Historical Fiction

As a children's book person, I love stories that bring new horizons to young people and in the process, often, to me. Sometimes a book provides a look backward (a new persepctive on history and culture)... good historical fiction. A wonderful such book is The Land I Lost: Adventures of a Boy in Vietnam, by Quang Nhuong Huynh, published in 1986. Set in Vietnam in the decades before the American war, it is a story of the author's growing up time in the midst of his extended family. The family farms rice and lives in a village where cooperation among farmers is central to their lives. The qualities prized in the water buffalo which are much a part of a family's labors are a combination of mountain-bred buffalo and lowland buffalo: aggression and patience. The young narrator accompanies his father to a distant village to purchase a buffalo which they hope will be ideal for them; the boy hopes the buffalo will be a playmate as well as a great help to the family. They find just such such a one! The story is filled with vignettes that bring the Vietnam countryside alive -- forays into the jungle where snakes and other animals lurk, tasks that necessarily fill a young boy's life, such as bringing water from the river for the family.

When it was evident in our own travels that water buffalo are very much a part of agrarian life in Vietnam today, I asked our guide Huy if what I had learned about the family's water buffalo held true, if the same qualities were prized. He understood my question right away and said yes: the "strength" of a highland buffalo combines with the "skill" of a lowland buffalo to produce a valued family beast. I also asked about the wildlife found in the countryside and highland areas, so much a part of the book. He replied that much of the wildlife in the countryside was depleted, sometimes entirely, by the use of Agent Orange, the herbicide and defoliant used by the U. S. military in Vietnam in the 1960s. We have long been painfully aware of the tragic affects in loss of life and birth defects among human beings as a result, I had not, frankly, considered the result for the creatures of the countryside. New understanding and perspective for me.

So yes: historical fiction can surely be an invaluable stepping stone to understanding a new land, a different time -- the ways a culture continues and the changes a country undergoes.

 

Favorite Foods

While I cannot speak for Mollie and Marianne regarding favorite foods, I thought I'd begin a blog entry about one of my favorite pasttimes: eating. We have had many delicious meals; I will only hit a few highlights.

1) The croissants. A happy legacy from the French. Light, perfect with creamy butter. Available in every breakfast buffet we have had. Perfect with the strong, good coffee Vietnam offers. Especially delicious following an early morning walk along the ocean.

2) Passion fruit. The outside is a pretty red color; inside it's filled with countless slippy seeds (one fellow traveler called it a "slimy yellow mess" but I prefer to think of it as a sweet-tart confection that feels both healthy and decadent). This morning Mollie discovered passion fruit yoghurt on the buffet. I put passion fruit yoghurt onto my passion fruit half and was in heaven.

3) Barbecue Chicken and Green Mango Salad made by us. Today. At the Morning Glory Restaurant in Hoi An. We and our fellow travelers had a fantastic cooking class led by Lulu, a young chef who had worked at the restaurant for seventeen of her thirty-one years.

4) Lemongrass sorbet. Best experienced in the middle of a 95-degree day.

 

 

Water Buffalo

From Marianne

Huy told us there are three important things for a man to have:
1. a water buffalo,
2. a house,
3. a good wife.

The water buffalo helps by working in the rice field. It will not eat the rice crop or the straw from the rice, but eats only grass.

Killing a water buffalo is considered a serious crime...like murder.

When Huy was a young boy he was told that he could be out all day and that when sunset came and it was time to go home he could follow their water buffalo and it would lead him home.

Bamboo

From Marianne

According to Huy, the bamboo tree represents the Vietnamese people., "bendable but very strong."

2500 years ago, the hill people divided. The more adventurous people left the hills and came to lower lands near the rivers. They brought bamboo with them from the hills and planted it to serve as a fence.

Bamboo matures in five years. It has a strong root system and helps to stabilize the soil.

Items made from bamboo can be as small as a toothpick or as large as a house. Products made from bamboo bring in $200 million annually.

Huy said that bamboo chopsticks are the best chopsticks. "One stick is stable, the other one is in motion....(pause) like a couple."

Language: Tones Matter

From Marianne

Huy's lesson today, as we rode the bus to visit a small village, was about the Vietnamese language.

Vietnamese is a very musical language. It has six different tones. If one pronounces "Chao" with a descending tone, it means "Hello"; with an ascending tone, it means "I'm hungry."

In written Vietnamese, the accent marks (which show how a syllable should be pronounced) change the meaning of a syllable. Huy gave us an example using the word, "ma." He said it six different ways and the words meant ghost, mother, horse, tomb, young rice or what if, depending on the tone he used. A group member suggested that using the same syllable we could say "What if mother's horse and young rice are in the tomb?"

In written Vietnamese, the accent marks also change the meaning of words. Example: by changing the accent marks the sentence "I'm waiting for you at school" becomes "I'm naked waiting for you."

Thirty percent of Vietnamese vocabulary is borrowed from the Chinese. The word's pronunciation is kept, but the meaning of the word is different in Vietnamese.

There are different regional and provincial accents. The Hanoi accent is used as the standard accent and is used in singing. Huy explained that radio and TV news programs use announcers from different regions on a regular rotation in order to be fair to the regions. Mondays may have an announcer from Hanoi; Tuesdays may have an announcer from the central or southern region.

The danbau is a unique Vietnamese instrument with one string. Its sound is core to the Vietnamese people; it's like the call of the homeland. Huy noted the link between music and language.

Education

Although Huy says the Vietnamese will be quick to say how unlike the Chinese they are (not a happy history there -- yet one more chapter in the domination of this country), there is much Chinese influence in the Vietnamese culture.  Nowhere is this more evident than the importance of education. The Temple of Literature in HaNoi provides centuries of evidence.  This temple is a tribute to Confucius who, in the 6th century, created a code of civil law.

The entrance to the temple includes rows and rows of giant tablets, sitting on the backs of huge turtles, inscribed with the names of those who passed their highest educational test. The oldest of these stone tablets -- each maybe 8' tall -- was inscribed in 1442.   The latest is from the 19th century.

Turtles appear everywhere: the feet of huge stone tables are turtles, there is an enormous golden turtle  featured in a glass box next to the altar to Confucius, and just outside the altar is a statue of a crane maybe 10' tall, its feet on the back of a turtle.

 The sculpture captured my attention, and if I can just figure out how to get my photos off my camera and onto this blog, I'll share it.  We didn't hear the story about that image until yesterday, which Marianne will share that in another blog.

But I am struck by the presence of the turtle, since in Native American tradition we are said to be living on turtle island.

Land use

The flight from HaNoi to Danang did not allow for much study of the land below-- air quality was too poor--but first impression was of extremely dense pockets of housing in islands surrounded by large mosaics of rice.  It certainly looked that way on the ground. Rice is grown right up to the walls of four story "skinny houses."

Since half of the country is mountainous, its 90 million people live primarily where food is more easily grown -- on the flat lands and flood plains near the coast. all land in Viet Nam is owned by the state, but the uses are individually owned and taxed accordingly.  Farmland enjoys very low taxes, and to encourage farming, no taxes are charged for the first 4 or 5 years.  Land can be out under permanent agricultural preservation.

Homes traditionally have that skinny, tall, railroad quality since, starting in the 13th & 14th centuries houses were taxed on the width of the building. Ground floors are devoted to shops ( the majority of people are self-employed), and families live upstairs, the youngest generation at the top.

Landing in DaNang, I could see what looked like neighborhood blocks with only one or two skinny houses within -- the rest lost to war? Or not built? This city, the third largest in Viet Nam, is much less dense, and homes tend to be a little broader. According to Huy (of course, all of this is according to Huy), the mayor of DaNang is responsible for reducing density and retaining more green space within the core.  It's the city where Huy would like to move, leaving his native HaNoi.  We passed an enormous, multi-block long sports complex open to everyone and intensively used with courts, fields, etc.

Everywhere along the stretch of new road where the Furama Resort is located, there are frames of buildings begun and abandoned.  Long fences promote future development of "beachfront retreat," new gated condominiums and resorts planned but halted due to the same recession we have been facing.  International investors, I presume.  On a smaller scale, we saw the same thing in HaNoi--many partially constructed homes, piles of sand and bricks, lumber, metal sheeting sitting idle.

I wonder what this stretch of road will look like in another decade --the new Gold Coast of vacationland? And what about the rising oceans? I asked Huy.  He thinks the bedrock foundation and ridge of mountains to the west make this much less vulnerable to flooding and climate change than the southern part of Viet nam, but I wonder.