Bamboo shoot season

(Baonghean) - Early in the morning, before the forest birds had time to call the day, my mother woke up and bent down under the kitchen roof to cook sticky rice and then carefully wrapped it in green banana leaves for my father and I to take to the forest to pick bamboo shoots. After carefully equipping ourselves with gloves, boots and necessary items such as machetes, hoes, and baskets, my father and I began our journey. The forest path was steep, rocky and tangled with vines, making it very difficult for us to reach the right forest with lots of bamboo.

With his many years of experience picking bamboo shoots, my father followed the small mounds of earth around the bamboo clump,

My father taught me that when picking bamboo shoots, if I see undulating mounds of earth with cracks around a bamboo clump, there are definitely bamboo shoots struggling to push themselves up from the ground. By carefully observing the signs my father taught me, I sometimes discovered bamboo shoots.

But my skills were still clumsy, so sometimes when digging bamboo shoots, I broke the young shoots in half. My father taught me how to dig the soil quickly and still get the whole bamboo shoots. Thanks to my father's dedicated instructions, my bamboo shoot harvesting technique became more and more proficient.

Part of the bamboo shoots that my father and I picked from the forest every day would be processed by my mother into many simple delicious dishes such as boiled bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots stir-fried with pork belly, bamboo shoot soup, bamboo shoots braised with fish... The rest, my mother would chop into small pieces, pickle with chili, honey locust fruit or dry in the sun to make dried bamboo shoots to eat gradually and give as gifts to relatives and friends. Each way of processing enriched the flavor of the rustic wild bamboo shoots. On lucky days when she picked a lot of bamboo shoots, my mother would line them up and take them to the market to sell for extra income.

Then, after the forest fire caused by the prolonged heat last year, the bamboo clumps turned to ashes. My father and I ended our days of going to the forest to pick bamboo shoots and packed our bags to go to the South to work for a living. The day we returned, the bamboo shoots were starting to regenerate. Green shoots were gradually emerging. One afternoon, when my father went to visit the newly grown bamboo shoots, his eyes were filled with hope. One day, not far away, the bamboo forest will be as lush as before...

Phan Duc Loc