The Beauty of Humanity Movement (9 page)

“I’ve had quite enough drama of my own already this morning,” says Ph
ng.

Ph
ng is the driver, and T
, because of his better English, is the guide, but together they are the A-team employed by the New Dawn Tour Agency in their matching company T-shirts and knock-off Chinese Nike Shox Jungas with soles the colour of ripe mango. On the job, Ph
ng goes by the name Hanoi Poison, Hanoi P for short. He says it’s for the benefit of the tourists who can only seem to spit his real name, but the truth is it’s his rap name and he’s planning on becoming a famous
rap artist. Ph
ng has solid musical training behind him, a growing reputation and many, many fans, but most of all, he’s got talent. He tries to mess with T
s name as well—T
-Dangerous, TaT
—but T
is not interested. “I’m old-fashioned that way,” he says, “leave it be.”

T
met Ph
ng a couple of years ago when they were both teaching at the high school in Ðô’ng Ða district. T
was twenty years old and had just made the depressing discovery that loving math was a very different thing from loving teaching it. He was dreading the thought of the next forty-five years until retirement, but when he thought of the drudgery his parents had endured in their early working lives he was overcome with guilt.

Bình and Anh had been employed at the Russian KAO factory for years, dutiful proletariat manufacturing Ping-Pong balls for a pittance. T
s father had worked with celluloid, his mother had tested for bounce and T
had had a cardboard box full of misshapen white balls to play with as a child. But in the 1980s, the bones of the Soviet Union began to rattle. Soviet aid ran out and the factories began to close, leaving Vietnam friendless and hungry and in trouble. And so began Ð
i m
i—Vietnam’s very own perestroika—the economic reforms that allowed a free market to develop and have since changed all of their lives.