Bilingual village
(Baonghean) - The Tay people, with their farming habits of growing rice and raising cattle and poultry, often choose flat valleys near rivers and streams to build villages. That village has been around for hundreds of years, with many generations of Tay people living there.
In the sixties of the last century, the village quietly welcomed hundreds of Kinh households from Nam Dinh and Thai Binh to reclaim land and settle down.
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| Illustration: D.T |
The Kinh people have integrated into the lives of the indigenous people. Several decades have passed, the village has become more and more crowded, but there has never been any conflict or conflict between the Tay and Kinh families.
After decades of living in the village, I have gradually noticed the changes in customs, habits, lifestyles, and activities of both sides. The Kinh people from Nam Dinh and Thai Binh often use hoes to weed, but when they saw the Tay people using a tool they call qua, or butterfly hoe, which is much more effective, they also tried using it. Seeing them using machetes to clear the fields very quickly and neatly, the Kinh people also used machetes.
The Tay people used to celebrate the Full Moon Festival in July very big, the biggest festival of the year, while the Kinh people celebrated the Lunar New Year every year grandly. So from some point on, the village had two Tet holidays.
In that strange series of years of life, there are many things that people cannot foresee. For example, my parents, as well as many other grandparents, once thought that after death, they would return to Nam Dinh, Thai Binh to lie next to their ancestors. But after living in that village for a long time, giving birth to children, daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, they suddenly realized that this was the land that they were both grateful for and indebted to. And from the bottom of their hearts, there was a deep gratitude to the indigenous people, who quietly took care of, shared, and opened their hearts to accommodate all the different noises, even the complicated troubles.
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| Tay ethnic people participate in the swallow-catching sport at the Long Tong Festival in Lam Binh district, Tuyen Quang province. Illustration photo: Tuyen Quang Newspaper |
Later, no matter how far I go, every time I look back, I still feel full of love for that village, with stilt houses mixed with tile-roofed houses, Tay language mixed with Kinh language. And in the afternoons when the sun sets, boys and girls are bustling and excited, joking with each other in both languages on the small stream in the middle of the village…
