The Beauty of Humanity Movement (10 page)

T
s father now has endless carpentry work. He employs two assistants, four skilled woodworkers and an apprentice, but still, with so much construction going on he must say no to jobs on occasion. Despite his enthusiasm for private enterprise, Bình is still more craftsman than businessman.

T
s mother, meanwhile, had knocked on the doors of every one of the new butcher shops that opened in the 1990s until she found one proprietor who was obliged to listen because he came from the same village as her mother. The story is now legendary in their family. “Tell me nine ways to prepare pork for Tet and I’ll consider hiring you,” the
butcher said. And so T
s mother recalled the pork dishes they used to eat during the holidays at her grandmother’s house. She described the sensation of her teeth collapsing through fried rice paper into the soft ground pork middle of a spring roll, the crisp saltiness of pig skin fried with onions, the silk of the finest pork and cinnamon pâté coating her tongue, the soft chew of pork sausages, the buttery collapse of pig’s trotters stewed with bamboo shoots, the ticklish texture of pig intestines resting on vermicelli and the fill of sticky rice, pork and green beans boiled in banana leaves. Just when she was about to falter, she remembered how her father used to reminisce about the dishes his mother made for Tet during his boyhood in Huê: pork bologna, fermented pork hash, pig’s brain pie …

The butcher raised his finger. “You’re hired. Stop there before I fire you.”

T
did not have to do time in a factory: he grew up in a world where he was free to choose a career for himself. What right did he have to complain about his teaching job? But then he’d met Ph
ng, a part-time music teacher a few years older than he who taught classical
đàn ba’u
two days a week. Ph
ng, moping in the teachers’ lounge, had called theirs a thankless profession. This had unleashed a sympathetic torrent from T
, marking the beginning of an illustrious friendship.

Ph
ng had the spirit and imagination of an artist and entrepreneur, enough to inflate the dreams for two. By the end of that school year, once Ph
ng had lobbied T
s father for consent, they had both submitted their resignations and registered for a diploma course at Hanoi Tourism College.

You are the Ð
i m
i generation, the instructors at the college told them, the children of the renovation, the future of Vietnam—a future that depends on opening even more doors to international trade and
relations. T
feels the elation of being poised at the vanguard of the future as a proud, fully fledged, nationally accredited tour guide shaking the hands of the world.