Life and Death, Hurt and Healing in Southern Vietnam

Bear with me! I’m about to  give you a “word picture” firstly of a trip I and five other students took to the home of Mai (the harmonica girl) in Bam Lau in the Xuyen Moc district of Viet Nam.  For reasons that I won’t go into I’ve lost all the really great photos I took that day, but I’m rising to the challenge of recall.  This was a breezy bus-trip of about 20 kilometres followed by a scorching walk of about one km which tapered into what some would call a “jungle path”.  I’m learning that our English colloquialisms don’t really describe realities so don’t take “jungle path” in the way you’ve always understood it.

Mai is 17 and her younger sister Hong is 15.  They ran to the dusty red motorbike pathway to greet us.  They had been working in the kitchen all morning making a nice dinner for all of us to share in a few hours.  I was offered a large glass of water and crushed ice.  How the ice got to this “outpost” and remained in a solid form is something I didn’t bother to ask.  It just felt so refreshing.  And it still surprises me when these lovely teenagers race to me with open arms shouting “La—rry”.

The wooden house shows light through parallel-laid boards.  The wind-worn planks are reminiscent of the well-aged “fish stores” of south-shore Nova Scotia.  A bamboo stick holds open a one-foot long twig-shaped shutter where fresh air can enter.   I immediately inquired into the state of the seven puppies Mai had told me about in an email.  They had been poisoned in the night by a thief and, so the story goes, sold for dog-meat.  The progeny-less mother I was happy to observe was able to move at greyhound speeds while running through the forest and playing with the kids.

I shifted quietly into the kitchen to watch the girls at work.  Huong, Xiu, Trang and My who had traveled with me from Xuyen Moc stepped in with ease and grace to help with preparations.  Here was an open wood fire place at floor level and it was hard to get a clear photo of the working Mai through the smoke.  The floor of cracked and uneven tile shaded into cinder and dirt.

Outside the house lengths of bamboo undergirded by additional bamboo y-shaped supports served as the sturdy clothesline—perfectly reliable in this hot summer sun.  We washed our feet under a tap from the huge rain-water cistern and all moved down to the creek, river or brook where all the teenagers including Tom my faithful 17 year old friend and translator waded in, as did I, into the cool refreshing muddy water.

Mai’s mother is a widow at 50ish.  Her land seems to border on the brook and jungle.  She seems to have planted some tiny coffee trees for future growth; there are many banana trees, lots of bamboo patches and shoots plus a number of new black pepper trees.  Several of the younger girls (My and Hong) climbed a Vietnamese apple tree and gleefully tossed apples down to the rest of us.  Inhibition is a non-entity.

Dinner was amazing and full of surprises, just like any traditional Vietnamese cuisine, and I’ve been getting that as a daily fare in the rice-growing community of Long An.  Most of what people eat seems gathered from their immediate surroundings.  In this case it was “crab soup” which seemed to be the effervescence of a few small land crabs which Mai and her younger brother had gathered by flashlight the night before.  It looked and tasted more like what one might skim off of a good bit of boiled hamburger.  You don’t refuse these things no matter what your palette because one learns quickly how much work has gone into sharing with you a dish for which people take unique pride.

It was much later in the day that Mai’s mother returned home from her work on her cashew plantation.  She had been working since early morning mowing grass and fertilizing around her only real “cash-crop”.  With her older son’s help and those of some labouring neighbors a good yield would consist of two tons of cashews, but like Western Canadian farmers one can never guarantee a good year.  Everything built into a year of family support depends on the cashew yield.  I made a number of inquiries relating to crop insurance and family income.  The only safeguard would be an investor.  One thousand American dollars represents the family income for a year.  I won’t estimate the work from dawn to mid-afternoon in the hot sun.  If you are like me you probably didn’t realize that the cashew nut is, in the larger picture, the curled worm-like appendage to a cashew fruit.  I buy plenty of cashews in Vietnam.  They are a local product and a treat welcomed by young and old alike.  But I’ll never again take cashews quite so for granted as I have done in the past.

I gazed thoughtfully at Mai and Hong’s mom.  I had wanted to meet her for many months.  Now she had arrived home on her motorbike dressed in black and with course wavy black hair that the fan, as it rotated blew back behind her right ear.  It revealed, it seemed to me, a much younger woman of an earlier day, and prior to the sudden death of her husband several years ago.  Her hands were large, muscled, and well-worn.  As tired as she was she insisted on bringing a little cot to the porch area of her home so that I could have an afternoon rest before our bus departure.   For an investment of $1000 (US) this gracious, hard-working woman could be assured of her annual family income.

She offered to drive me to the bus in order that I might be saved the kilometre walk in the blistering sun.  I refused her kind offer signaling in body language and indicating sleep or rest that she herself needed and deserved.

The humid, hot walk back to the bus featured the younger girls Hong and Trang still holding my hands or arms, this punctuated by the 17 year old Huong walking beside, talking to, and stroking the cone-shaped hat and the bent-over back of a very elderly woman walking the kilometre to market.  Young men buzzed by at top speed on their motorcycles.  I never saw the woman’s face.  It was parallel to the ground.  Yet, I was reminded once again that I was in the presence of extraordinarily warm-hearted teenagers.  I continue to be very proud of my young companions in Viet Nam.

I stayed for a week or so at the Le family Villa on the main street of Phuoc Buu/Xuyen Moc.  Even by Calgary standards this is an impressive structure with at least four bedrooms and as many showers plus a sauna—God forbid that one would even contemplate such an option in this July climate!

On one of my first mornings I heard and saw a marching band of drummers dressed with headbands and long white shirts.  It was a funeral procession for a thirty-four year old neighbour who had taken his own life.  For three consecutive nights Tom and I listened to the somewhat mournful music of a funeral gathering which began early in the morning and did not end until well into the evening.  Outside the neighboring house were funeral flags and the ubiquitous motorcycles pressed together under temporarily strewn strings of parking lights.  Unlike Tom I rather enjoyed the all-day Asian music festival which to my untrained ears did not sound unnecessarily mournful.  My enjoyment of the music did not, however, prevent me from wondering about the life so abruptly ended.  I had a son about the same age who took his life.  What factors are similar or different in Vietnam, I will continue to wonder?

Tom accompanied me everywhere in Xuyen Moc and its environs. Tom is not a Buddhist yet when we bussed to Ba Ria to visit the Very Venerable Grand Master of Phuoc Buu Pagoda who had suffered a severe stroke and seemed paralyzed on his right side and unable to speak, it was Tom who urged me to give a Buddhist blessing as he slowly recited the Vietnamese words that would accomplish this for me.  I declined because of a story around Bishop Jack Spong that had once moved me, the blessing or formal words of prayer for Spong had become the only “phony” component to an afternoon of wide-ranging and beautifully warm and intimate conversation with a dying friend.  He spent the next ten years of his life pondering the meaning of prayer.  It turned out to be his first book, written by popular demand.

What was moving for me was that I was able to say that I brought my own love and admiration and that of the senior monk’s good friend the Venerable Thich Vinh Phuoc (Thay) who was currently in Canada.  I had talked to Thay by phone (and translation) the day before.  The Grand Master was able to grasp my hand with considerable strength.  I stroked his thin Gandhi-like body over his chest and left arm.  He pulled me in towards him.  We nestled our heads together and both of us cried together with the groans of a man who so wanted to speak.  This is a wise monk and Buddhist Dharma teacher about my age blinded through torture in the days of the “American” war in Vietnam.    

Much to my surprise the monk returned back to the Pagoda on the night that I left Xuyen Moc.  He will be cared for by a local doctor who will visit him at the Pagoda.

It was Tom as well who encouraged me to purchase much more fruit than I would have initially chosen as we stopped on the darkened main street of Phuoc Buu/Xuyen Moc one night as we were returning home from a lovely simple meal prepared by Tom’s mother. It turned out that the petite vendor at the edge of the street, her squeaky-voiced supportive husband, and their three year old son stayed on the street every evening well after ten or eleven with their makeshift stand of fruits.  Somehow they gathered additional fruit: bananas, the prickly durian, jackfruit and others in time to be on the street again in the morning.  Serving again as my translator, cultural interpreter, and youthful conscience Tom told their story through translation.  Beside me was a former medical practitioner so frustrated with administrative failings that she and her husband had decided to become gardeners.  Their little boy slept stretched out on a two-foot square wooden loading tray. Tom encouraged photographs.  They were delighted to join with us in this act.  

Healing is something I find surprising here in Vietnam for some reason.  Perhaps it is because I hear of such tragic stories and expect no happy endings. Maybe we westerners see poverty, hurt and hardship in a one dimensional manner.  We may have long since lost the capacity to plum the depths of health and the healing balms of nature and family.  Vietnamese thrive on it.  

One man I met fell from a balcony fourteen years ago and lies prostrate on his back aided by his wife, a scrap-metal collector.  He is surrounded by his children and a TV set which allows him to cheer for his favourite soccer team: Manchester United.  One of the monks from Phuoc Buu has literally saved him from pneumonia by teaching him breathing exercises and bringing a new confidence in living that the practical Buddhist philosophy can sometimes offer.

In the little coconut leaf-roofed house bordering on Kim Oanh’s Long An home where I have spent so much time there is a woman who lay on her back for months unable to move.  A young child caused a motorcycle to fall on the woman’s back.  It looked like an ugly picture of fate.  I have visited her several times.  I have stroked her arms and wondered how she survives in that little space with dirt floors and subdued lighting.  This morning she was walking on her new large-tiled porch, fronting a beautiful big home which has risen in the time Adam Tran and I have been visiting Long An.  The neighbour was dusting and sharing conversation with Kim Oanh’s mom, engaged in the same universal activity of cleaning house.  Maybe cleaning house means what it has always meant in any culture—new beginnings.  It is not that healing and health do not exist here, it is that this Westerner is not as receptive to grasp it and its roots in nature and family, nor does he patiently await with confidence, its emergence from those sources.

There is one last story I wish to relate on this theme.  It is about the same beautiful family of which the $9.00 tailor story I recently told is a part.  The family is part of Kim Oanh’s and Adam and I have spent many happy evenings in this coconut-palm house.  It was here that we were introduced to the local meditator/spiritual counselor of no fixed religion.  I had toured the quaint and beautiful shrimp farm.  While I was in Xuyen Moc the news emerged that this year’s crop of shrimp would be almost non-existent.  Thieves had rigged his overarching electric devices, killed most of the shrimp and taken them to various markets to sell for their own profit.  I asked questions about insurance and family income.  Amongst laughs, smiles and the gaiety of children I was told that there is no insurance.  His family income was $2000 (US) annually.  So what might be done?  He had thought of becoming a rice farmer like all his neighbours.  And then with that beautiful warm smile of his, this man who I have walked with arms draped around each other’s backs on the narrow paths between rice fields, “maybe I will move to Canada?”  He was joking but so often this is the reply I receive.  “You need someone to clean up for you Larry, Con Bay and Be Na will go back to Canada with you”.  Or more serious proposals and questions.

But I can’t take these people back to Canada with me as much as I would love doing so.  There are a few who I and my Calgary friends will continue to help by finding ways to have them work in Canada and Calgary.  Perhaps there are a few others who might be assisted in such an adventure or there will be that adventurous soul who sees an opportunity to be of assistance.  But I have believed ever since coming here the first time in January that what is at stake here is so much more than moving a few adventurous and lucky folk to Canada. I have tried to suggest in all my writing and public presentations that any reader/listener can do as I have done at age 74.  I have also tried to make it crystal clear that the gifts go both ways.  I’m not being sentimental when I say that and in fact when it comes right down to it you, gentle reader, will be the much greater recipient.

Long An, July 9, 2009