The Beauty of Humanity Movement (90 page)

She raises her eyebrows and T
is made uncomfortable by his father’s directness. In tourism college they were taught that American notions of what constitutes a personal question are quite different from their own. T
has learned this the hard way, through responses to questions like: And what do they pay you to be a pharmaceutical representative with GlaxoSmithKline, Mr. Clark? Is this lady your wife or
your daughter? Do they have the death penalty in your state of Texas? Why are the insides of your ears so hairy?

“It was complicated,” Maggie replies. “When I was young, especially, you know, in the years just after the war.”

“I spent most of the war hiding in the caves at Tam C
c,” T
s father says. He throws his head back, moves his hand up his chest and indicates rising water. He pretends to be gasping for breath.

T
stares at his father with astonishment, so slack-jawed that he is forgetting to eat. His father is not a conversational man.

“One day my mother saw Vi
t Minh soldiers coming toward the caves in a sampan,” Bình continues. “Thanks to my mother and a sharp stick, I was not conscripted,” he says, pointing at the glass eye that eventually replaced the one his mother damaged.

Miss Maggie cringes. T
wishes his father didn’t have to be so graphic.

“You know, I saw an American soldier once,” Bình carries on, sitting with his bowl now clenched between his knees. “I had been fishing in the river and I was making my way back to the village when I heard the crack of a tree branch above. I looked up and I saw an American soldier hugging the trunk. His plane must have been shot down. I remember the look in his eyes and I could see he was afraid of me—just a boy with two small fish—and so I looked away and left him to hug this tree, far away from his comrades and his country. He was gone the next day. I had been hoping to give him a fish.”

T
has never heard this story before and is beginning to feel rather excluded. “So, uh, Miss Maggie, Maggie,” he interrupts. “Can you tell what is so special about Old Man H
ng’s broth?”

“Maybe the way the taste evolves in your mouth?”

“That comes from years of experience,” T
s father says. “It is an indication of the strength of H
ng’s commitment to his craft that
even in the years we had no rice he could find a way to make noodles.”

“And he doesn’t get bored of making the same thing day after day?”

“It’s like religion for him,” T
says.