Author Camilla Gibb comes to Calgary with her latest The Beauty of Humanity Movement.
Camilla Gibb couldn’t resist inspiration of Vietnam
Discovering your heritage is like picking out the ingredients for the perfect bowl of soup. For many it’s as easy and refined as opening a can. But if you happen to be a simple country cook like Old Man Hung from a not-so-simple country Vietnam these conclusions may be hard to come by. You may just find yourself sifting through maggots scraping lichen off of pond rocks and drying weeds in the sun just to make noodles.
The Beauty of the Humanity Movement by author Camilla Gibb takes place in modern-day Hanoi. Hung lives in a shanty village on the banks of an urban pond in the shadows of a grim carbon emitting tire factory. He used to operate a pho shop that was frequented by many of Vietnam’s most prolific poets painters and visionaries. However the government rescinded his licence forcing Hung to illegally sell his product out of a makeshift cart. One day a young Vietnamese-American woman named Maggie Ly approaches the pho stand seeking information about her father who had disappeared while on his way to a re-education camp during the revolution.
Maggie and her mother had been rescued following the fall of Saigon and grew up living in Minnesota. To the Vietnamese though Maggie was known as Viet Kieu — a common slang phrase for traitor. Throughout the story she struggles for belonging and has difficulty asserting her identity — be it Vietnamese or American.
“I imagine for her being a Vietnamese face in America — one that had been given refuge at that time — would have been tough” says Gibb from her home in Toronto. “She is the face that would suggest American failure and a profoundly disillusioning passage of American history.”
Although the old man’s memory isn’t quite what it used to be he agrees to help Maggie with the assistance of his young adoptive relatives — Binh a carpenter and Tu a tour guide. These characters manage to highlight Vietnam’s adaptation since the American war. Tu remarkably memorizes countless pieces of American trivia in order to impress ex-military men who join his tour group.
“For them because (the war) was so long ago America means opportunity and entrepreneurialism” she says adding that the Vietnamese ought to be proud. They did win the war after all.
“That doesn’t mean that a legacy hasn’t been passed down but now that a trade agreement has been signed with the U.S. they can get American products and access status symbols like MTV and Nike which are revered around the world.”
This marks Gibb’s fourth novel and is the keenly anticipated follow-up to Sweetness in the Belly (2005) which was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and won the Trillium Book Award. Gibb was already two years into another novel when she first visited Vietnam.
“I wasn’t looking for distraction or any inspiration but my imagination got hijacked by contemporary Vietnam and after that trip I started writing and put my other project aside” she says.
The Beauty of the Humanity Movement is thoughtfully bonded with Vietnam’s history and is a literary chameleon bursting at the seams with culinary imagination.
