The Mountains Sing(3)

“How about food? What will we eat?”

“Oh don’t you worry. Farmers there will feed us what they have. In times of crisis, people are kind.” Grandma smiled. “How about helping me pack?”

As we prepared for our trip, Grandma’s voice rose up beside me in song. She had a splendid voice, as did my mother. They used to make up silly songs, singing and laughing. Oh how I missed those happy moments. Now, as Grandma sang, vast rice fields opened their green arms to receive me, storks lifted me up on their wings, rivers rolled me away on their currents.

Grandma spread out her traveling cloth. She piled our clothes in the middle, adding my notebook, pen, ink bottle, and her teaching materials. She placed her prayer bell on top, then tied the opposite corners of the cloth together, turning it into a carrying bag to be wrapped around her shoulder. On her other shoulder hung a long bamboo pipe filled with uncooked rice. She had already packed up my school bag with water and food for the road.

“How long will we be away, Grandma?”

“I’m not sure. Perhaps a couple of weeks?”

I stood next to the bookshelf, my hands running over the books’ spines. Vietnamese fairytales, Russian fairytales, Nguy?n Kiên’s Daughter of the Bird Seller, Treasure Island from a foreign author whose name I can’t pronounce.

Grandma laughed, looking at the pile of books in my hands. “We can’t bring so many, Guava. Pick one. We’ll borrow some more when we get there.”

“But do farmers read books, Grandma?”

“My parents were farmers, remember? They had all the books you could imagine.”

I went through the bookshelf again and decided on ?oàn Gi?i’s novel, The Southern Land and Forests. Perhaps my mother had arrived in mi?n Nam, that southern land, where she met my father. I had to know more about their destination—cut away from us by the French and now occupied by the Americans.

Grandma glued a note onto the front door, which told my parents and uncles that in case they returned, they could find us in Hòa Bình. I touched the front door before our departure. Through my fingertips, I felt my parents’ and uncles’ laughter. Now, looking back over the years, I still wonder what I would have brought along if I had known what would happen to us. Perhaps the black-and-white picture of my parents on their wedding day. But I also know that on the verge of death, there is no time for nostalgia.

At Grandma’s school, we joined the throng of teachers, students, and their families, several with bicycles piled high with luggage, and walked, merging into the mass of people moving away from Hà N?i. Everyone wore dark clothes, and metal parts of vehicles were covered up to avoid reflection from the sun, for fear of attracting bombers. Nobody talked. I could only hear footsteps and the occasional cries of babies. Terror and worry carved lines into people’s faces.

I was twelve years old when we started that forty-one-kilometer walk. The journey was difficult, but Grandma’s hand warmed mine when the wind whipped its bitter cold against us. So that I wouldn’t be hungry, Grandma handed me her food, pretending she was already full. She sang countless songs to calm my fears. When I was tired, Grandma carried me on her back, her long hair cupping my face. She bundled me into her jacket when it drizzled. Blood and blisters covered her feet as we finally got to Hòa Bình Village, nestled in a valley and surrounded by mountains.

We stayed with two elderly farmers—Mr. and Mrs. Tùng—who let Grandma and me sleep on the floor of their living room; there was no other space in their small home. On our first day at Hòa Bình, Grandma found a worn path that zigzagged up the closest mountain and into a cave. Some villagers had chosen the cave as their bomb shelter; Grandma decided we must join them. Even though Mr. Tùng said the Americans would never bomb the village, Grandma and I spent the next day practicing climbing up and down the path, so many times that my legs felt like they had been hammered.

“Guava, we must be able to get up here, even during the night and without any light,” Grandma said, standing inside the cave, puffing and panting. “And promise to never leave my side, promise?”

I watched butterflies fluttering around the entrance. I longed to explore. I’d seen the village’s kids bathe naked in a pond, ride water buffaloes through muddy fields, and climb trees to reach for bird nests. I wanted to ask Grandma to let me join them, but she was looking at me with such worried eyes that I nodded.

As we settled into our temporary home, Grandma gave Mrs. Tùng our rice and some money, and we helped prepare the meals, picking vegetables from the garden, cleaning the dishes. “Ah, you’re such a help,” Mrs. Tùng told me, and I felt myself growing a little taller. Her home was different, but in a way, it was so much like mine in Hà N?i, with its windows sealed with black paper, to prevent American bombers from seeing any sign of our life at night.

Grandma looked graceful as she taught in the village temple’s yard, her students squatting on the dirt floor, their faces bright. Her lesson wouldn’t end until she’d finished teaching them one of her songs.

“The war might destroy our houses, but it can’t extinguish our spirit,” Grandma said. Her students and I burst into singing, so loud that our voices broke, and we sounded just like those frogs who joined us from nearby rice fields.

The Southern Land and Forests, set in 1945, had a fascinating beginning. Before my eyes, the South appeared so lush, the people happy and generous. They ate snakes and deer, hunted crocrodiles, and gathered honey in dense mangrove forests. I underlined complicated words and exotic Southern terms, and Grandma explained them whenever she had time. I cried with An, who lost his parents as they ran away from the cruel French soldiers. I wondered why foreign armies kept invading our country. First it was the Chinese, the Mongolians, the French, the Japanese, and now the American imperialists.