The Beauty of Humanity Movement (92 page)

“What does
infectious
mean?” Ph
ng asks as they watch Maggie walk up the hotel steps, both of them staring at her behind.

“I think it’s something like a disease,” T
says with considerable satisfaction.

Maggie feels warmed through, sated but not inflated, though having been raised on the sweeter broths and abundant garnishes of America, she has to admit she finds the ph
here, H
ng’s included, a bit austere.

When she was a child, her mother had taken her for a bowl of ph
downtown once a week. She never cooked it herself, never passed on a recipe—too hot, she said, too much work—but what she really meant was, How would I know who was marrying whom, who had lost her life savings at a casino and whose son was going to become a dentist?

It had to be the gossip that drew her, because it certainly wasn’t the ph
. People get lazy in the U.S., she always said. Too many ingredients and too much choice leads cooks to take shortcuts, flavouring weak broth with things from packages and jars. Beware the evil of the stock cube.

Maggie remembers the salad her mother used to make, dressed with a mixture of fish sauce, sugar, garlic and lime juice. She would peel a cucumber, then slice it very finely. She would tear mint leaves and coriander and slice tiny red shallots and a red chili. Then she would cut five niches around the edges of a carrot and produce a cascade of orange flowers with her knife.

As Maggie climbs up the hotel steps, she unzips her purse, reaching into it for the velvety reassurance of worn paper. She had brought one of her father’s pictures with her to breakfast in the hope that there might be an opportunity to show it to the old man, but after hearing about the poet who lost his tongue and meeting Bình, such a gentleman,
laying down his jacket for her to sit upon, a man whose own mother had caused him to lose an eye in order to save the rest of him, she couldn’t pull the drawing from her purse. Everyone has a painful story. Her father’s is just one of millions.

T
is back to regular work with the agency, but despite the wide stretch of his New Dawn smile, he feels his shoulders stiffening this morning as he shakes the hand of Mr. Bob Brentwood from North Dakota. It is the man’s receding hairline, the belly spilling over the belt holding up his khaki trousers and the fact that he is travelling alone that tell T
Mr. Bob Brentwood is a vet on a war tour.

While T
wants to offer such tourists a broader history of the city, the ancient things that existed long before the war, they are generally only interested in the story since 1965, most specifically the lake where Senator John McCain was shot down and his prison cell at the Hanoi Hilton. They have come to Vietnam to see the DMZ, China Beach, My Lai, Khe Sanh Combat Base, the Rex Hotel, the C
Chi tunnels, imperial Hu
, the Hanoi Hilton—places that make them very choked up with emotion.

If T
said “China Beach” to an ordinary Vietnamese person, even one who had lived through the war, they would think he was talking about a beach in China. If he said, “Hanoi Hilton,” they would think first of a hotel.