The Beauty of Humanity Movement (93 page)

T
didn’t know many of these places until he’d had a full week of lessons on the subject in tourism college. He also learned the names and plots of various movies—
Apocalypse Now
,
Full Metal Jacket
,
Platoon
,
Hamburger Hill
and
Rambo: First Blood
—all of which are banned in Vietnam, but all of which he, like all his friends, has secretly watched on pirated DVDs from Malaysia.

Tourists often tell T
that they have every intention of going straight back to the U.S. to lobby the government to compensate the victims of Agent Orange. And how can they help the Vietnamese people here, right now? they want to know.

What can you do here? Spend your money, thinks T
. Did you shoot a Viet Cong rifle at the C
Chi tunnels? Play with the AK-47s the communists used against you? Sample the manioc the soldiers lived on throughout the war? Crawl into a tunnel that was widened to accommodate the very non-Vietnamese width of your behind? Excellent. I hope you had a very nice time. And if you would still like to spend some more money? Well, then you can consider giving me a very good tip.

For Mr. Bob Brentwood, T
suggests an itinerary that would satisfy anyone on a war tour. “And for lunch I would like to recommend the favourite restaurant of Bill Clinton,” he concludes with great enthusiasm.

“What about the favourite restaurant of your president?” Mr. Brentwood asks.

“Of course,” T
says because he doesn’t know how else to respond.

Mr. Bob Brentwood is not displaying predictable behaviour. Rather surprisingly, he brushes T
s proposed itinerary aside and says that he has become a Buddhist in recent years and would like to visit a temple. While T
has met young white Buddhists before, this is his first old one. The young ones have often shaved their heads and declare they have given up meat and alcohol, and even sex in some cases, and just once he would like to ask one of them why they feel it is necessary to be so extreme to be a Buddhist.

“Which temple would you recommend?” Mr. Bob Brentwood asks.

T
immediately thinks of his mother’s favourite—that of the Tr
ng sisters. They have commanded an audience for two thousand
years despite the Chinese defeat of their short-lived dynasty, which led the sisters to drown themselves in the river.

Inside their temple, giant spiral cones of incense hang from the ceiling. The smoke snakes and billows, and ashes fall limply to the floor. T
leads Mr. Brentwood through the fog of incense toward the altar. T
bows to the statues of the kneeling Tr
ng sisters with their copperleaf crowns, their arms outstretched to receive their audience.