The Beauty of Humanity Movement

There is something discordant about the timeless portrait of Vietnam that adorns the front cover of Camilla Gibb’s cumbersomely titled book, The Beauty of Humanity Movement. The effect is heightened by a title that suggests forces of progress and disruption, not the stasis of pastoral tranquility. The disunion of cover and title, unfortunately, is reflective of the book’s larger failures. In a strange simulacrum, Gibb’s book is uncomfortably close to the “benign, nationalistic art the Party stil

There is something discordant about the timeless portrait of Vietnam that adorns the front cover of Camilla Gibb’s cumbersomely titled book, The Beauty of Humanity Movement. The effect is heightened by a title that suggests forces of progress and disruption, not the stasis of pastoral tranquility. The disunion of cover and title, unfortunately, is reflective of the book’s larger failures. In a strange simulacrum, Gibb’s book is uncomfortably close to the “benign, nationalistic art the Party still encourages,” a quip made within by a Hanoi gallery owner who produces a decadent alternative art.

In a narrative so aware of art and representation, it is hard to believe that Gibb herself could not have been aware of the ironic nature of the misguided pairing. “It has a timelessness to it,” observes her protagonist, Miss Maggie Ly, while wandering through another gallery looking at similar pastoral scenes, “an almost inconspicuous avoidance of history.” And while the book itself does a commendable job of reframing history, hardly avoiding it, it would still be charitable to suggest that the cover was intended irony.

More cynically, the cover, beautiful, inviting, and “depicted through a gauzelike veil of rain,” announces the book as women’s fiction. Given that women purchase an outsized share of books in the United States, this may be understandable. Yet this is not just a book for female readers. Its complex treatment of the American War in Vietnam sheds new light on the once dark city of Hanoi, its wartime deprivations laid bare. Gibb’s portrayal of the injustices of a totalitarian government and the scarcities of communism read as acutely as does her depiction of a Vietnam which has thrown open its doors to the world, a transformation as fraught as it is exciting. The cover, unfortunately, reflects none of this and does the book an injustice.

There is much to criticize about this book, but it is worth noting that Gibb is an accomplished storyteller. The novel itself satisfyingly blurs the lines between post-colonial literature, historical genre fiction, and most appealingly, what might be called a fiction of the anthropological. Jan Stuart, writing in The New York Times, described the book as “essential reading for anyone mulling a visit to Hanoi.” So well done are the descriptions of what it is like to live in a Vietnamese shantytown or to squat in the empty pool of a luxury hotel still under construction while slurping a bowl of hot soup with laborers, that it may actually obviate the need to visit.

Gibb is an anthropologist and has put the methods of her profession to good use. The rich fruits of the participant-observer in action, however, are not the only culinary gifts offered to the reader. An informative natural history of Pho, a dish as defining of Vietnam as any other, tantalizing leads the reader into a story of the octogenarian Old Man Hung. It is he who ingeniously pushes the reader deep into the history of Vietnam, from the waning days of French colonialism in the early 1950s to the darkest days of the American War, when twelve days of bombing over the Christmas of 1972 set Hanoi alight. Similarly, Hung’s fictive grandson, Tu, carries the reader into modern day Vietnam, after Doi Noi, the economic liberalization that has occurred at an ever quickening pace since 1986. Importantly, though Hung and Tu compete with Maggie for the reader’s attention, they never distract.

In fact, the balance of characters and plots is nicely mimicked in the content of the book. For instance, that same bowl of Pho, crafted with a balance of ingredients, filled by the delicate balance between Hung's two hands, also gives insight into the balance of north and south in Vietnam. Even today, says Hung, the Pho of Hanoi and the north is austere and pure while that of Ho Chi Minh City and the south is polluted by vegetables and other vestiges of an imperialist legacy. The attuned reader will also note other instances of yin and yang at work: communism and capitalism, the resilience of nature and the destruction of man, and perverted art versus the backward art mentioned above. These themes make for rich extra-textual reading.

Despite Gibb’s ability to subtly weave together balanced plots and characters with historical narrative, there are a number of false starts; subplots that lead nowhere and offer the reader nothing in the way of understanding. Take Mr. Bob Brentwood from North Dakota as example number one. Though seemingly written-in to avoid a one-sided portraiture of Americans (Brentwood is both a Vietnam veteran and noveau Buddhist), the scene between Brentwood and Tu, his younger travel guide in Hanoi, ends with an unarticulated breakdown of understanding when the latter refuses to indulge the former in offering up a mutual prayer.

More generally, though, the opposite criticism of The Beauty of Humanity Movement may be leveled. If there is one aspect of this book besides the cover that seems blatantly set on earning the novel the moniker ‘women’s fiction’, it is the conspicuous and unselfconscious tying of loose narrative ends. In short, everything works out in this book. For those readers weaned on the skepticism towards plotting that contemporary fiction encourages, even demands, this book will feel too plotted, too resemblent of genre fiction. The only positive aspect of this disappointing fact is that it makes for easy reading, not exactly a trait that defines great literature.

The unobservant reader may be tempted to disagree that everything works out as intended, particularly with regard to the relationship between Maggie and Tu. When Simon Devereaux, the half-French, half-Vietnamese art professor makes his appearance in the last chapters, flirting with Maggie as he does, the conditioned reaction of the reader will be one of disappointment as it will signal the end of Tu’s erotic hopes. Yet the incestual seeds of the impossible romantic relationship between Maggie and Tu had been sewed much earlier in the book when Maggie, on several occasions, referred to Tu as a brother-like figure. While in agreement that Maggie’s fluttering eyes, aimed as they are at an interloper of a character, at the end of the book are an annoyance, they should hardly come as a surprise. The turn simply represents another instance of the uniformly tied storylines.

Overplotting and extraneous characters aside, the writing is often clunky. Part of the reason for this is the indeterminate, disembodied narration which often resembles that of the voice-over from American cartoons of the 1960s. Among the quirky results: “Ah, and here is Binh, greeting him quietly as always, bowl in hands,” or “It is three kilometers southwest of the Old Quarter, at least two of them on cracked asphalt, open drains running at the edge of the roads, and oops!—that’s unfortunate—there goes a small dog disappearing into a sewer without a grate.”

At other times, the poor writing impedes the progress of the narrative. After one erotically charged moment, we read that “Tu suddenly felt very shy. He felt other things too, but very shy was perhaps second on the list.” At another point, Maggie reflects on a past conversation with a colleague. "“There’s a real opportunity there,” he had said, and Maggie had known this to be true in her gut." In as much as her bygone gut feeling matters at all to the story, it should have at least been syntactically introduced prior to her colleague telling her something was known to her and thus to the reader to be already true.

Finally, on several occasions, Gibb fails to use potentially lucrative symbolic items placed conspicuously throughout the text and then, incongruously, introduces new symbols with dubious meaning in their place. Take the relationship between Hung and Lan, neighbors who, improbably, have not spoken for more than forty years. When their untenable relationship ends in 1959, Lan has only one sleeve left to sew on a shirt that she is making for Hung. When the relationship is renewed years later, the shirt, ripe for reappearance is nowhere to be found. In its stead is a valueless vile of MSG crystals collected by Lan from a time before they were commonplace; or more accurately, a vile of deflated meaning due to the author’s lapse.

From its cover onward, The Beauty of Humanity Movement is a curious book. The very idea of a movement implies a unity of truth, even when adjectively conditioned as is Gibb’s. Post-colonial literature, however, has always looked skeptically on claims to the unity of truth. Transgression and disruption are liberating qualities in societies plagued by violence and warfare, beset by colonial occupiers, or threatened by imperialism. Precision belongs to the powerful while ambiguity is a weapon of the weak. Strikingly, none of these features are present in this novel. Even identity, so often an important focal point in post-colonial literature, is disappointingly blurred. Vietnamese, Viet Kieu (watered down Vietnamese raised abroad), and Vietnamese-American are all terms of reference employed, but not fleshed out. Identity, frustratingly, hardly affects voice. In the absence of these critical challenges, which require far more movement than is contained within this book, there is an echoing sound within a womb-like chamber rather than the resonance that one might expect in a literature of Vietnam. The Beauty of Humanity Movement is a pleasurable read, albeit one that fails to challenge the intellect or the imagination.