The Beauty of Humanity Movement (70 page)

H
ng loosened his grip on Bình, stepping forward to lift the sullied bowl off the table. Bình followed H
ng through the shop as he carried the bowl out through the back door, tipped the broth into the alleyway and cracked the ceramic in half against a rock.

Ðạo appeared on the threshold behind his son. “Come, Bình,” he said, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Say goodbye to Mr. H
ng. Breakfast at home from now on.”

H
ng, still holding the broken pieces of ceramic in each hand, turned around and waved goodbye to the sullen boy, knowing it best, and painfully aware that the days of Bình shadowing him were unlikely to come again. The moment was bittersweet: Ðạo was finally being a father to his son, but protecting Bình meant sending him away.

The following morning, the officers were back, making a great display of throwing armfuls of confiscated copies of the journal into the burning guts of an oil barrel planted in front of H
ng’s shop. Black
smoke billowed in through the front door while the officers broadcast messages of condemnation over a crackling megaphone, calling
Fine Works of Autumn
the work of reactionaries and Trotskyites, the senile ravings of syphilitic minds.

The men in the shop did not speak or otherwise react; they simply carried on eating from their bowls. When H
ng suggested the men might wish to leave by the back door, Ðạo said, “We will not be cowed by their theatrics. We will leave by the front door.” And so they did, the eight of them who remained: in solemn and single file.

The effects of land reform soon began to be felt in the city. The baskets of country women rattled with a few bruised apples, the price of rice became impossible, the greens in the market were limp reminders of things that had once grown in abundance, the only meat available was grey and taut with age.

H
ng did without green garnish and pounded tough cuts of beef with a mallet and was simply grateful that the men did not complain, still came morning after morning to eat a soup that could not be compared to the soup of earlier times, came despite the rings of late nights beneath their eyes and the worry apparent on their faces.

They’d become a small army dedicated to thought and solemn talk. They gave up shaving, perhaps having given up returning home to bathe and sleep in their beds. They needed a faster and cheaper way to communicate with the people, a way to extend their readership and reach. They agreed to produce a tabloid-style magazine going forward, one they would call
Nhân Van
—Humanism.

H
ng remembers inhaling the ink rising darkly from the pages of the first issue, reeling drunk from the intoxicating smell and the thrill
of its daring words. Just as he was burying the issue safely beneath his mattress in his backroom, Party officers were raiding the magazine’s offices, burning books and papers and shelves and damaging the press.

Ðạo moved the giant press to a secret new location at the back of a communal house in his neighbourhood with the help of men in black masks. The men published the next two issues of
Nhân Van
from here in quick succession, but they might as well have fed the magazines directly into the fire given how rapidly the copies were confiscated and destroyed.

The men were quieter than H
ng had ever known them to be, both exhausted by their efforts and wary of the potential presence of spies in their midst. H
ng was relieved that Bình was at least safe at home with his mother, Amie; he felt sure that any day now the shop itself would be set on fire, but he missed the boy like one might miss the sense of smell. The boy had never wanted ideology or politics; he wanted the simple things a man like H
ng offered: customized chopsticks, an extra dash of fish sauce, praise for a chore done well, a greeting just for him.