It’s time to celebrate. Harvest time.
City folks here in Vietnam go home where beer and Banh Chung (Bean Cake) are waiting, while country folks truck in their flowers and fruits in the opposite direction to sell in the city.
This year, we don’t see the return of H5N1. So eat on. Chicken and ducks.
A friend of mine has an orchid farm in Da Lat. He could hardly come down for a visit . Too busy.
I am glad for him. Harvest time. The dead even got their joss paper money burned by the living as Holiday spending spree.
We chatted about cemetery in the States vs here in Vietnam. People did not know that in New Orleans, LA ; people were buried in stack-up tombs (below sea level, which occasionally broke the dyke as happened during Katrina).
The French left their architectural signatures both here in Vietnam and elsewhere like in New Orleans, Montreal and Cote d’Ivoire.
In Paris, they managed to keep traffic out of the city.
Here in Saigon, people build out which means more congestion even when commercial trucks are restricted to off-peak hours).
Young students are eager to go home. This will ease traffic for a few weeks.
Perhaps there will be enough space for flowers to be sold on concrete sidewalks.
Flowers remind city folks of “Green Field”, lush country as seen in “Good Morning Vietnam” (soundtrack by Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World). Those green fields got sprayed years ago with Agent Orange, whose long-term destructive consequences are still being sorted out.
Yet, lovers still “parking” in the parks, vendors still selling bouquets (for households to decorate their shrines).
A Vietnamese New Year song aptly says it all “Wishing the farmers with great harvest and young lovers their love nests. So let’s toast” (notice the imagery : harvest and nest etc..). Tet is inclusive, not just for city folks, or just the living. It’s democratized to include the afterlife population.
With the dead and undead join in, concrete or chemical can’t stop the sprouting of flowers on concrete.
Thang Nguyen 555 