The Beauty of Humanity Movement (2010)

"Old Man Hung makes the best pho in the city and has done so for decades. Where he once had a shop, though, he no longer does, because the rents are exorbitant, both the hard rents and the soft - the bribes a proprietor must pay to the police in this new era of freedom."

Camilla Gibb's latest novel, The Beauty of Humanity Movement, explores the classic trope of Old World vs. New. In it, American raised Maggie Ly returns to Vietnam in search of information about her father, an artist who disappeared into Communist re-education camps after the fall of Saigon. Her search leads her to Old Man Hung, an itinerant pho seller who once owned a shop frequented by artists, but whose memory of Maggie's father and his fate is, at best, spotty. Maggie is brought into Hung's circle, which includes Tu, a young Vietnamese tour guide who is caught in the clash between the conservative values of his community and the ever growing American cultural influences, and who joins in Maggie's search for answers.

Stories such as this can sometimes be problematic, in that they leave themselves open to accusations of cultural appropriation, but Gibb tells the story with a great deal of sensitivity and respect and the complete absence of exoticization is one of the novel's many strengths. Gibb crafts a story and characters that compliment Vietnam's complex history, showing a nation that has been the victim of forces both outside and within, but also a nation with enough strength at its core to endure. The nation portrayed in the story is one in transition, the features of hardline Communism still apparent in some aspects, but one that is also begining to embrace Capitalism. It is also a nation struggling against popular perception of itself as provincial and unsophisticated, an image which artists such as Maggie's father and the others who frequented Hung's shop challenged with their work, but which was buried during the course of cultural cleansing re-education.

Gibb's prose is engaging and the story often powerful. The characters and the community in the novel are crafted with care, with Gibb slowly revealing the depths of both as the story progresses. Though The Beauty of Humanity Movement never quite attains the weight of her previous work, 2005's Sweetness In The Belly, it's still an excellent read and certainly one of the best books of 2010.