The Beauty of Humanity Movement (102 page)

Why don’t any of those contemporary artists paint this? T
wonders. Vietnam is not standing still, not moving at the pace of a buffalo pulling a plough. Foreigners seem to think backwardness is romantic, whereas for T
, nothing could be more romantic than the estimate that twenty billion foreign dollars will be invested in the country this year alone. Figures like that can make you swoon.

T
is distracted by these thoughts on the drive back into the city, paying less attention to the French family seated in the back than he should. They have paid for the super-deluxe service, after all, and offering them informative and lively conversation as he escorts them back to the Metropole in the super-deluxe Mercedes van with the leather seats and seat belts and the multi-disc CD player is part of the package. Unfortunately, only the most senior driver at the agency is allowed to drive this van—a guy T
calls Karl Marx because he studied German in Germany and came back with a beard, which is not only impossible to grow, but a very dirty thing in his opinion—Ph
ng will be thoroughly annoyed.

T
stops by his friend’s house in the evening hoping to share some of his thoughts, but Ph
ng’s mother says he has gone to the library. T
, finding this very hard to believe, makes his way straight to the bar they started frequenting while in tourism college, having some happy
hour
bia hoi
after classes before going home for dinner or, depending on how much they had to drink, perhaps not going home for dinner at all and doing karaoke instead. But there is no sign of Ph
ng here either. T
orders a glass of beer and is once again reminded that happy hour is depressing without his best friend.

Fortunately Ph
ng walks in just in time to prevent T
from sliding into a funk. And he really has been to the library. Ph
ng is carrying a collection of traditional songs, meaning songs approved by the Ministry of Culture and Information.