The Beauty of Humanity Movement (46 page)

Now, having met Miss Maggie, H
ng is able to picture who one of those babies of the shantytown might have become. A strong, educated young woman with a good job who speaks with confidence and does not lower her eyes when she meets a stranger. He thinks of all those babies, women now, their
áo dài
s flapping in American winds, and he wonders if they still know the Vietnamese language, if they have married American men, if they eat ph
for breakfast, if they even know the taste of home. He must ask Miss Maggie if America still suffers the deprivation of ph
. He wonders how many young women like her are haunted by questions about the past, their homeland. And how many old men like him might have some answers.

If only he had not been so careless with his memories. Carelessness has cost him dearly in the past: shouldn’t he have learned when his papers were taken from his shack? He was too angry at the time to think of it, but he should have dedicated himself to his memories then. He should have worked hard to preserve all that he could, because soon there will be nothing of them left.

Maggie can’t sleep. She’s remembering that winter morning with her mother in Minneapolis when they lost all contact with Vietnam. The snowbanks were the size of elephants that day, the sky bright, flakes swirling around them as if they were figures in a shaken snow globe. Maggie’s feet were sliding around in her boots as they trudged up the
street because even though she was only ten, her mother had bought her ladies’ boots so that they would last a few winters.

They passed ph
Vi
t Anh, where they usually stopped for lunch, because although Mrs. Trang made the best
ph
b
c
in Minneapolis, Nhi wasn’t in the mood for the lady’s gossip. They pulled open the door of the new Vietnamese restaurant down the street instead, bells tinkling overhead as they walked in.

The place was thick with cigarette smoke and the noisy clatter of dominoes on Formica tabletops. Maggie’s mother nudged her into a booth and took a seat beside her on the red vinyl bench.

“Nghiêm Nhi?” asked the man who came to take their order, his mouth and eyebrows almost cartoon-like in their expression of surprise. He stared at Nhi, not closing his mouth.

Her mother squinted. “Do I know you?”

“I’m Paul,” he said, his finger to his chest. “Paul Nguy
n. Van Hai’s colleague from Saigon. Photojournalist. Associated Press.”

She raised her eyebrows in recognition.

“I’m very very sorry about Van Hai,” Paul Nguy
n said.

“Ma?” Maggie prodded.

Her mother rose from the booth. She walked back into the kitchen with Paul Nguy
n, leaving Maggie alone at the table. She returned a few minutes later with a glass bowl of vanilla ice cream.

“Daddy didn’t make it out of Vietnam,” Nhi said to the tabletop once she sat down.

They both sat and stared at the bowl of ice cream. Maggie thought of the figure eights she’d learned to make on ice that winter wearing borrowed skates. She remembered the sensation of gliding backward.

“Daddy’s not coming?” Maggie said after a few minutes of silence—voicing something she had perhaps known for years.

“No, Daddy’s not coming.”

“But where is he?” she asked.

“Oh, Maggie,” said her mother, burying her face in her hands. “I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “He’s left us for the next life.”

Because we left him, Maggie thought to herself, we left him standing on the tarmac at the air base.

“Maybe his next life will be in Minneapolis,” Maggie finally said, trying to comfort first her mother, then herself—a pattern that, in retrospect, had already become entrenched.

It wasn’t until she was older that Maggie learned the details that had surfaced that day. At sixteen, she sought out Paul Nguy
n, discovering he now worked at Abbott Northwestern Hospital as a lab technician. They sat on stools in a dimly lit room, Paul wearing his lab coat and twisting a piece of paper in his hands.