Mastering a scent

Agarwood beads from the hands of craftsmen in Nong Son. Photo: VINH ANH

The day I returned to Phu Quoc ( Kien Giang ) after a business trip to the Southwest islands, my friend insisted on taking me to visit the fish sauce factory - Phung Hung barrel house.

“To know why Nam O fish sauce is as delicious as Phu Quoc, but in terms of tourism , this place is better” – you said. It is hard to be offended by your way of inviting.

A couple of times, I took guests to An Luong wharf (Duy Hai commune, Duy Xuyen) to eat seafood, then wandered into the nearby Duy Hai fish sauce factory. In a fit of excitement, I talked about the anchovies of March in this area that would produce a drop of fish sauce that was so delicious it... hurt my teeth.

The 3:1 ratio of fish and salt seems to be immutable, but the variation in each person's hand will give a different flavor. For example, with the same recipe for braised goby fish with pepper that grandma passed down, none of her grandchildren could braise it with the full flavor. Grandma often said, you have to know how to manage the flavor.

Quang Nam fish sauce village. Photo: Thang Binh Cultural Center

How surprised were the customers when they heard the female owner of the fish sauce factory explain the nitrogen content of the first water, the second water, and the following waters.

How much protein customers want to eat will depend on how the sauces are refined and the flavor of the sea breeze and sunshine. How does the premium fish sauce get out into the world from the ancient family recipe?

That scent, when the hands are calloused by the profession, must have seeped into every line of the palm, and then become the genetic code of each person still practicing the profession. I have a habit of enlarging as much as possible the photos of the artisans when reporters send them to the editorial office. To see the sweat on the fingerprints and feel the difficulties they are facing.

The other day at the beach, I saw the Boi Loi tree again. It must have been 30 years since I last saw this tree. In the hazy memory, my grandfather told me how to pound the Boi Loi fruit to get the ingredients to mix into incense powder. Then he worked hard to split the incense, dip it in powder, and roll the incense.

The incense powder when my grandfather was alive was made from leaves and plants around the garden, but was later replaced with agarwood powder. My grandfather said that we had to be careful and meticulous to have incense sticks to worship our ancestors and pray to heaven and earth.

Without explanation, I just believe that I am of Cham descent, confirmed only by my great-grandfather’s Giao Chi toe and the beginning of the land offering poem passed down from the elders in the family. “Chu Ngung, Man Nuong/Loi Lac casualties/Cham market barbarians/All souls/Come together to resonate”.

That was when I was young, when I had not yet read the books of researcher Ho Trung Tu. He had given many explanations about the Cham traces in the life of Vietnamese people in general and the occupations of Vietnamese people in particular. Those things made me believe that my roots were here, in this place, not from the migration of Vietnamese people on the way to open up the land to the South.

Incense from incense sticks offering to the earth and the gods.

I remember one time about 7 years ago, while sitting listening to the zither and sipping agarwood tea at the Hoang Tram Farm tourist area (Dien Tho commune, Dien Khanh district, Khanh Hoa province), I heard my colleagues clicking their tongues and sighing softly.

He said, our country has been famous for agarwood since the time King Le Thanh Tong established the Quang Nam province. Agarwood products were shipped by merchant ships to India and Japan. But nowadays, the way it is made here is far behind.

At Hoang Tram Farm, from the process of making agarwood, agarwood products, and even Ky Nam are all present in the Agarwood Museum. It helps visitors fully visualize from the story of looking for agarwood to the other lives of agarwood in the human world. Both the legend of agarwood and the legends told around the sacredness of Lady Thien YA Na following the agarwood seekers...

The facilities for processing and manufacturing agarwood products in Nong Son or Tien Phuoc - considered the agarwood center of Quang Nam - are not enough to make the craft village famous.

How to differentiate from the many other agarwood villages in Khanh Hoa, Hue or Nghe An? There are many agarwood products, from agarwood buds, agarwood pieces, agarwood incense, essential oils, jewelry and many other things. But how to recognize agarwood from Quang?

Enjoying a cup of agarwood tea, I remember the hands of the artisans in Trung Phuoc shaping the agarwood bonsai. Green veins and rough calluses. At the source of Thu Bon flowing to the sea, no matter what, they are still taking care of a scent…

Source: https://baoquangnam.vn/quan-xuyen-mot-mui-huong-3140482.html