"The old days echo back"

(Baonghean) - Father, today I take you back, according to your last wish, to the small house that you had to leave behind for so many years, going back and forth to make a living. The place that is deep in your heart, and deep in mine too, is the call: Father's homeland, the land of our ancestors.

Standing on the warm soil of my homeland, watching the Lam River this season with its rippling waters, watching the sunset slowly descend on Yen Xuan Bridge, the fields bustling with harvest... I understand more deeply what my father said: No matter how far away we go, we only truly feel the strongest and most peaceful when we set foot on our homeland. I just understood why, during the days lying on my sickbed, my father kept asking to listen to the song: "Tieng ho tren dat Nghe An" by musician Tan Huyen, and every time he listened, he closed his eyes... And I came back, not only because of my father's wish that my own hands would light incense on the ancestral altar, but also because there was something urging me from my heart. I felt a connection that was both vague and close, that was the connection between the present and the past, between history and legend, between pain and glory... when I looked at my homeland.

I remember my father's stories, the Lam River that flowed throughout his childhood, to the childhood of children today; about Lam Thanh mountain, whose popular name is Rum hill; about King Le's temple, where Mrs. Pham Thi Ngoc Tran is worshiped - the wife who followed Le Loi from the days of raising the flag of uprising; about Can market, My market... with the hardships with rice cakes, rice paper. And there was never a time when my father talked about his homeland that he did not mention September 12, 1930. That indomitable uprising, my father did not witness, but it was deeply engraved in his mind, through the words of my grandfather, my grandmother, through tears, through smiles, through the death anniversaries in the family... There were relatives of mine who fell among the more than 200 people stained with blood on Thai Lao field. And the drumbeat still seems to echo in my father's chest, in the proud beat when someone mentions Phu Long commune, Thong Lang commune... That pride has helped me overcome many hardships, helped me always hold my head high and yearn to return.

Students of Dang Thai Mai Secondary School visit the Nghe - Tinh Soviet Museum. Photo: My Ha

The song that my father loved, a song full of revolutionary spirit, I once found it so out of place among the thousands of melodies today. "When will the Lam River dry up, just like the revolutionary spirit of our people...". The song was inspired by the Soviet movement by musician Tan Huyen, my father closed his eyes and listened, not only as a way for him to remember his homeland, but also as a way for him to live with his homeland. The human soul must have been made from such things, from the ties of the past, of memories, of nostalgia, of the things that we yearn for...?

Father, perhaps many nights of your life, you have heard the “murmurs in the earth” of those old stories, mixed with your grandmother’s breathing, your mother’s crying… Like me now, standing silently in front of my hometown cemetery, looking down at my feet. And I know, even if I go halfway around the world, I, like you, will return, because of that urging sound…

Nghe An weekend