The Beauty of Humanity Movement (99 page)

“It’s a bit blurry,” Maggie says. “Smudged.”

“Cats,” H
ng remarks. “In a fight. ‘Once we were Siamese,’” he says, reading the bubble of text that floats halfway up the page.

“I’ve never fully understood it.”

“The North and South. The country was ripped apart by the partition in ’54.” H
ng slowly raises his finger. “‘The skin of a fruit, discarded; a skinless fruit,’” he says.

His mouth hangs open. His pupils float toward the corrugated tin ceiling, his finger still poised in the air. He looks like a man watching stars fall to earth. Mesmerized, H
ng begins to whisper to himself, barely audible. He sways back and forth like a child.

Maggie hears something about a homeless man. The line, “Your fruit is a feast for maggots.”

H
ng coughs and raises his hand to his chest. He continues to cough, then splutter.

Maggie reaches out to touch the old man’s back. “Did you ever have that X-ray, Mr. H
ng?”

The old man closes his eyes and leans his head back against the wall of his shack. His bottom lip quivers and tears pool in the corner of his eyes. “It’s not that,” he whispers. “I thought it was gone. I didn’t think I could remember anything beyond the first line.”

——

Maggie’s perfume still lingers, or is it the cake that is in fact a pie that he smells? H
ng cannot be sure. His senses are as confused as his emotions. Something in him has been rattled loose. Perhaps this is what the release of tears does to you; having so little experience with the phenomenon, he really doesn’t know.

H
ng has only shed tears once before in his adult life—at the sight of Bình returning twenty-five years after his mother took him away.

One unremarkable day in the years after the war, a man of Ðạo’s likeness arrived in the shantytown on a bicycle. “Uncle H
ng,” the man had said.

H
ng pulled Bình—now a grown man—into his shack and showed him the ancestral shrine he’d built in Ðạo’s honour.

“I apologize for the fact that the drawing is not a perfect likeness,” he said, but Bình had already closed his eyes. H
ng joined the man in prayer. When H
ng opened his eyes some minutes later, water was dripping from his chin onto the front of his shirt. It had taken him a moment to understand the source.

In all these years since their reunion H
ng has never been able to recite any of Ðạo’s poetry. The last person to hear the poems was Lan, the girl who had sat beside him under weak moonlight decades ago, repeating back to him those lines that pleased her most.