THE BEAUTY OF HUMANITY MOVEMENT 

by Camilla Gibb

Penguin Press, HC
(Mar 2011, $25.95, 320 pages)

At the opening of Camilla Gibb’s The Beauty of Humanity Movement, an attractive American-Vietnamese woman (“Viet Kieu”) named Miss Maggie shows up at a busy pho stand in Hanoi’s working class outskirts. Maggie is an art curator in Hanoi on the business trip she’s always waited for. She left Hanoi young, after her father Ly Van Hai, a painter during the communist occupation, was imprisoned. Old Man Hung, the man ladling soup from behind the rickety wooden cart, knew of Ly Van Hai’s work, and came close to dying like him.

Throughout the book, grandiose flashbacks regale Hung's past, centering on a revolutionary literary arts circle he falls into and forever changes him. During the communist overhaul in the 1950s, Hung's pho shop was a salon for an anti-communist prophet, Dao, and his followers. Hung was never imprisoned, but many of the group were, including Maggie’s father, sent to re-education camps to be tortured, mutilated and eventually killed for expressing anti-communist opinions. Now, Hung lives impoverished, making a living by selling homemade pho and sharing with friends what he remembers of Dao’s masterful poetry.

Gibb must have been reading Willa Cather's My Antonia when cooking up ideas for this novel. An immigrant story set in the American West, My Antonia is monumental in its reliance on traditional foods as cultural symbols. It’s not a scarce technique among literary writers in any era, but Gibb's focus on Vietnamese culture, with a constant focus on pho, is incomparable.

As a child, impoverished parents send Hung from farm-life to his uncle Chien’s home in Hanoi, where he learns the art of making pho. Now an elder, again impoverished and living outside the city in a shantytown, Hung watches his past play out before him: "Often the only other people awake when Hung pushed his cart through the city before dawn are groups of children traipsing in from the countryside, children whose families cannot afford to keep them in school [. . .]". The trip from outer to inner Hanoi to serve people pho illustrates a constant link between past and present Vietnamese culture, a connection that cannot be broken.

There is also a strong focus on art perception, and how the world you hail from affects that viewpoint, like when Tu, Dao's grandson, tours Hanoi's art studios with Maggie. Tu is baffled by the lies he sees in contemporary art: romantic depictions of traditional Vietnamese farmers tilling the land, nothing close to the post-Cold War, global Vietnam he experiences. Unlike Maggie, Tu is a realist, and wishes his country’s artists would tell it like it is.

Overall the mash-up of contemporary and traditional Vietnam leads to insightful questions in Humanity. Is this how prophets like Dao wanted post-war Vietnam life, even if the enemies were defeated? Scenes flop focus from the perspective of youngsters like Tu and his attraction to gangsta rap and basketball shoes, to Hung's static symbolism of Vietnam, parodied as an old work-horse, pulling his cart through the poor streets of Hanoi and surroundings. Hung’s view of Vietnam is, like Hung himself, near death, depleted by a tragic and disturbing history.

- John Coleman

Home