The Beauty of Humanity Movement (16 page)

Seeing Bình rise and approach the foreman had cast him right back to those heady days in the early 1950s when Ðạo and the circle of artists and intellectuals who gathered around him would congregate for breakfast in the shop H
ng had by then inherited from Uncle Chi
n.

Bình, tiny then, would sit on a low wooden stool at his father’s side, looking terrified of splashing his white shirt as he bent his head over his bowl and tried to manipulate a pair of long chopsticks between his small fingers.

Ðạo and the other men completely failed to notice the boy’s travails, consumed as they were with news of the liberation struggle and engaged in heated debates about the future of Vietnam. After abandoning his bowl, little Bình would sit patiently beside his father, who was alternately scribbling in a leatherbound notebook or arguing a point by jabbing the air with the burning end of his cigarette.

H
ng, alone, saw the boy. And Bình’s invisibility gnawed at his heart.

“Come,” H
ng said at last, drawing Bình away from the table. “There is a bird nesting above the frame of the door.”

The boy padded through H
ng’s backroom after him, where H
ng pointed to the nest wedged under the eaves.

“Are there babies?” he remembers Bình asking.

H
ng had crouched down and encouraged the boy to climb up and sit on his shoulders. H
ng tottered upright, pinning the boy’s calves against his chest. “Can you see inside?”

“There’s a blue egg,” Bình said, his voice full of wonder. “When will it hatch?”

“I tell you what,” H
ng said. “We’ll have a look every day until it does.”

One night, H
ng took a pair of ivory chopsticks, sawed off their tips and sanded them until they were nicely tapered and polished. He pulled Bình out of the inferno the next morning to present these to him. The boy held them in one hand and clutched them against his chest as he walked back to the table unnoticed and resumed his seat. The glow in Bình’s eyes as he turned the chopsticks over in his hands and admired them from all angles had given H
ng the sense, for the briefest of moments, of what it might feel like to be a father. He had felt it again this morning watching Bình rise to address the foreman: that same proud flicker of paternal love. Age is doing its inevitable though, and reversing their roles; the son is now defending the father.

How gentle and selfless Bình has always been. How bold and idealistic was his father. But perhaps the politics of a time determine the disposition of a man; perhaps a revolutionary is only a revolutionary in revolutionary times. H
ng cannot say with any certainty what makes a man. But he certainly knows what breaks one.