Memories of Ham My (Ham Thuan Nam), where I was born and raised, during the rainy days of late autumn, evoke a sense of nostalgia and many recollections. Searching through the past in the memories of the 1980s, Ham My appears so familiar to me.
I close my eyes and remember those dreamy days of my youth. It's been over 30 years since I left my homeland, and each visit brings back a flood of cherished memories, leaving my soul a jumble of reality and illusion. I drift into a reverie, filled with countless emotions of longing, remembrance, and forgetfulness; joy and sorrow intertwined with the passage of time.
On rainy autumn afternoons of yesteryear, I remember walking along the rice paddies, using my bare feet to scoop water from the small ditch, letting the mud clinging to my feet wash away with the cool water. On either side of the fields, the rice plants, still in their milky stage, drooped down, obscuring the path. It was called a path, but in reality, it was just a worn trail along the edges of the rice paddies. It was a path for farmers to check on their fields, to catch crabs that crawled out of their burrows to damage the rice; it was a path they used to stop any leaks that caused water to flow from one field to another, to retain water for the rice as it headed. Now, those paths are gone. The farmers have built concrete pillars on the land to grow dragon fruit, and those paths have also been paved with concrete to make harvesting the dragon fruit easier with wheelbarrows. But every time I return to my hometown, I remember those paths filled with memories, lined with fragrant rice stalks. Some unfortunate crabs crawled out of their burrows and were put into a bucket to be brought home and minced for the ducks waiting at home to lay eggs every morning. Mentioning the ducks in the coop naturally stirs up a feeling of nostalgia, a longing for something very distant, yet very close. I remember that around the first half of September in the lunar calendar, my mother would go to the market and buy about 15 to 20 ducklings. She would use a bamboo screen about one meter high and ten meters long, rolled it up behind the house, and confine the newly bought ducklings inside. My mother said that feeding the ducks leftover food would make them grow faster. But whoever was diligent enough to catch crabs and snails to feed them would make the ducks grow faster, lay eggs for us to eat, and then have meat for Tet (Lunar New Year). My younger brother and I imagined that every morning we'd have a few eggs to boil, mash with fish sauce, and dip boiled water spinach in – we'd finish all the rice! So every afternoon after school or herding cattle, my siblings and I would follow the ditches and rice paddies to catch crabs that had come out of their burrows to eat. We'd grill the bigger ones for fun, and chop up the rest to feed the ducks. Occasionally, my mother would slaughter a lame or slow-growing duck, boil it, and make mung bean porridge for the whole family to eat; the aroma of that evening's meal still stirs my heart to this day.
For me, another unforgettable memory is when, in the late afternoon sun, we would carry a bundle of fishing rods, baited with earthworms, and set them up by the riverbank where the water collected near the dry bamboo groves. Although we got bitten by mosquitoes a little, in the late autumn days when the rain stopped and the water receded, we would catch golden snakehead fish. The fish we caught were shared with neighbors, and the rest were grilled and mixed with cinnamon and basil, enjoyed with a few glasses of rice wine, or stewed with ginger leaves to feed the whole family during those impoverished times – nothing could compare. Back then, Ham My commune where I lived didn't have many restaurants, and during the subsidy period, occasionally enjoying dishes from the fields and gardens like that was a dream come true. I spent my childhood in a rural area filled with innocent, radiant smiles, with labor appropriate to my age, and with the belief that I would have a bright future if I tried my best in my studies and overcame my circumstances to rise above them.
Today, having lived away from my hometown for more than half my life, every time I return, I feel incredibly close to it; I eagerly breathe in the fresh, cool breeze of the countryside under the breezy sky, with a slight chill after the rain has stopped. In my memory, Ham My commune holds so much to remember, to cherish, and to be proud of—a place where the people were "heroes in the national liberation struggle," and when peace was restored, they diligently worked to build a more prosperous and beautiful homeland. Writing about the longing for home, Chau Doan has verses that always evoke memories in those far from home: "Oh homeland, though far away, I still remember / Remembering the hard days of my innocent youth / Mother bent her back carrying a heavy load in the misty dawn / To be ready for the dawn at the market."
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