The Beauty of Humanity Movement (38 page)

He had been sitting outside his shack with Lan one evening long ago, a full moon straining through the clouds, when he first admitted to himself that he was in trouble. Lan’s grandmother joined them less frequently by then, saying the poems and the stories just lulled her to sleep and what good was she to anyone with idle hands? She nevertheless encouraged her granddaughter to spend evenings with H
ng, saying the girl needed an education and where else was there any chance of that.

H
ng thought this quite an enlightened attitude on her grandmother’s part, perhaps choosing to not consider the possibility that she might be looking to relieve herself of a burden by pushing her granddaughter into the arms of a man, even one as old, blemished and poor as H
ng.

H
ng focused on the matter of education, an issue he took very seriously, having learned as much as he had from Ðạo. H
ng had held onto all the poems Ðạo had copied down for him, even though the poet later came to throw away most of his early efforts, dismissing as adolescent and naive his laments for a stolen country with recurring images of weeping mothers and flowers blooming without scent.

As Vietnam struggled toward independence, Ðạo’s poems reached into an uncertain future, contrasting images of Vietnamese peasants in Parisian zoos with those of human pyramids shaped like pagodas; allied Vietnamese workers with hands raised toward yellow skies. Some of these poems were eventually published in
Fine Works of Spring
, the first publication Ðạo and his colleagues produced.

Upon reading that journal by the bitter melon light of the oil lamp in the backroom of his shop, H
ng had felt the words do a perilous dance on the page. The illustrations vibrated with hidden meaning. His skin tingled and his ears burned as he read a poem about the hard times that had befallen the North since 1954. It was a risky topic to raise, one that might lead the Party to charge a person as an agent acting on behalf of the imperialists in the South.

When H
ng tried to return the journal to Ðạo the following morning, Ðạo insisted it was his to keep. “Because you are one of us,” he said. “One of our movement to keep the beauty of humanity alive.”

H
ng, filled with a mixture of pride and fear, held the inky pages to his chest. He bowed his head. He was humbled by the honour, but with honour comes responsibility. Being part of their movement meant the risk was his to share.

Five years later, in the interest of Lan’s education, H
ng found himself sharing the journal with the girl, retrieving his well-worn copy of
Fine Works of Spring
from the stack of papers he kept wrapped in plastic inside his shack, safe from rats and rain. He handed her the mimeographed volume, wanting her to feel the paper, smell the ink on its pages, hoping she might experience it with all her senses just as he had when he’d held it for the first time.

“But, Uncle, I cannot read,” she said, holding the pages in her delicate hands.

H
ng was surprised to hear it. He had left school at eleven, but he was a peasant boy from the country, this was to be expected. This girl was a Hanoian, born and bred, with the sophistication of the city about her despite the indignities of her current surroundings.

“Have you had no schooling?”

“My father was killed in the liberation struggle when I was very small,” she said. “After that we had very little money, only enough for one of us to go to school. We sent my older brother.”

And so H
ng began to read to her—the essays, the stories and the poetry—doing his best with the latter to infuse the lines with some approximation of Ðạo’s intonation and cadence.