 The World in a BowlbyNicki Leone
“Old man Hu’ng makes the best Pho in the city and has done so for decades.” It is tempting to suggest that in the first line of Camilla Gibb’s new novel, The Beauty of Humanity Movement, is everything the author takes the rest of the book to say. Set in current-day Hanoi, the story reads like a symbolic history of modern Vietnam, and the delicate scent of pho—a Vietnamese beef noodle soup that is practically its national dish—the complex aroma of its broth and spices blended in subtle and artistic ways, is the not too subtle metaphor for the country that envelopes the story. But if the symbolism of the novel is not subtle, the language certainly is. At the center of the story is old man Hu’ng, a pho seller who was born into the old colonial era, came of age during the communist revolution, suffered as revolution became repression and war became deprivation, and now finds himself in the new era of economic reform (Doi moi), relegated to an existence at the edges and in the cracks of a new country. Having been sent to the city from the country when he was a boy (owing to an inauspicious birth mark, his mother didn’t want him), Hu’ng apprenticed with an uncle who was a cook and who couldn’t afford to be superstitious when offered free labor. Under his uncle’s tutelage Hu’ng learns to cook, and it is soon apparent that the boy has a talent for it. By the time he is a young man, he has taken over the pho shop and it has become a gathering place for writers and poets. Hu’ng feeds the poets and they, in return, teach him Marxism and try out their verse for him over the ever-present smell of cardamom, cinnamon, and star anise that wafts up from their bowls of pho. The leader of the poets is a man named Dao, but Hu’ng thinks the man is a better poet than a father, for his young son Bình is often left all but forgotten while Dao argues for hours with other poets about the role of the people in a new society founded on Marxist principles. They call themselves The Beauty of Humanity Movement. Hu’ng, who knows what it is like to be ignored, takes Bình in hand and teaches him to find the beauty in small things—like the birds’ nests in the alley behind the shop and the pale blue eggs they hide. Hu’ng reveres the father, but loves the son, and awaits the day when the poets in his shop—so on fire with their ideas and their words—come to the attention of the increasingly strict and suspicious authorities in the new communist government and everyone is arrested. It doesn’t happen right away, but it does happen, eventually. And Hu’ng is left with only tattered memories of the warrior-poets and their revolution of words. Stray lines and verses that slip away he grows older, until the only tangible evidence that the poets ever existed is the small ancestral shrine Hu’ng keeps tended in memory of Dao, and the presence of Bình—a grown man now, with his own son—who still comes to Hu’ng every morning for his pho. The old man no longer has a shop—that, like the poets and their literary journals and revolutionary verses—was long since eaten up by the Party. Nowadays Hu’ng has a rickety wooden cart, cobbled together from left over bits of wood and tin, which he pushes along the streets of Hanoi, setting up each morning in a different spot to serve his pho to his loyal customers. There are about forty of them, including Bình and his son. And then, one morning, there is also Maggie. A young Vietnamese woman who was raised in America and has returned to Vietnam in search of evidence of her father—an artist who may have been involved with the Beauty of Humanity Movement, and who may have been served pho by Hu’ng. Maggie asks questions about the past, and this in turn sends Hu’ng, and Binh, and Binh’s son Tu on a kind of search for a Vietnam-that-was. As it turns out, the regime may have burned the books and destroyed the journals and artwork of the Beauty of Humanity movement, and it may have taken the poets and artists to be “re-educated” until they were all dead, but it did not destroy what they had done. Like old man Hu’ng himself, evidence of their work and words still exists—in the memories of old women, buried in backroom chests, moldering, forgotten, in the basements of old hotels, all waiting to be discovered if anyone should come looking. According to the author, what Gibb calls “The Beauty of Humanity Movement” is loosely based on a real historical incident known as the Nhân Van — Giai Pham affair, so named after the two publications, Nhân Van (Humanity) and Giai Pham (Fine Works). It was a period of political dissidence in Vietnam in the mid ‘50s—fueled largely by intellectuals—that sprang up after the devastation wrought by the Party’s “land reform” which evicted so many people from their land and sent the country into an economic tailspin. The movement was ruthlessly repressed, most of the people associated with it arrested and imprisoned, not to be seen again until the doi moi economic and social reforms in the eighties allowed some survivors to be rehabilitated. Stories about freedom of expression and human rights abuses under communist governments tend to bring out the righteous fury of writers, and it isn’t easy to write about the life of an idealistic movement born under an ideological, repressive regime without falling into a kind of dogmatic belief in the rightness of your own side, the utter wrongness of your enemies. It makes for good politics and worthy causes, but it doesn’t necessarily make for good fiction, which demands complexity, not talking points. Dogmatism, of any kind, has a way of flattening literature into propaganda—something that Hu’ng’s idol Dao resists fiercely, and at great cost. For the most part Gibb herself sidesteps the pitfalls of ideology with grace. There are occasional lapses—the police seem to be universally cruel and corrupt, and her portraits of artists, especially the modern ones, are often flatly contemptuous. But these are rare and minor flaws at the edges of the picture Gibb herself is creating of a modern Vietnam. It is a picture that may surprise most Americans, who even to this day see Vietnam resolutely through the lens of a war that happened over forty years ago. Vietnam’s borders have been open for over a decade, but most people still see the country of The Things They Carried, and Full Metal Jacket. By focusing on a single person, old man Hu’ng, Gibb allows ideology to stay in the background, as impersonal as weather. And while the symbolism of his life is inescapable—the state of Vietnam is reflected in the state of Hu’ng’s Pho which is rich in good times and thin in lean ones—the careful beauty and preciseness of Gibbs language prevents us from reading Hu’ng as some kind of “statement” or weathervane of the moral rightness or wrongness of the country. He is a simply a man (although as all writers know, there is never anything simple about that). A man who admired a poet, was kind to a child, fell in love with a girl, and was devoted, more than anything, to the importance of a good balance of spices in his pho: Hu’ng eases himself down onto his straw mattress. He runs his fingers over his few strands of hair. He lies back and listens to the belch of an obstinate water buffalo somewhere in the middle distance. He hears the ruffle of a duck shaking water off its back, the blip of a fish gulping a spider off the surface of the pond, the whir of a dragonfly’s wings. A crow lands on his roof; he hears the tick tack tick of its nails across the tin surface . . . . . . Where Hu’ng had hoped to be able to offer Bình and Tu a poem by Dao in celebration of the upcoming Mid-Autumn Festival, he will prepare a special lunch for the family instead. Cooking is something no one can steal from him—not poverty or the Party, not a war, not a girl, not age. Which is fortunate. Because poetry may inflame a heart and inspire a man to reach for lofty things, but pho is what sustains a nation. Books mentioned in this column:
Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.
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