The Beauty of Humanity Movement (40 page)

“You could sell this,” said the grandmother, and in fact, this was already in H
ng’s thoughts.

He spent the next month building a stone grinder he could operate by pushing a pedal. Then he made himself a cart out of wood scraps and twine, and set out into the streets, launching himself as a roaming ph
seller.

Up until that point, H
ng’s sense of Hanoi had been fairly circumscribed, his routes dictated solely by the needs of the restaurant, but times had changed, and with them both the city and his way through it. His route meandered as he went in search of new clientele. How quiet the city was in those days, how devoid of people. Streets that had once bustled with commerce had become graveyards. Just a few entrepreneurial souls like himself had something to sell.

Without distraction he began to see the layers of the city. Craft villages had first arisen on this site a thousand years before, when the capital had been moved to Hanoi. The wall of the citadel, which these villages had served, still marked the western edge of the Old Quarter. The inhabitants had built walls around their villages as they evolved into guilds, and though those walls had since come down, H
ng could map their respective territories by discerning which temple, which pagoda, which communal house or
đình
belonged to which of the thirty-six guilds.

He had walked around the perimeter of the Old Quarter and come to rest his cart at the East Gate, the only original gate still standing. H
ng reasoned that a gate was an invitation to traffic, even in the absence of a wall, even in the absence of traffic, and so this is where he waited with his cart.

Several people passed by him on foot that first morning, none of them even glancing his way, but eventually two men on bicycles, curiosity or perhaps hunger getting the best of them, turned around and asked what he was selling.

“But there’s no rice,” the older of the two said, “no noodles. How on earth can you be selling ph
?”

“Come,” H
ng said with a nod and an inviting smile. “Taste.”

He pulled the lid off one of his pots. Even he found the aroma tempting. He lowered a handful of his pondweed vermicelli into the
broth with his bamboo ladle. He had one bowl and one bowl only— they would have to share. They held the bowl between them, accepted the proffered chopsticks and grasped at the noodles. They drank from the bowl in the absence of spoons.

“Ahh,” the younger one sighed, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “That is excellent.”

“That is the best thing I’ve tasted in years,” said the other, burping loudly.

“I’ll be here again tomorrow morning,” said H
ng. “Bring your bowls and your friends.”

“But how much are you charging?” asked the younger.

“How much can you pay?”

“Not much now, but next week I am old enough for the army.”

“Me, I could pay in leather,” said the older one. “I used to be a leather worker, that is, before all the cows disappeared. But I still have my scraps. Hey, a belt—do you need a belt?”

And so H
ng found himself the proud owner of a new belt, and soon thereafter, of quail feathers and palm fronds and lumps of northern coal.

He would share these things with the girl. Present them as small gifts. “You deserve so much more,” he would say, handing her a speckled duck’s egg or a smooth piece of cow horn.

She had tried to reciprocate where she could. One morning he found her sitting on the threshold of the shack she shared with her grandmother sewing a man’s shirt out of a piece of tarpaulin. In the absence of news, of underground papers, of anything other than propaganda shouted through megaphones and plastered on walls, one had to rely on signs like these. There must be threat of another war, H
ng thought, if there are enough military vehicles for her to risk tearing a
piece of tarpaulin off the back of a jeep. Who is it now? he wondered. The French or the Chinese? The Saigonese or Japanese or Khmer?

He had to resist the urge to reach out and wipe the smear of grease off her cheek with his thumb. “You deserve a better life,” he said instead.

“We had a better life,” said the girl, breaking a piece of thread with her teeth. “Of course we didn’t realize it at the time. We had a very large apartment, and before my father was killed, plenty to eat. Even croissants and chocolate.”