Every time you come to a new land to live, every time you move to a new house, or every time you “retire from the weather at an inn” in some remote area (maybe on the other side of the world)… – me – or maybe you Everyone wonders: How many people have lived and left the place they are currently attached to?
The elders taught: “The land is inhabited by a hundred people, the field is plowed by a hundred people”, maybe the place where you live is originally a cemetery or an island in the middle of a fast-flowing river, or both of those “mulberry fields” in the past. different periods of thousands of years, tens of thousands to millions of years of history…
When the tutelary god followed the “flow” of landslides
The Red River is flooded with landslides, to the point that communal houses keep having the same name in two provinces, along both banks of the largest river in the Northern Delta. That’s because the river flowing from the Yunnan region of China, leading to Ba Lat estuary in Thai Binh, has a length of 1,100km, of which more than 500km meanders on Vietnamese soil. The Cai River came to my hometown following annexing the Da River into its country at the upper junction on the Trung Ha side.
In just a few years, the river ate up all the villages on the right bank, people lost their land for farming, their homes and temples. They complained, and the old king said: Your land used to be on this side, but now it falls into the river, so it will inevitably go to the other side to sediment. But it can’t run anywhere. If you go there and establish a hamlet, build a new communal house, we will immediately confer the title.
Ms. Lac’s story at the Museum of Ethnology following the demonstration of preparing edible soil and eating soil made me (left) laugh. TG
A few generations later, there must have been another king, and the other side was swallowed up by the river, losing villages, houses, and communal houses – so they moved to the other side to live and build village communal houses. From then on, when I entered journalism in 1998, I wrote regarding communal houses and hamlets with the same name on both sides of the river, residential communities that shared the same bloodline and worshiped the same tutelary god. (sometimes) zigzagging “clones” of the same name along both sides of the Red River…
Such is the journey of landslides and accretion of land, the journey of people searching for and being attached to the land. “When I live, it’s just the land, when I go, the land becomes my soul.” When people live long, they “return to the earth”, cremation is the same, basically it is still “enchanting” the bones or bone powder into the tolerant mother earth. The village fields are the place for the golden harvest, and also the refuge of all souls following their journey on earth. People from my hometown are close to each other, sometimes a couple cannot marry each other when they are young, they date each other when they are widowed and old in the countryside following a life of wandering. Then we met once more in the village fields. Where there will be no more separation forever.
The first image of the soil-eating custom in the mountainous area of A Pa Chai was published by me in the press. D.DH
In vast river areas like the Mekong Delta, generations have been prosperous. When I first limped to explore the Southwest region, when I was still in my twenties, I wondered: why are each urban area in this country always six or seventy or eighty kilometers apart? Saigon – My Tho – Vinh Long – Ben Tre – Tra Vinh – Can Tho – Sa Dec – Soc Trang – Bac Lieu – Ca Mau… I tried, I measured, I asked researchers, it turns out: ancient , back when “land was as wise as a horse, water was wise as a boat”, migrants sailed from one country to another, traveling from dawn to dusk and had to rest on a plot of land, a certain sleeping and lodging area (later known as a sleeping area). refueling, entertainment, socializing, shopping, etc.). So the speed of the boat back then was regarding six, seven, eighty kilometers a day. They thought, there must be services, so a town was formed, expanding a little to become a town, expanding a little further to become a district, eventually becoming a province.
Land preparation for rice cultivation in Giang Thanh district, Kien Giang. Photo: Cao Ky Nhan
The three words “village fields” always resonate in children living far from home with warmth and the feeling “let’s go back to our mother”. “The wind of the field washes the face of exile / I return to my hometown to heal the wounds of wandering.”
Similarly, in the northern mountainous region, we kept walking from dawn, eating rice balls, clearing paths to chase fish as we walked, and at dusk it was as if a residential cluster appeared.
I rushed to the stream to bathe, leaving my backpack and jacket on the shoulder of a chair somewhere. Naturally, people will cook rice, make beds, and when they come to the stream, they will call the officials to come home to eat and drink hot pot (drink wine). “Where is home at night, where is bed?” was the journey and style of climbers like me at that time. And I understand, “our homeland is vast”, from the attachment to the land, to the living space of each member, each need in the community; but everything is born according to a rule that is both easy to understand and so interesting.
Live on the ground, eat the ground
“Put a string on the land, a tree and a pole”, that is a “folk” regulation in handling land issues, disputes, and property division. “Returning to the land” is what our people warmly say regarding separation from the worldly world.
In many regions of Vietnam, in many countries, people still have a strange habit… of literally eating dirt. I discovered this by accident in 2002, when walking along the Vietnam-China border, present at the A Pa Chai border gate, Muong Nhe district, Dien Bien province. The wife of the Vice Chairman of Chung Chai Commune People’s Committee, along with her niece named Po So, helped me carry my things while walking through the mountains and forests for many days. While resting, she and Po So kept digging out soil balls from the cliff and eating them deliciously. Like people eating dumplings or peanut candy. I interviewed and expanded my research. It turned out that in Hanoi there was an expert who did initial research on this story, with legends from the Hung King period.
After the first article, I welcomed many experts from research institutes, we organized international seminars on this topic, including cultural, historical, ethnic experts, and even nutritionists. Nutrition… It turns out that in some situations and in many typical rural areas, edible soil is also “good for health” and adds many micronutrients to residents.
There were many journalists participating in the analysis, in particular, VTV3 produced the program “Strange Stories of Vietnam” around the demonstration of the craft of “grilling” (smoking for fragrance) land with bought leaves and sim leaves to eat at the Museum. Ethnographic. I drove Ms. Lac (who lives in Vinh Phuc province) back to Hanoi to demonstrate eating soil and preparing edible soil.
Later, many research projects were born, they expanded their research, it turned out that in Germany, they also produce edible soil, put it in beautiful jars, and sell it in luxury supermarkets. I also witnessed many scenes of soil eating across the country. In Lap Thach district, Vinh Phuc province, I recently met people who have a service job of “processing edible soil”. They dug the garden into deep wells. After digging out all the white soil, they ate the soft and fleshy pieces to smoke and sell them at the market as a country gift from ancient times…
