The Beauty of Humanity Movement (7 page)

“No,” she says, revealing herself a foreigner with just one word. Her black suit and crisp white shirt also set her apart; she is dressed like a serious businesswoman, and those teeth—white as the snow that used to fall on Quy
t Mountain when he was a boy, straight as the pines that crowned it.

“Maybe I knew you when you were a child?”

“I don’t think it’s possible, sir. I grew up in the U.S. But perhaps you knew my father—Lý Văn Hai.”

“Lý Văn Hai,” H
ng repeats. The name is not entirely unfamiliar to him, but it is a sound far away, a temple gong ringing in a distant valley.

“He was an artist here in the fifties.”

H
ng stops the movement of his ladle. Wait. Who is this woman? And what does she want? Does the government now employ beautiful young women with foreign accents as spies? Has she been hired to trap him, all these years later, to have him admit some collusion with the men of the Beauty of Humanity Movement?

H
ng straightens his back, ready to defend himself, when he suddenly sees all the colour drain away from her face.

This girl is no spy.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I know this must seem like it’s coming out of nowhere, but I heard you knew many of the artists back then, and I’ve spent a year searching and nobody knows anything and I just …” Her voice evaporates and her shoulders slump. “I just hoped that maybe you knew him.”

H
ng clears his throat. He does not know what to say. The professional businesswoman has transformed into a girl defeated. A girl in search of her father. “A Hanoi man, was he?”

She glances up, turning H
ng into a frozen portrait of a man holding a ladle in mid-air. She looks so vulnerable—her eyes shining like rare black pearls, a slight tremor to her chin—her face far too revealing.

“He grew up in H
i Phòng, but he moved here to train at the École des Beaux Arts in the late 1940s,” she says.

It has been decades since a beautiful young woman has looked at him in such a way. Not since Lan, the girl who used to raise her eyes to him for answers. It is almost unbearable. If only he could offer this
young woman—and himself—some relief. But he cannot honestly say he remembers anything about Lý Văn Hai, except perhaps that combination of short syllables.

“His name is vaguely familiar,” says H
ng, leaning in closer. “What else can you tell me about him, dear?”

“He was sent to a re-education camp in 1956.”

“So many of them were,” H
ng says quietly.

“He was in good company then.”

“Oh, he would have been, yes,” H
ng says. “Some of the very best.” He feels the urge to tell her just how good, to boast about the poetry and the essays and the artwork the Beauty of Humanity Movement produced, the fearlessness the men he knew had displayed in the face of opposition, the reach and inspiration of their work.

“Come again,” he says to the young woman instead. “Perhaps I will remember him.”

She pulls a business card from her pocket and hands it to him.

H
ng squints at the English letters and bows his head respectfully, not recognizing a single word.

T
sits behind his father on the seat of the Honda Dream II as they head back toward the Old Quarter after breakfast, wending their way through the congestion of motorbikes, bicycles, cyclos, pedestrians, cars, wooden carts and back-bent widows peddling food in baskets hanging from bamboo poles, blazing a trail through air thick with diesel fumes and morning fog.