The Beauty of Humanity Movement (67 page)

Back then, his customers had berated him for his disappearance. They did not ask where he’d been for a week, did not notice H
ng had
turned inward; they simply wanted the assurance of breakfast every morning. They wanted him to do his job.

Only little Bình and his father paid H
ng any attention. Bình eagerly relayed the news of the alleyway: the pink flower that had sprouted up between the rocks beside the back door, a spider’s web with fifty rings, the rumour of a man who was said to be sleeping in the alley at night. Ðạo, meanwhile, lingered after breakfast asking for H
ng’s input on a play he had begun working on in H
ng’s absence.

“What might you say if you were a peasant who owned a rice paddy across the river from your village and a Party official told you that from now on you’d be working for a share of the harvest on a collective on your side of the river, only that farm was fifty kilometres away? I just need a few lines. Something that sounds natural. Realistic.”

H
ng felt his intestines tighten. His parents
were
peasants who owned a rice paddy and they had nothing but that rice paddy and the one water buffalo they shared with another family, and it would appear they had been killed because of it. Did Ðạo really have no idea what it was like to be a poor peasant? For all his talk about equality across class, his invitations to H
ng to share his point of view, Ðạo was still, in the end, an educated young man of Hanoi, schooled in the western way, who had never done manual labour or gone hungry. Ðạo could feel outraged by things in the abstract that he would obviously never feel in his bones.

H
ng walked away from Ðạo in lieu of replying, marching through his bedroom and out the back door into the alley to check how much water remained in the rain barrel. He was flapping flies out of his hair and berating a young man urinating against the side of the building when he heard Ðạo speak his name.

“H
ng,” said Ðạo, touching his elbow. “What happened to you? Where did you disappear to last week?”

H
ng turned to face the man who had taught him so much yet knew so little of the real world. “You’ll forgive me,” he began.

“You’re a Hanoian, H
ng, you should free yourself of that country habit,” said Ðạo.

“These problems with land reform that you have been addressing?” H
ng continued.

“They are not just theoretical. They affect real people in real ways.”

“Which is why we need real people like you to tell us what you have seen with your own eyes,” said Ðạo.

But H
ng could not speak of the horror he had just witnessed. He refused, furthermore, to be treated as Ðạo’s token friend from the country. He did not say that words could never capture the devastation. That he believed a knife through the stomach would more effectively communicate the pain than anything one could produce with a pen. H
ng could not say such things to a man still so resolutely optimistic that words could change the world.