In Camilla Gibb’s new novel, the best pho in Hanoi is not sold at an elegant restaurant or a busy street stall. Only a small but dedicated group of regular customers can find it, as they embark on a daily odyssey to find Old Man Hu’ng’s travelling pho cart, which could be parked anywhere from a back alley to an empty swimming pool. There, they enjoy Hu’ng’s succulent broth, the “subtle dance of seasonings” of a recipe that has persevered, along with its cook, through decades of war and poverty.
The elderly Hu’ng is at the core of The Beauty of Humanity Movement, a panoramic portrait of Vietnam’s past and present. While Hanoi is now a modern tourist destination, Hu’ng remains a vestige of Vietnam’s troubled history. Despite the city’s abundant amenities, he stubbornly clings to his life in a shantytown hut, washing his pots in a pond and sleeping on a straw mattress. The narrative ambles through Hu’ng’s history, illuminating an existence that has been both tormented by loss, and invigorated by his involvement in the ’50s with a cadre of spirited intellectuals who struggled to liberate art from the confines of an oppressive regime.
Woven into Hu’ng’s story are those of Maggie, a Vietnamese American hoping to gain insight into the life of her long-dead father; and Tu’, a Nike-clad tour guide who finds himself increasingly frustrated by the artificial, pastoral image of Vietnam he is forced to perpetuate. Compared to the obstinate, wounded Hu’ng, however, these characters seem flat, their middle-class existential dilemmas trivial.
Gibb’s prose can be cloying, but it conveys the scope of her subject matter. She skilfully illustrates the war’s impact on contemporary Vietnam by personifying its landscape as a human victim — “pockmarked and battle-scarred” roads, the “hollow carcass” of a building, the “bloodless kidney” of a swimming pool.
Her writing is at its strongest when describing the food her characters eat: the “buttery collapse” of a pork dish, the steam from the pho “rising like incense smouldering in a temple.” Aside from tantalizing the senses, these passages underscore how for Gibb’s characters food means more than just sustenance; it represents family, culture, and, most important, survival. Few scenes in the novel are more memorable than Hu’ng’s recollections of having to use pondweed to make vermicelli noodles during the war, or of killing the last duck in the village for his broth.
“The history of Vietnam lies in this bowl,” Gibb writes. In her hands, pho becomes a poignant testament to the tenacity of Vietnam itself.
