The Beauty of Humanity Movement Read Online Free PDF Page A

over a greasy wad of small bills, then makes his way unburdened toward a pink pyramid of stacked pigs in the far corner of the market.
    Anh waves a large blade in greeting. She puts the knife down and wipes her bloodied hands on her white smock before delicately taking the business card Hng holds out to her by the edges. She does not read English either. They need someone of Ts generation to translate. Anh calls over the fishmonger’s son, but he shakes his head: he was in a boat as a boy, not a classroom.
    The district propaganda broadcast is reaching its peak as the business card is passed from bloodied hand to fish-scaled hand to muddied hand throughout the stalls of the market. A voice backfires like an exhaust pipe through the loudspeaker, spluttering the names and addresses of those who have neglected to pay their garbage collection fee or renew their motorbike licence or turned eighteen and failed to report for military duty.
    Having heard his own name so many times, Hng is immune to this public shaming. He’s more attuned to the smaller sounds, the burps of nature. Frogs croaking their final days in pans of slimy water; birds twittering in their lacy cages. Despite all the years he has lived in Hanoi, Hng can still hear a canary sing above the propagandabroadcast, over the thrum and burr of engines and the orchestra of competing horns. He can still discern a note of nature’s grace.
    The card is a stampede of fingerprints by the time it is returned to Hng, but someone has written a translation of the words on its reverse.
    M ISS M AGGIE L Y
    Curator of Art
Hotel Sofitel Metropole
15 Ngô Quyn Street
    luxury at the heart of Hanoi since 1901

A Seam Between Worlds
    M aggie’s taxi is now wedged into a jam of idling engines. She wants to reach over the driver, punch the steering wheel and join the chorus of horns. On any other day she would simply lean her head back against the seat, resigned to the futility of fighting Hanoi’s traffic, but she feels renewed this morning, more hopeful than she has in months. That faint glimmer of recognition in the old man’s eyes as he repeated her father’s name had been like finally seeing a sliver of light peek out from under an iron curtain. She’d wanted to slip her hand underneath, whatever the risk of being crushed, to grope around for a hand to take hold of on the other side.
    She’s spent a frustrating and painful year combing through archives that have yielded no evidence of her father. She’s found no reference to him in the archives of the Fine Arts Museum, not even a single catalogue for an exhibition where his work might have been shown. Even hispresence at the city’s former École des Beaux Arts is in question—there’s no record of his attendance at the school. The censors literally cut the names of dissident artists out of registries and publications. They’ve been systematic and thorough revisionists, leaving a history full of holes.
    The records would suggest Lý Văn Hai never existed. But if that is so, whose daughter is she? And who was the man with the hands gnarled like a boxer’s from an accident he refused to talk about, the one who taught her to write the English alphabet with a pen gripped between the knuckles of his index and middle fingers, the one who sketched crude animals for her with his claw, trying to guide her own hand in imitation as they knelt side by side on the floor of their room in Saigon?
    He used to hold her hand every morning as they walked down the street together even though he had no grip. People referred to him as her grandfather because he was relatively old when she was born, the fourth and only one of her mother’s pregnancies to result in a child. His hair had turned completely white during the three years he’d been interned in a re-education camp after returning from the U.S.
    For a Vietnamese man, Maggie’s father displayed what she knew even then to be an unusual amount of public affection, kissing her on the