Vinh Tuy - The Village of Tales

(Baonghean) -According to legend, since ancient times, my village (Vinh Tuy, Vinh Thanh, Yen Thanh) has had many people who loved to study, loved to sing folk songs, and loved to sing Tuong. When we grew up, we followed our elders to "sing songs".

In front of the village there is a vast lake called Roc Cua. Children and adults lie down in the warm south wind listening to the elders read verses and tell stories. In the past, the village had Mr. Tran Cuon, the patriarch of the Tran Duy family, a poor family, who had the talent to write poems. When the village was prosperous, he composed some very touching verses: "Our village has three sides competing with each other/Looking at the landscape, there are two rows of areca trees/The mandarins have golden letters/The village elders have two silver letters/Our village is really crowded/There is a virtuous woman who has just been given a dragon/Looking up, I see the shadow of a dragon across/On all sides, clouds cover two rows of turtles/Paying homage to the land of Vinh Tuy/Inside the temple, outside the well, elephants kneel on one side/Thanks to the grace of the old mandarins/Peace and prosperity will last for thousands of years". The atmosphere of the village festival is vividly recreated: "The village has been preparing palanquins for a long time, this palanquin is new/The palanquin is painted bright red/Then it is gilded with silver and carved with dragons/The mandarins march in two lines/The drums beat happily".

But my village is famous for its humorous stories, many funny stories that make us cry. Also during the nights sleeping by the lake, we heard Mrs. Cat's rhymes. The elders said that Mrs. Cat composed very good rhymes in our village. During the time of bombs and bullets, the whole village sang loudly: "The kitchen chopsticks have been turned/Unite the lips and spoons/Gotu kola leaves the xia/Full stomach to win the battle". When the women planting in the fields saw their superiors coming to inspect, Mrs. Cat raised her hand to count: "Big cadres wearing red bags/Small cadres wearing black bags/Inferior cadres wearing cloth bags...". The scene of moving houses to build collective buffalo pens had its own tragicomedy. "Team 1 carried the house poles/Team 2 carried bottles to buy honey". In fact, at that time, negativity had begun to appear: "Each person worked as hard as two/So that the cadres could buy radios and cars". Or "When you are happy, you carry books/When you are miserable, you are stuck". People's lives were not much better: "Team 1 carried the pillars of the house/Divided the salary/Suffering like a dog/Going to work all their lives". There were some things that were difficult to understand: "Seven ounces have not passed/Three ounces are coming soon/Cooperative members are excited/Working hard in the fields/Getting one hundred jobs/Thirty and a half less". It seemed that people were beginning to "realize" something: "Everywhere they talk/Our cooperative/Has been named/A progressive homeland".

The ending was bitter: "But there is one more story/The cadres were of one mind/Inviting each other to visit the fields/One pig every three days". Those sentences, few of hers but many of the people's, in the end she "tolerated them all". Or like the story of Mr. N, who was gentle, the elders in the neighborhood joked, he just laughed, later his children and grandchildren found it funny and made it into a story. One day, Mrs. N blamed: "You dress like a rascal, the pants you just wore during the reform period are already torn!" Mr. N was upset: "You are so strange, but when I go to meetings, I have to crawl into a dark corner to sit". What are you doing, she asked: "Pulling your pants off, putting your butt on the ground, protecting your pants, it took him forever to tear them, and yet you keep blaming me?". Another time, when he went to visit his son in Hanoi, he couldn't catch a bus, suddenly he saw a train rumbling past, he raised his hat and waved: "Train... let me go...". The train still didn't stop, he continued to get angry: "You are rude, you don't know how to respect the elderly". Suddenly seeing the huge train wheels, he was delighted. "Dad! Go to Hanoi and tell me to buy you a pump, eat and pump the train wheels to make enough to live". When he arrived in the capital, he was bewildered by the rows of high-rise buildings. A motorbike taxi driver appeared. "Hey old man! This is my house, how dare you look at it". "I only looked up to the 5th floor" "Then throw up five thousand!". Mr. N fumbled to get the money from his pocket, the motorbike taxi driver ran away, Mr. N looked up to the sky and laughed heartily. "You idiot! I counted to eight floors, and you only took five thousand, you're really stupid". When he arrived in the North, at mealtime, his daughter-in-law said to her mother: "I invite you up to dinner". He was surprised: "Why do you call you 'u'?". "Out here, we call you that" - "Oh my god, in my country they call you 'cay' (swell)". When it was time to go home, he showed his grandchild's photo to his grandmother. Suddenly, he got angry: "Damn, you're so arrogant, you dare put my grandchild in a basin to go to work." Mrs. N hurriedly came to see, it turned out he was holding the photo upside down...

Now, thinking back, I can't help but be surprised! The thinking of Mrs. Cat and Mr. N has a predictive function. Even during the time of bombs and bullets, it was the people, no one else, who saw that the cooperation mechanism had to change. As for Mr. N, he is an image that criticizes illiteracy and the alarming gap in awareness between rural and urban areas. Perhaps that's why when I heard Professor Phan Ngoc talk about village culture, I was really shocked, because we are holding in our hands a "gold mine" that we sometimes don't even know about?!

Tran Ngoc Khanh