Beloved Homeland

I returned to my hometown, hung a hammock and lay under an old tamarind tree, listening to the wind chasing each other through the thick layers of leaves; every now and then it threw down to the ground, around where I lay ripe tamarinds, with dry, silvery outer shells.

From the thatched-roof kitchen, the smell of “tamarind honey” that had been peeled many days before, drifted up with the wind, pleasantly awakening my sense of smell. If she were still alive, my mother would surely sit down and carefully select tamarinds shaped like slender fingers, ten out of ten, for me to bring back to Phan Thiet as a gift for my daughter-in-law. And, not only tamarinds, but also bananas, jackfruit, mangoes, star apples, cashews… each season has its own fruit, my mother always gives her children and grandchildren the freshest and most delicious things. I can feel the affection and boundless love she puts into each gift through the way my mother carefully, neatly, and beautifully arranges, selects, and packages them.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath of the fragrant scent of the countryside mixed with a little bit of wild grass, a very unique characteristic of my hometown. Somewhere, the intermittent cooing of birds echoed, sounding distant and disjointed but somehow enough to lull me to sleep without me knowing. In my dream, I saw myself as a child, barefoot, sun-burnt hair, dark skin. I wore an old conical hat, followed my father down to the riverbank, wearing only a pair of rough, ink-blue shorts. My father went first, as soon as he reached the riverbank, he took off his shirt and threw it on the bank; in fact, he had a habit of just wearing his shirt loosely without buttoning any of the buttons. He gently sank down, leaving only his head above the water, and conveniently waved the water towards me. I also sank down, swam to my father not far away, and we were both silent, enjoying the wonderful pleasure of splashing around in the clear blue water of our beloved hometown river. The sound of the lapwing suddenly rang out and gradually spread out from the dense bamboo hedge on the other side of the river, unintentionally breaking the quiet space that nature had just generously bestowed upon us.

I woke up when I clearly felt the strange afternoon sunlight shining obliquely on my face. I no longer heard the cooing of birds, and the surrounding space was as quiet as before I fell asleep. I looked up and saw white cotton clouds drifting slowly, continuously creating extremely funny shapes, both stimulating my imagination and arousing the inherent curiosity of children. The air was so fresh, the clear blue sky made me feel my soul sink, settling my deep longing for my homeland, even though I was present in the very place where I was born and raised. Here, I wrote my first immature, clumsy student poems. Decades passed, on the difficult path of making a living, my memory only retained a few lines, not knowing whether to call them poems or just something similar…

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