The Beauty of Humanity Movement (95 page)

H
ng had sensed Miss Maggie in the line this morning before he’d even seen her. Perhaps he’d smelled something sweet beyond the familiar warmth of his broth. He had not been surprised to learn of her father’s mangled hands, though he wishes such a lovely girl were not familiar with this kind of suffering. The cruelest torture in the camps had often been the most deliberate, destroying the mouth of a poet, the mind of an intellectual, the will of a man of resolve.

The propaganda could lead one to believe that much of the inmate’s time in a re-education camp was spent in a classroom. Lessons on Stalinism and productive socialist thinking, lectures condemning American imperialism and the puppetry of the South. But H
ng knew the truth beyond the propaganda; they all did.

H
ng had never felt such loneliness as he did those first few months after Ðạo and his colleagues disappeared. Having been surrounded by
their company for so many years, only to have it all taken away, was far worse than the isolation he had felt in childhood.

As much as he missed Bình, at least he could assume the boy was safe, far away in his grandmother’s village. But where Ðạo had been taken, if Ðạo was even still alive, H
ng didn’t know. The re-education camps were scattered throughout the North, inmates constantly being shuffled between them precisely so that their families could not locate them and interrupt the progress of their ideological retraining.

As he’d promised Amie, H
ng kept his shop open as if it were a lighthouse, a bright star to guide the men home. He counted their absence in months, months during which he made ph
from less and less every day, marking the arrival of each new moon with a knife blade against a wall, each cut a little deeper than the last.

Independent businesses in the city had begun to close all around him. Little food reached the city anymore. Millions of hectares of farmland had been razed to remove those peasants stubborn enough to remain. Didn’t the Party understand that no one who had survived the devastation of land reform would be able to forgive their brutality? They had murdered families, hundreds of thousands of them, including his own. The new collective farms were failing to produce. Who had the will for such a thing? More than a million people had fled south.

One day in late 1956, H
ng was drawn out of his shop. The streets were filled with H
Chí Minh’s message of personal apology. The Party would now launch the Campaign to Rectify Errors: those who had been wrongfully charged as landowners were to be reclassified as “middle peasants.”

But it’s too late
, H
ng wanted to shout. Like his parents, most of these people were already dead and gone. Gone too was H
ng’s favourite butcher, gone was all the beef. Gone too was the spice man,
the salt and pepper, the cinnamon and star anise. Gone were the rice sellers, the noodle makers, the fish sauce and soy peddlers. Gone were all the dogs from the streets.

And in place of all that was gone? Government shops, their shelves tragic displays of meagre produce farmed by labourers in camps that would soon kill half a million more.

H
ng bought what he could with his ration card, but he lost days to standing in line. Ten hours of waiting for chicken only to be told there was no chicken left. No option of trying a store in another district. This is the district in which you are registered. There is no chicken left, only bones. Here: there is turnip instead.