The Beauty of Humanity Movement (5 page)

H
ng is a man governed by such principles rather than any laws, particularly those ones keenly enforced by the police that are of greatest inconvenience to him and those he serves. When the officers come to ticket him for trespassing or operating without a licence after he has had the peace of setting up shop in the same location for a few consecutive
days, his customers will be forced to run off clutching their bowls, sloshing broth against their freshly pressed shirts, losing noodles to the pavement, jumping aboard their motorbikes and lurching into the day.

H
ng’s crime is the same every day, but sometimes the police are in more of a mood to arrest a man than fine him. “Where did you relieve yourself this morning?” an officer in such a mood had asked him a few months ago.

H
ng had shaken his head. The question made no sense. “Where did you pee, old man?” The officer raised his voice, threatening to arrest H
ng for resisting a police officer if he didn’t answer the question.

H
ng reluctantly pointed toward a patch of grass and asked, “Has peeing now been declared a crime?”

No, but that very patch of grass, as he was no doubt well aware, was the consecrated site upon which the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs would soon be erecting a new monument to honour the revolution’s martyrs and devotees. And so H
ng was promptly arrested for insulting the Communist Party, which is to say, the only party there is.

H
ng considered that night behind bars, lying on concrete and pissing into a communal bucket, mild punishment compared to the previous time he’d been charged with insulting the Party. Then, they had disciplined his mouth by punching out most of his front teeth with the butt of a rifle.

“Why this waste of money on statues?” he shouted after Bình had paid the bribe to release him from prison the second time. “Why yet another monument for the revolution? It’s been fifty years of this. Oh, if they could read the insults in my mind …”

“They used to claim they
could
read minds,” Bình said, and off they wandered, mumbling together like two old men despite the almost
thirty years between them, two old men who had indeed once believed in the Party’s telepathy.

H
ng serves the last man among today’s early shift of customers and looks over at Bình and T
, the younger still making calculations in the air with his chopsticks, the elder concentrating on his bowl. He wonders whether it isn’t time for T
to marry. He hopes T
s mother, Anh, is giving this matter some attention; if not, T
may well be the last in this family line H
ng will serve.