In the mental luggage…

08:32, 25/06/2023

After Tet Nguyen Dan, it seemed like everyone was busy, so busy that sometimes they forgot the date. One morning, suddenly hearing the sound of ducks quacking on the roads to the new market, we knew that it was the Doan Ngo Festival.

The Duanwu Festival comes quickly and goes quickly. It was early in the morning and the sun was already high in the sky, and after noon the festival was over. When I was a child, I didn’t want the festival to end, I kept sighing and regretting it. So after the full moon of the first lunar month, I anxiously waited for the fifth day to come.

On the day of the Duanwu Festival, early in the morning, the villages were bustling, bustling with the sound of ducks quacking. Even though the rice in the fields was ripe, even though the village was busy harvesting, all farm work had stopped to prepare for the festival. Every household was busy wrapping sticky rice cakes, sticky rice cakes, making sweet soup, cooking duck stew, pounding chili and ginger to make dipping sauce for boiled duck, picking fruits available in the backyard, opening jars of rice wine that had been brewed for several days. Each person had a job, and in just a few hours, the offering tray to the ancestors at noon had all the flavors and colors. There was the deep red of peaches, the green of guava, the yellow of papaya, mango, and bananas that had just ripened. Then there was the pungent smell of sticky rice cakes, the sweet smell of sweet soup, the fragrant smell of rice wine, the spicy smell of betel leaves and lime mixed with the faint smell of incense, the wafting scent of incense, praying to heaven and earth for favorable weather and a bountiful harvest.

Illustration: Tra My

For decades away from home, I have returned every summer but never on the fifth day of the festival. Perhaps that is why every time the Duanwu Festival comes, I have many special emotions. I remember the figures of the old ladies carrying baskets back from Thuan market, their voices, laughter mixed with the sound of ducks calling loudly on the whole village road. I remember the warm and cozy family meal on the fifth day of the festival. After a bowl of strong green tea, a piece of betel that made my lips red, in a rare moment of leisure, the uncles and aunts chatted animatedly about the crops, about which fields after Con Mo had not yet been harvested, about which house in Doi Thuong hamlet would be threshing rice tonight, about who would help build the haystack first... I remember that it was almost noon when my mother urged my four sisters and I to run quickly to the garden to get the fifth day leaves. Oh my, lemongrass leaves, guava leaves, mugwort leaves, bamboo leaves, orange leaves, grapefruit leaves, motherwort leaves... smelled of soil, sunlight, and Lao wind, making my sisters and I forget our mother's advice to pick the leaves on time to make medicine because we were too busy inhaling the fragrance of the plants.

In the city, every year I carefully prepare a feast to welcome the Duanwu Festival. There are cakes, rice wine, sticky rice, sweet soup, betel and areca nuts, boiled duck with ginger fish sauce… Then the whole family gathers together to enjoy the flavors of the fifth day. Yet I still cannot forget the fifth day of my childhood. Perhaps because of those Duanwu Festivals when I was immersed in the flavors of my beloved hometown, which then became a mental baggage that I carried with me throughout my life.

Mai Lan Anh

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