The Beauty of Humanity Movement (24 page)

“Ðạo,” he says to the portrait in front of him, “do you remember Lý Văn Hai? Eating ph
in my shop one morning? You must have been there too.”

He needs Ðạo’s help. There is simply too much for one old man alone to remember.

M
aggie had deliberated about returning to the old man for breakfast this morning. She doesn’t want to push, but she’s impatient. You left him your card, she reminds herself. He knows how to get in touch if anything comes to mind.

She stops in the kitchen to thank Rikia for directing her to H
ng yesterday, then battles her way into her office holding a cup of coffee at shoulder height. The room is a bit of a disaster, crammed with pieces of art she has pulled out of storage leaning four deep against each wall. She has to tear through a forest of cardboard and brown paper just to reach her desk, spilling half her cup of coffee as she does.

She’s eighty-five per cent of the way through cataloguing the hotel’s collection—an incomparable body of work from the colonial era found stashed in the bomb shelter beneath the hotel. The art had survived both the war and the decades of the hotel’s service as a Communist Party
guesthouse, during which the building had deteriorated into a rat- and bat-infested dump.

The story of the collection’s discovery had reached her through a colleague at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. “There’s a real opportunity there,” he had said, and Maggie had known this to be true in her gut. A hidden vault of art in her father’s city. The opportunity to bring its contents to light. Her mother no longer alive to dissuade her. And Daniel’s feelings no longer a consideration before her own.

Maggie came up with a proposal, which she pitched to the French management company undertaking the Metropole’s refurbishment, to open a contemporary gallery in the hotel. Her timing couldn’t have been better. Interest in contemporary Vietnamese art has surged over the last decade—having a gallery at the hotel made sound business sense. So did having a Vietnamese-speaking curator with a master’s degree in curation from the Art Institute of Chicago who could do the work of preserving and cataloguing the original collection.

She spent her first month and a half in Hanoi below ground in a metal chamber with a flashlight. Her first weeks were all cool surfaces, taut canvases and a pounding heart. She pored through work that spanned the five and a half decades from the hotel’s opening in 1901 to the expulsion of the French in 1954—her father’s era, the world into which he was born, the one in which he drew, grew up, painted.

She was hopeful then. But that hope grew heavy, canvas by canvas, sheet by sheet, until it hung above her like a leaden cloud. And then finally a sliver of light. An old man. A ph
seller. Mr. H
ng.

Maggie lifts a black-and-white painting and props it on the arms of a chair. A string of barbed wire made up of Chinese characters runs across the canvas. She was looking for this piece yesterday; it’s by the Hoa artist she represents. Maggie is a collector of lost sheep:
artists like this one who fall between cracks. In Vietnam, her Hoa artist is not recognized as Vietnamese, but in China, where he spent his adolescence after his people were expelled from Vietnam, he isn’t recognized as Chinese either.

Maggie can relate. While she might look Vietnamese, this only gets her so far. She has had shopkeepers quadruple their prices as soon as she opens her mouth, people mock her accent, gossip behind her back and treat her with a great deal of suspicion. They call her Vi
t Ki
u —some watered-down and inferior species of Vietnamese—a sojourner, an exile, a traitor, a refugee. However people might regard her, Maggie has to content herself with the knowledge that her roots are here, the family stories, as remote and inaccessible as they might be.

Maggie’s mother was not a storyteller. She revealed very little over the years, and it was only after suffering a stroke two years ago that she offered anything unprompted. “Your father didn’t feel entirely Vietnamese,” she said one day from her hospital bed. “His experience in the U.S. changed him. He felt it had made him a better artist and a better person, and he wasn’t going to let anyone take that away from him.”

They had been speaking about apples just the moment before; she was craving the tart juice of a hard, green variety she had eaten as a child. It had taken Maggie a minute to follow: to move from the taste of fruit to this rare mention of her father. She seized the opportunity then, exhaling the question that had haunted her for the thirty years since that day she had said goodbye to him on the tarmac.

“What happened to him in the camp? His hands?”

Her mother turned away at the question.

Maggie sat down on the bed and leaned her chin upon her mother’s silken head. She felt a tremor run through her mother’s body as if she had just exorcised a small ghost.

The truth her mother revealed to her that afternoon is one Maggie has since kept caged in her chest. There was a time when she might have shared that painful story with someone—with Daniel—but that time had passed.

“They might have broken Hai’s hands but they could not touch him inside,” was the last thing Maggie’s mother said before she drifted off to sleep that afternoon, the weak sun through the blinds casting prison bars across her bed.

Her mother died in that bed, suffering another stroke in the night. Maggie felt she had been struck down as well, made an orphan.

The phone rings once, twice, three times before Maggie makes a move to answer, bending at the waist and prostrating herself over the corner of her desk in order to reach it. There’s some kind of problem, though the young man at the front desk is having difficulty articulating precisely what it is. From what Maggie can make out, it seems someone has been involved in an accident in front of the hotel. But why would they call her?

“Is it one of our guests?” she asks.

“No,” says the young man.

“One of the staff? An artist of mine, a client?

“No. I think he is some kind of homeless man.”

It’s one of the uncomfortable truths of working in a hotel like this that the doormen are under instruction to clear the street of beggars and the homeless. The official line is that it’s done so that guests don’t feel uncomfortable, but it’s part of both the government’s efforts to promote tourism and a wider Party policy that sweeps the streets of humanity periodically, particularly in advance of the arrival of foreign dignitaries.

“Did he injure himself on hotel property?” Maggie asks, still unsure why this is being brought to her attention.

“No, on the street,” says the young man at the front desk.

“Is he okay? Does he need to go to hospital?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “He’s asking for you.”

H
ng feels like his leg has its own heartbeat. He’s ashamed to be sitting here in this room with his trousers muddied and torn, particularly since his little accident seems to have knocked the reason he was coming to the Metropole in the first place right out of his head.

A taxi had swerved to the right as he neared the hotel, tearing a corner off the front of his cart and causing it to roll backward, trapping his trouser leg and sending him crashing to the ground. He rubs the back of his head now—sticky, a bit of blood. Perhaps the reason he is here at the Metropole is still lying out there on the street like a log parting a river of traffic, just as he was for a few minutes before the doormen hauled him to the pavement and onto his feet.