The Beauty of Humanity Movement by Camilla Gibb Read Free Book Online Page A

himself slept outside. The frame for Ðạo’s portrait—that, he hadn’tbeen in a position to make for years, not until he found a way to sell phagain and someone paid him with a piece of glass.
    Hng notices a spiderweb glistening at the edge of the frame now. He can picture Bình as a boy, his face contorted in concentration as he counted the silk rings of a web. The fate of those on earth depends upon honouring the ancestral spirits, and Hng has kept Ðạo’s memory alive for Bình, whose father disappeared when he was only six years old.
    Hng peels the silken web away with his forefinger, lights a stick of incense and offers up his hands in prayer. He wishes Ðạo well on whatever higher plane he now inhabits and he prays that they will know each other in the next life. But there are things Hng must impart before he allows the spirits to take him on that journey. At a minimum he has a recipe to pass on. “The taste of home” is how an artist had once, long ago, described his ph.
    My God, thinks Hng. That someone. His hungry eyes hovering above a bowl. The man had been travelling; he had come by ship from America and his legs were still wobbly. He was carrying his belongings in a sack and he said he hadn’t had a bowl of phin years. Hng had wondered how the man could still be standing.
    The man’s name was Lý Văn Hai, Hng is sure of it. He must tell Miss Maggie Lý that he did once meet her father, if only briefly. He will make his way to her fancy hotel tomorrow and do just that, he thinks, patting the card in his shirt pocket.
    “Ðạo,” he says to the portrait in front of him, “do you remember Lý Văn Hai? Eating phin my shop one morning? You must have been there too.”
    He needs Ðạo’s help. There is simply too much for one old man alone to remember.

New Dawn
    M aggie had deliberated about returning to the old man for breakfast this morning. She doesn’t want to push, but she’s impatient. You left him your card, she reminds herself. He knows how to get in touch if anything comes to mind.
    She stops in the kitchen to thank Rikia for directing her to Hng yesterday, then battles her way into her office holding a cup of coffee at shoulder height. The room is a bit of a disaster, crammed with pieces of art she has pulled out of storage leaning four deep against each wall. She has to tear through a forest of cardboard and brown paper just to reach her desk, spilling half her cup of coffee as she does.
    She’s eighty-five per cent of the way through cataloguing the hotel’s collection—an incomparable body of work from the colonial era found stashed in the bomb shelter beneath the hotel. The art had survived both the war and the decades of the hotel’s service as a Communist Partyguesthouse, during which the building had deteriorated into a rat- and bat-infested dump.
    The story of the collection’s discovery had reached her through a colleague at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. “There’s a real opportunity there,” he had said, and Maggie had known this to be true in her gut. A hidden vault of art in her father’s city. The opportunity to bring its contents to light. Her mother no longer alive to dissuade her. And Daniel’s feelings no longer a consideration before her own.
    Maggie came up with a proposal, which she pitched to the French management company undertaking the Metropole’s refurbishment, to open a contemporary gallery in the hotel. Her timing couldn’t have been better. Interest in contemporary Vietnamese art has surged over the last decade—having a gallery at the hotel made sound business sense. So did having a Vietnamese-speaking curator with a master’s degree in curation from the Art Institute of Chicago who could do the work of preserving and cataloguing the original collection.
    She spent her first month and a half in Hanoi below ground in a metal chamber with a flashlight. Her first weeks were all cool surfaces, taut canvases and a pounding heart. She pored