The Beauty of Humanity Movement Read Online Free PDF

forehead when he dropped her off at school on the base every morning—a school for the children of the friendliest of friendly Vietnamese, those who were working directly for the Americans. Her mother worked as a nurse, and her father as a translator because, although he could no longer paint, he could speak English thanks to the four years he’d spent studying in Chicago in the early 1950s.
    “I missed you today,” he would often say when he picked her up.
    “But, Daddy, I was here at school the whole time. Just where you left me.”
    There were days when there was no school and the three of them stayed in their shuttered room, her father kneeling on the cracked linoleum floor, bending over paper and sketching a story for her with his claw while her mother cooked over a kerosene burner, the smell of rice mixing with the incense they burned to mask the stench of sewage beyond the bamboo curtain.
    Her parents would whisper at night, Maggie lying on one mattress, her parents on another, discussing the progress of the war, making plans. Maggie’s stomach would flutter as if full of fish. “
If
we have a choice,” her mother would whisper, and the fish would get rough with their tails.
    Only when they were standing on the tarmac at Tân Sn Nht air base in 1975 about to board a U.S. military plane did Maggie realize a choice had been made. Her father had stepped out of line as they approached the plane, joining the other men gathered to one side. Maggie broke free from her mother, running toward her father, mashing her forehead into his stomach and digging her nails into the back of his thighs.
    “Little one,” he said, trying to loosen her grip with his claws. “Listen.” He squatted so that he could face her. “We have no choice, Maggie. The men who did this to my hands? The men from the North? They are coming to Saigon.”
    The heat rising from the tarmac wavered like water and the fumes of the plane made Maggie feel woozy. She buried her face in her father’s neck and inhaled the peppery smell of his sweat and the starch from the collar of his shirt.
    “It is women and children first to safety,” her father said, patting her back with his claw. “I will be coming on another plane.”
    Maggie looked over her shoulder at her mother in her nurse’s uniform, holding a baby that was not her own. Lined up behind her werehundreds of nurses and nuns holding the hands of children and cradling a great many crying babies.
    “You go back to your mother now. You keep her company. Be strong,” he said, giving her a gentle push.
    “But, Daddy—”
    “She needs you, Mouse.”
    When Maggie stepped out of the arrivals building at Hanoi’s airport a year ago, the combination of jet fuel and sweat and the starched shirts of men had caused her to drop her bags and bury her face in her hands. The smell of home was indistinguishable from the smell of leaving home: each inhalation a mix of familiarity and fear.
    The recognition ended there. Maggie entered a city so much brighter and busier than the cold and dark portrait of Hanoi she had inherited from her mother. The optimism and energy of the place, with its doors thrown open to the West, its new wealth and possibilities—her mother wouldn’t have believed the spirit, the surging adrenalin of three and a half million dreams being pursued simultaneously with little concern for what is stirred up in their wake.
    Maggie found herself in a world of teenagers, a generation fuelled by hopes and hormones, people who had no interest in being dragged back to the past. They face forward, the future, the West. The past is abandoned: the pain of it, perhaps; the shame of it. It’s old men Maggie must turn to now, old men with their ailing, fading memories and their fears.
    A few months ago, an artist whose work Maggie has on display in the hotel gallery had directed her to just one such old man, telling her about a café that served as an informal gallery of artwork from the dark days