The Beauty of Humanity Movement (97 page)

Maggie takes a hotel car to Ð
ng Ð
district at the concierge’s insistence. “It’s not a good place,” he says. “Especially at night.” Rikia had said much the same thing after calling her husband. “He spoke to his driver, but he is only willing to let me pass this information on to you because I told him you were setting up a charity for the poor.

“Take this at least,” she said as Maggie was about to leave the kitchen, handing her a lemon meringue pie destined for the garbage because of the slightest singe to its edges. “It will make me feel like less of a liar.”

Maggie needn’t have worried about asking the driver to let her out before getting to the shantytown. He comes to a stop, his headlights illuminating a potholed and rocky dirt track. “You’ll have to walk from here,” he says. “I’m not going to lose a muffler over this.”

The driver turns on his high beams and illuminates the first fifty metres of the track, but as soon as Maggie passes over a slight rise, she is plunged into darkness. As she stares ahead into the unknown, she’s less convinced this is such a good idea. What if the old man resents the intrusion? What if the picture means nothing to him?

An hour ago she was in her office entering names and descriptions of pieces of art into a database. She has devoted herself to cataloguing and preserving the hotel’s collection, yet her father’s drawings are in terrible shape. The one she’d brought to breakfast with her this
morning was lying flat on her desk. She ran her fingers down its nearly translucent creases. Leaned over and inhaled its musty smell. She can take it in with all her senses, but the meaning of this particular drawing has always eluded her.

Her father’s story might be one of millions, but it is still the one that matters most to her. She reaches into her pocket for the reassurance of the paper and carries on walking in the dark, sticking to the middle of the track, listening for creatures in the verges. The air is pulsating with the night’s crickets and acrid with the smell of burning kerosene. She tenses her shoulders, gripping a bottle of wine under her arm, and keeps her eyes fixed on the fires burning in the distance. She tries not to squeeze the cake box she holds in her other hand.

Maggie is close enough to the shantytown to hear voices when something flies out of the dark and smacks her on the thigh.

“Jesus!” she yelps, leaping backward.

“Money,” says a boy in English, his hand outstretched.

“You scared the crap out of me.”

“Money, Mister. Pencil.”

“Who taught you to beg?” she reprimands in Vietnamese, causing the boy to scurry off.

“Stranger coming! Lady stranger!” she hears him shout.

So much for an unobtrusive entrance. She sees the outlines of people assembling at the end of the track.

Before Maggie has a chance to explain herself, a woman is pressing silk pillowcases against her skin. “You buy,” she says in English. “Very good price.”

A teenage boy waves a fan of postcards before her eyes. Someone else tries to tempt her with a bottle of Coke, tapping his fingernail against the glass.

“I’ve just come to visit someone,” says Maggie.

“Lady,” says the boy who first ran into her, “what is in the box?”

“It’s a pie.” She opens the lid of the box and everyone leans in to have a look.

“Ooh,” says the boy, wiggling his finger toward the crust.

“Van!” a woman shouts, slapping the boy’s wrist.

“Who are you coming to visit?” a pockmarked man asks.

“Old Man H
ng,” she says. “Can you tell me where I might find him?”

“He lives beside the spinster Lan,” says the woman who just slapped Van’s wrist. “I’ll show you,” says the boy.

“Here,” Maggie says, holding out the cake box to the group. “Please, you can share this. It’s very good.”

“H
ng first,” says the pockmarked man, pulling Van away from the box.

Van natters away as Maggie follows him, re-enacting some pivotal moment from a soccer game that is lost on her while they weave between shacks, through hanging laundry, past people huddled around small fires. The boy hoofs an imaginary ball into the air, jumps up to meet it with his head, adds a karate kick for good measure, then segues into the plot of a Bruce Lee movie he says he saw projected onto the side of a building last year during Tet.

He stops in front of a row of shacks facing a pond and bellows through the doorway of one them: “Foreign lady for Mr. H
ng!”

Maggie winces. Old Man H
ng pokes his head through the doorway. His hair is sticking up off his head and he is wearing a tattered grey undershirt.

“What are you yelling about, Van? I’m not deaf.”

“A lady is here to see you.”

“I’m very sorry to disturb you, Mr. H
ng.”

“Miss Maggie?” The old man squints and pats his chest as if looking for a pair of glasses. “Is something wrong?”

“I just wanted to talk to you, if that’s okay. I didn’t get a chance this morning.”

“Come.” He beckons her into his shack. “Off you go, Van.”

“But Old Man H
ng—”