The Beauty of Humanity Movement (100 page)

Lan’s lips
had
been like cherry blossom. He had even dared to put his finger to the centre of her plump bottom lip as she delivered that line, speaking it as if she had written it herself. She had paused, not
breathing, then touched the delicate tip of her tongue to the rough tip of his finger, transforming him from a solid into a liquid. She had closed her lips around the tip of his finger and sucked, taking in the entire liquid being of him as if through a straw.

H
ng can taste the salt of Ðạo’s words in his mouth when he wakes. He yearns for something sweet. He pulls the paper box perched on the crate that holds his clothes toward him and sticks his fingers into Maggie’s lemon meringue pie.

T
o see the old man smile at Maggie when he sees her again this morning, to see the gleam of his new dentures, affirms T
s own positive assessment of her.

T
s father had also smiled at her when she emerged from her apartment building. He’d even attempted some English. “Good morning, Miss Maggie,” he said as she climbed onto the back of the Honda Dream II, the three of them riding together to breakfast.

T
felt a bit embarrassed; his father pronounced his vowels like a deaf man. “Have you been reading my English phrase book?” he yelled into his father’s ear as they lunged into traffic.

Bình laughed and said he was just doing a bit of mental calisthenics; good to exercise the brain with a new challenge once in a while.

His father thinks English is a language only for the young. It’s Russian he knows as a second language.

“I was wondering, Maggie, is there ph
in America?” H
ng asks over T
s shoulder this morning. “Have the Vi
t Ki’êu managed to keep the recipe alive?”

Maggie clearly enjoys the question. Her eyebrows do a little dance as she says, “Every major city has its little Saigon, and even in small towns you often find a couple of Vietnamese restaurants, usually in a row.”

T
has met plenty of Americans familiar with the taste of ph
, but her description paints a new culinary picture of the U.S. in his mind. He tends to think of uninterrupted kilometres of hamburger chains and Kentucky Fried Chickens. The latter came to Saigon last year, the first and only one of the American fast-food chains allowed into Vietnam, and while T
has never tasted Kentucky Fried Chicken, there are people eating ph
on the streets of New York. And maybe even in smaller towns like Little Rock, Arkansas, home of Bill Clinton. Perhaps while the Vietnamese are becoming more Americanized, America is becoming more Vietnamesized!