do it, virtually every one
of my contemporaries. Even the ones with talent. I would rather see shit on a canvas.”

“Do foreigners actually buy that man’s art?” T
whispers to Miss Maggie when Mindanao leaves her to wander around the room.

“Sure,” she says. “Quite a number actually. I take it you don’t like it?”

“I think it’s disgusting,” T
cannot refrain from saying. “Disgusting and useless.”

“Well,” she says, “at least he’s got a point of view. Time will be the judge in the end.”

So much for Zen. The palindromic prime numbers T
calculates as he walks over to Ph
ng’s house this evening are overrun by a torrent of words. Time will be the judge? She cannot be serious: time will only reveal a guy like that as an animal! Nationalistic art or pornography— are these really the only two artistic choices? One portrays the country as backward; the other portrays the country as perverted. Why would artists willingly engage in either if they weren’t backward or sick themselves? He knows he crossed a line by expressing his disgust to Miss Maggie, but he couldn’t help it. He was equally appalled by her calm reaction to that freak’s work. She might look Vietnamese, but her tastes are evidently very American.