Go with?

(Baonghean)"Go through your village, and you will meet... yourself!" I read Garcia Marquez's words a long time ago and thought about them quite a bit, but because the writer speaks so abstractly, for me, the meaning of that quote varies depending on the stage of my life:

At ten years old, I walked through the village and came across a forest riddled with bomb craters... I picked up a cluster bomb, not knowing how dangerous it was, and twisted it open to play with the fuse. I looked at my own ten-year-old self reflected in the steel and aluminum alloy casing of the fuse, and saw how horribly deformed it was. I threw it into a bamboo thicket, and it exploded! Death spared me just like that...

At twenty, I wandered through the village and stumbled upon the wedding of the man I secretly loved. I felt utterly dejected on a rainy afternoon, with muddy red dirt clinging to the village road and scattered pink firecracker remnants... Afterwards, I went home and lay around all day. Eventually, I got up hungry to eat, but there was no rice left, so I sat down and wrote... poetry!

At thirty, I walked through the village and saw a newly opened paved road. The road led north, while I had just come from the south... On lonely nights, I lay listening to the mournful sound of train whistles from Vinh Station, the crying of my child, the nagging of my wife, and the gentle patter of raindrops falling into the plastic basin on the empty table...

At forty years old, I once again wandered around the village. I had long since given up the desire to leave my village, but my feet kept leading me to places that had become so familiar to me over the past forty years. Here's the banyan tree, the pond, the village square, and the Cooperative's meeting hall. Here's the A-shaped bunker people built in the old days to protect themselves from the enemy. Here's the concrete road built "by the state and the people together."

And here's this: The sea. The boundless ocean, its waves never tiring. And the endless, overwhelming wind, just like when I was 10 years old. Everything is still the same. Only there are so many people, some familiar faces, but countless strangers. They also wander around the village like me, laughing, talking, working, falling in love, and criticizing each other. One thing is different: the children now seem more well-behaved; they don't have toy bombs to play with like I did back then. They're busy with school all day, while their grandparents are busy with party meetings, neighborhood meetings, or some other association meetings. Their parents are at work... Perhaps they're just like me in the past, lonely with games on computers or phones...

I returned to my old house, almost unrecognizable... The dim light of an oil lamp flickered through the crack in the door... I cautiously stepped inside and saw a boy, about 10 years old, with sun-bleached hair and bare feet, sitting and studying... He seemed to be intently reading a yellowed piece of paper. I went closer to take a look, and oh my God, it was the poem I had written when I was 20: "Why don't you let your hair grow long?"

I grabbed the ten-year-old boy's hand, causing him to throw a handful of steel marbles onto the table. "Spherical bombs! Dangerous!" I yelled. "Lie down!" The boy laughed and looked up at me. To my utter astonishment, it was me!

By traveling through your own village, you will encounter yourself! But that "self" you will encounter is only what you desire. And how can you travel through your own village, by what means, when, and with whom? The writer Garcia Marquez doesn't seem to address this...

Hoai Quan