The Beauty of Humanity Movement (60 page)

Land reform was now underway in the countryside, and although Uncle H
had promised this would liberate the peasantry, it was the peasantry who were proving most resistant to the idea—with good reason.

“You can’t just impose the Russian model on a country like Vietnam,” Ðạo kept repeating. “We simply don’t have the vast tracts of arable land that it would take to create these large collective farms.”

H
ng thought through the implications for his village. He certainly couldn’t imagine wealthy families like the Changs ever relinquishing their land. What would it take to revolutionize his village— any village for that matter? What would it take beyond theory?

“They would have to merge hundreds of small farms,” H
ng said over Ðạo’s shoulder as he leaned in to replenish the small jar of fish sauce on the table.

“That’s what worries me,” Ðạo said. “It would take charging every one of those small landholders as a class enemy if they showed any resistance at all.”

The need to get the sum of money he had amassed over the months into his parents’ hands became more urgent as a consequence of this conversation. The next day, for the first morning in twenty-five years,
the last eleven under H
ng’s ownership, Ph
Chi
n (& H
ng) was closed for business. Rather than straining the oxtail bones, peppering his silken broth with cloves, drinking a fortifying tea of ginseng just before the early-morning rush, H
ng was on a motorbike, gripping the broad back of a man he had paid to transport him back to his village.

The ravages of war with the French were evident along much of the three-day journey south of Hanoi, but for the most part, the driver avoided the pockmarked and battle-scarred roads and travelled along rural tracks, which made for a bumpy 320 kilometres. At the port city of Vinh, however, the devastating evidence of recent history was unavoidable. The city had been virtually flattened: the French had even bombed their own factories; sea, land and sky were the colour of ash.

The driver would take H
ng no farther than Vinh, blaming impossible tracks muddied by autumn rains. H
ng was thus forced to travel the last and most familiar kilometres on foot. As a boy, he had cycled the nineteen kilometres on his rickety Chinese bicycle to the industrial port every morning to attend school, pedalling the distance back to his village every afternoon. But the landscape displayed an alien nakedness now. Quy
t Mountain stood bald, without its crown of cooling pines. The terrain was a lonely grey, devoid of shadows.

H
ng walked along the buffalo track by the Lam River as it snaked its way through the tentative new growth rising from the scorched earth. This was troubled land at the best of times: Uncle H
country. H
ng could understand the great man’s desire for revolution because he too came from this poor place where the farmers were engaged in ongoing and often losing battles with the chalky soil, the hot, dry Laotian winds, the storms that tore inland from the Gulf of Tonkin, not to mention the landlords constantly driving peasants to produce more despite the mercilessness of the environment.