The Beauty of Humanity Movement (53 page)

The owner is still on the phone by the time they finish their circuit of the room.

The second gallery is only two streets away and the owner of this one is not on the phone. He greets Miss Maggie in a familiar way, then engages her in a conversation about a group of artists in Singapore, leaving T
to wander about the room. More of the same. Girls in white
áo dài
s returning home from school. Woman in rice paddy. Sunrise over Halong Bay. Lady with lotus flower, boat on Perfume River, different lady with lotus flower.

“It has a timelessness to it,” says Miss Maggie, coming to stand at his side. “An almost conspicuous avoidance of history.”

T
is looking at a pretty but by now familiar scene of a village depicted through a gauze-like veil of rain. He’s not sure what Miss Maggie means. Sure, these are images you see in the countryside, but you also see highways, factories, ports, manufacturing facilities, mines, airports, industrial parks and resorts being built along the coast. And what about the cities? These artists don’t seem to paint the cities. He worries that if this is all foreigners see, lazy rivers and poor people ploughing fields by hand, they will think Vietnam a backward country.

“What do you think?” Miss Maggie asks. “Would you ever have a painting like this in your home?”

“But these are not for a Vietnamese home,” T
says.

“You’re right about that,” says Miss Maggie. “Ninety-eight per cent of the contemporary art produced here leaves the country.”

T
, who likes a statistic, says he’s not at all surprised. He checks the photocopied piece of paper for the price of this piece, which is a heart-attack-making eight thousand dollars. Wait until he tells Ph
ng.
They could eat 11,428 and a half bowls of ph
for that amount of money. They could eat ph
every day for thirty-one years and three months. Even for a more-than-average-earning Vietnamese person to make that kind of money it would take close to twenty years. Twenty years without eating or a roof over one’s head or a motorbike or a change of clothes. But T
doesn’t know any Vietnamese who would buy such a thing, in any case. If you had eight thousand dollars to spend you might rent a shop for a year or invest in a business or buy a better motorbike and some land or pay for a wedding or a funeral.

Something’s not right with this business. Someone is getting very very rich.

The woman who lives next door to Ph
ng’s family is whacking crab claws on the sidewalk with a mallet. She passes a thin pink sliver over her shoulder into the eager mouth of the toddler standing behind her. T
high-fives the toddler before slipping down the alleyway and turning right into a courtyard. Ph
ng’s bedroom light beams through the bars of his window above.

T
bounds up the stairs, nearly knocking over Ph
ng’s sister on the landing.