Far from home
And then, a summer rain. (*)
Dear friends,
It is raining in Hanoi right now.
The sky is grumpy. Ambulances are blaring sirens, intensively, ripping off the thickening walls of downpour.
I love summer rains, though most of the time, they are brutal.
A week ago, a thunderstorm hit my hometown, erupting months of dry heat.
“Thích hí,” mom said softly, casting a satisfied look on her drenched garden.
There was something in her statement that stamped on my mind. How can I translate it properly into English?
“Isn’t it enjoyable”, perhaps.
And the dialect, and the way she talked – it tells you someone who hasn’t moved far from her farming root.
In the Mekong Delta, they call summer rains like this “golden rains”.
A golden rain, though short, helps to quench the prolonged drought. Is it enough to fill the exposed cracks of paddy fields’ muddy bottoms?
I recently read a series of reportings on Tuổi Trẻ (Youth) Newspaper about the migration wave of workers from the Mekong Delta to industrial southeast cities – Bình Dương, Đồng Nai and Sài Gòn.
Nearly 1.1 million people left the region between 2009 and 2019, according to a report issued in 2020 by Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
The second wave of COVID-19 in 2021 had sent them home in bulk but when the “new normalcy” was set up, the delta, one more time, witnessed its children’s exit.
“There’s nothing much to do. So I left.”
A garment worker from a rural northern village told me as I interviewed her for a feature story a long time ago.
The reality is shared by millions of migrant workers originally from Vietnam’s largest “rice bowl”, now torn by dams, dykes and canals constructed on its mother river’s upstream.
Have you noticed that the Mekong Delta’s second largest saline prevention sluice gate was closed this week?
Meanwhile, displaced people are fighting for their lives in production lines.
“I grew up on the streets where cars cannot sneak into
Where workers eat instant noodles in buckets,
Every time it rains, they collect leaking water with bowls,” Wowy rapped in Hai thế giới (Two worlds).
Where are those workers from? The Mekong Delta, I guess.
I’m not good at English and for any term I type in, I look it up in a dictionary first.
An advertisement embedded in Cambridge dictionary today was from the UK Government.
“Trying to enter the UK illegally could cost you everything,” it read, in Vietnamese.
Till next time,
T.
* Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog
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