Her story

(Baonghean) - When I started first grade, I went to a boarding school. The school lunch wasn't exactly boring, but unfortunately, it was full of dishes I absolutely hated. Braised mackerel with turmeric, chicken with lime leaves, and almost every dish had onions, and I detested onions. After a month of school, I was noticeably thinner. My grandmother and mother were frantic with worry, and every morning they would put a carton of milk in my schoolbag, telling me to drink it all during recess. But I was still thin. Once, my mother rushed to take me to school and forgot to put the milk in. My grandmother painstakingly cycled to school to give it to me, just as I was sneaking down to the kitchen with the other kids on duty to throw away the half-empty bowl of rice (because if I didn't finish my rice, I wasn't allowed to go to bed). My grandmother stared blankly at the pile of rice I had just emptied into the bowl, then looked at me with indignation. Without saying a word, she packed up my schoolbag and took me home. That day, I received a terrible beating.

Later, when I was a little older, she once stroked my head and slowly recounted stories from when she was seven years old. She couldn't remember exactly why or when the granaries in the house gradually emptied until they were completely gone. She also didn't know when they stopped having two meals a day, and had to supplement their diet with potatoes and cassava. Without potatoes and cassava, they would mix in wild vegetables, and then one day they had to cook porridge with ground rice husks. That kind of porridge, with the rice dwindling until it became thick and sticky with the husks that made you chew noisily. She was too young to know that the famine of 1945 claimed 2 million lives out of a total of 20 million people. She only remembered the emaciated, naked bodies, neither men nor women, sitting listlessly in corners of houses, kitchens, haystacks, and scattered at the ends of villages and markets.

She only remembered the filthy, dry, straw-like hair that hung down, covering faces so dark they were unrecognizable, revealing only deep, wild, animal-like eyes. The animals were all dead too. Buffaloes, cows, dogs, cats, chickens, ducks, even rats and cockroaches, all ended up in people's stomachs. And now, humans replaced the animals, scavenging, digging, stealing, robbing, and tearing each other's mouths to find food. People had to eat bran and oilseed meal, and even those things were increasing in price daily. The bran sold to the starving was a mixture of sawdust that even Western and Japanese horses wouldn't eat.

From behind the banana trees, a faint, sickly meow echoed. I shuddered, burying my face in my grandmother's flat chest. I thought of the children sobbing beside their dead, contorted parents, of the scrawny stray dogs with their gleaming white teeth and tattered fur stained with children's blood. The moon was so bright tonight. They say the spirits of the dead often return to this world on moonlit nights. Suddenly, I saw my grandmother staring blankly into the silent space where the moonlight shone, and I wondered what she had seen in the darkness, amidst layers of memories? The shadows of women? The shadows of men? The shadows of old people and children? The ghosts of those who had died even while alive, because starvation was a rare death where one could see the shadow of death reflected right on their own face.

How my grandmother got through those years, I'll never know. Those memories are vague, almost transparent and invisible like ghosts – some kind of pact to return from the dead, like the stories I read in Greek mythology? I also read a Japanese proverb that said, "One grain of rice has seven gods," meaning one shouldn't waste even a single grain of rice. I told her about it, and she remained silent for a long time.

Then she sighed, speaking with difficulty: "When I was a farmer, our rice crop was abundant. But then one time, when we plowed the fields, we found so many skulls and human bones. They were people who had died of starvation, my dear. The rice we eat contains not only gods, but also people and ghosts. Wasting it is a sin..." Suddenly, I thought of the children being held, crying and begging for a piece of candy. And my grandmother, she was probably thinking of the children sobbing beside their deceased parents, their bodies contorted amidst the wailing of stray dogs.

Hai Trieu