The Beauty of Humanity Movement

Tu' is a young tour guide working in Hanoi for a company called New Dawn. While he leads tourists through the city, including American vets on "war tours," he starts to wonder what it is they are seeing of Vietnam--and what they miss
entirely. Maggie, who is Vietnamese by birth but has lived most her life in the U.S., has returned to her country of origin in search of clues to her dissident father's disappearance during the war. Holding the story together is Old Man Hung, who has lived through decades of political upheaval and has still found a way to feed hope to his community of pondside dwellers.

This is a keenly observed and skillfully wrought novel about the reverberation of conflict through generations, the enduring legacy of art, and the redemption and renewal of long-lost love.

ABOUT THE NOVEL FROM CAMILLA GIBB

The Beauty of Humanity Movement
by Camilla Gibb


You never know where a novel’s going to come from. I don’t, at least. I’ve come to have the feeling that the novel tells me it needs to be written, rather than the other way around.

A couple of years ago I was working on a book that grew out of an idea. I’d only ever entered a novel through character before, never through a concept, and now I know why. The greatest ideas can lack a pulse on the page; the brain is not necessarily the best organ for novels. The heart is a much better judge and creator.

Still, I persevered with that doomed book, unable yet to admit defeat. I was at the height of my frustration with it when I happened to go on holiday to Vietnam, a place I had wanted to visit for years. Vietnam was a revelation to me, completely unexpected. It was young and vibrant, its heart practically leaping out of its body, and it threw any preconceived notions I had about the place out the window.

The Western narrative of Vietnam is entirely dominated by the war, a war that remains very entrenched in the American psyche. The American War, as the Vietnamese call it, has had a lasting impact, but that war was a ten-year ideological battle fought on and above Vietnamese soil—not eighty years of French occupation, not a thousand years of oppression by the Chinese. Culturally and politically speaking, Vietnam’s French and Chinese chapters of history have had far more influence on shaping the country and its struggles than the American War, but this isn’t a story we know in the West. We know Vietnam only in so far as it concerns us.

It was a young tour guide in Hanoi named Phuong who first offered me this perspective, one I would find reinforced over and over again as I travelled the length of the country. I was very struck by Phuong—he had a good job with a reputable tour agency, possessed a very sophisticated command of English, and was highly skilled at negotiating that often awkward and bumpy terrain between cultures. Born into an era of economic renewal, Phuong in many ways embodied the “new Vietnam.”

He gave me permission to ask anything and, being a writer, and an anthropologist in a former life, I asked a lot—about Vietnam, about him, about his life. “Is this your dream?” I remember asking in the midst of one very long traffic jam, to be a tour guide, to interact with foreigners, to serve as a bridge between cultures? Did a young Vietnamese man today have the luxury of being able to dream?

It was a good job, he told me, but no, it was not his dream. What he had always wanted, he confessed, was to have his own pho restaurant—to serve Vietnamese beef noodle soup to a Vietnamese clientele, adopting the standards he had seen employed in the service of foreigners in the country, treating his own people with this same kind of respect.

In that fantasy, his whole family would be involved. His mother, a butcher, would supply the beef. His father would work alongside him, his fiancée, Lan, who was studying accounting, would do the books. The restaurant would support everyone into their old age. As Western as Phuong seemed, he was very much a first-born son, loyal to his family and the expectations of his culture, governed by principles of Buddhism and Confucianism and by the fact that he was simply a very good guy.

This was the new Vietnam: at once versed in things Western, but committed to the work of developing Vietnam for the Vietnamese, not simply cultivating it for foreign consumption. And here was the seed of a new novel. A story I had not heard told before. Most significantly, here was the inspiration for one of the main characters—a character straddling these two worlds but increasingly conflicted by that divide.

“Who makes the best pho in Hanoi?” I asked Phuong one day.

“There’s an old man who doesn’t have a restaurant or a license to do business,” he said. “He has to keep moving locations because he is always getting fined by the police. People know where he is by word of mouth and they follow him. They bring their own bowls from home and they just run away whenever the police turn up.”

Who was this old man and how did he get to this place? I wondered. And so the novel began. An old man who is an itinerant pho seller. A young tour guide who is first among his devoted clientele. And a Vietnamese-American woman who turns up with questions about her father’s disappearance during the war. The three of them bound by hidden histories that come to light over the course of the novel.

It has been three years since Phuong and I first met, and I have been back once to Vietnam to see him and ask more questions. Phuong now has his pho restaurant, in which I am an investor. He also has a son, Duc Bao, whom he and his wife, Lan, asked me to give an English middle name. Duc David Bao is now two years old. And I now have a daughter on the way, and Phuong and Lan have likewise done me the honour. They have given her the name Thu—autumn—the most beautiful of the Vietnamese seasons, the season of blooming lotuses and the full moon into which she will be born, an auspicious name, they tell me, that will mark her “as perfect and beautiful and lucky as the moon.”

This book is dedicated to Phuong and Lan and Bao.


From the Hardcover edition.