The Mountains Sing(5)

Cheers erupted around me. It was now safe for us to go home. People hugged each other, crying and laughing.

“I’ll never forget your kindness,” Grandma told our hosts. “M?t mi?ng khi ?ói b?ng m?t gói khi no.” One bite when starving equals one bundle when full.

“Lá lành ?ùm lá rách,” Mrs. Tùng replied. Intact leaves safeguard ripped leaves. “You’re welcome to stay with us at any time.” She clutched Grandma’s hand.

I smiled, enchanted whenever proverbs were embedded in conversations. Grandma had told me proverbs were the essence of our ancestors’ wisdom, passed orally from one generation to the next, even before our written language existed.

Our hearts bursting with hope, we walked many hours to return to Hà N?i.

I had expected victory but destruction hit my eyes everywhere I looked. A large part of my beautiful city had been reduced to rubble. Bombs had been dropped onto Kham Thiên—my street—and on the nearby B?ch Mai Hospital where my mother had worked, killing many people. Later, I would go back to class, empty of my fifteen friends.

And our house! It was gone. Our bàng tree lay sprawled across the rubble. Grandma sank to her knees. Howls escaped from deep inside her, piercing through the stench of rotting bodies, merging into a wailing sea of sorrow.

I cried with Grandma as we pushed away broken bricks and slabs of concrete. Our fingers bled as we searched for anything salvageable. We found several of my books, two of Grandma’s textbooks, and some scattered rice. Grandma picked up each grain as if it were a jewel. That night in my schoolyard, we huddled against the wind with people who had also lost their homes to cook our shared meal of rice mixed with dirt and stained with blood.

WATCHING GRANDMA THEN, nobody could imagine that she was once considered cành vàng lá ng?c—a jade leaf on a branch of gold.

Three months earlier, as my mother got ready to go to the battlefield, she told me Grandma had been born into one of the richest families in Ngh? An Province.

“She’s been through great hardships and is the toughest woman I know. Stay close to her and you’ll be all right,” my mother said, packing her clothes into a green knapsack. Trained as a doctor, she had volunteered to go south, to look for my father, who’d traveled deep into the jungles with his troops and hadn’t sent back any news for the past four years. “I’ll find him and bring him back to you,” she told me, and I believed her, for she’d always achieved whatever she set out to do. Yet Grandma said it was an impossible task. She tried to stop my mother from going, to no avail.

As my mother left, Heaven cried his farewell in big drops of rain. My mother poked her face out of a departing truck, shouting, “H??ng ?i, m? yêu con!” It was the first time she said she loved me, and I feared it’d be the last. The rain swept across us and swallowed her up into its swirling mouth.

That night and for the next many nights, to dry my tears, Grandma opened the door of her childhood to me. Her stories scooped me up and delivered me to the hilltop of Ngh? An where I could fill my lungs with the fragrance of rice fields, sink my eyes into the Lam River, and become a green dot on the Tr??ng S?n mountain range. In her stories, I tasted the sweetness of sim berries on my tongue, felt grasshoppers kicking in my hands, and slept in a hammock under a sky woven by shimmering stars.

I was astonished when Grandma told me how her life had been cursed by a fortune-teller’s prediction, and how she had survived the French occupation, the Japanese invasion, the Great Hunger, and the Land Reform.

As the war continued, it was Grandma’s stories that kept me and my hopes alive. I realized that the world was indeed unfair, and that I had to bring Grandma back to her village to seek justice, perhaps even to take revenge.





The Fortune Teller

Ngh? An Province, 1930–1942

Guava, remember how we used to wander around the Old Quarter of Hà N?i? We often stopped in front of a house on Hàng Gai. I didn’t know anyone who lived there on Silk Street, but we stood in front of the house, peering through its gate. Remember how beautiful everything was? Wooden doors featured exquisite carvings of flowers and birds, lacquered shutters gleamed under the sun, and ceramic dragons soared atop the roof’s curving edges. The house was a traditional n?m gian, with five wooden sections, remember? And there was a front yard paved with red bricks.

Now I can tell you the reason I lingered in front of that house: it looks just like my childhood home in Ngh? An. As I stood there with you, I could almost hear the happy chatter of my parents, my brother C?ng, and Auntie Tú.

Ah, you ask me why I never mentioned to you about having a brother and an aunt. I’ll tell you about them soon, but don’t you want to visit my childhood home first?

To go there, you and I will need to travel three hundred kilometers from Hà N?i. We’ll follow the national highway, passing Nam ??nh, Ninh Bình, and Thanh Hóa provinces. Then we’ll turn left at a pagoda called Phú ??nh, crossing several communes before arriving at V?nh Phúc, a village in the North of Vi?t Nam. The name of this village is special, Guava, as it means “Forever Blessed.”

At V?nh Phúc, anyone will gladly show you to the gate of our ancestral home—the Tr?n family’s house. They’ll walk with you along the village road, passing a pagoda with the ends of its roof curving like the fingers of a splendid dancer, passing ponds where children and buffaloes splash around. During summer, you’ll gasp at clouds of purple flowers blooming on xoan trees and at red g?o flowers sailing through the air like burning boats. During the rice harvest season, the village road will spread out its golden carpet of straws to welcome you.