His family was poor, even though Mr. Buong was strong and worked very hard. He’d go into the woods to dig up bamboo shoots and sweet potatoes, then diligently carry them to the market, where he was able to earn just enough money to buy a jar of fermented shrimp paste and a small bottle of rice wine.
My grandfather said to him one time, “Buong, you work too hard. A person who does too much physical labor won’t enjoy life!”
To which Mr. Buong laughed and replied, “That’s my fate, sir.”
“You were born in the Year of the Monkey,” my grandfather continued. “So if you want to be successful, you must have specific plans.”
“Yes, sir. I know,” Mr. Buong said.
But his family remained penniless. Mr. Buong’s wife was a small-framed woman who knew only how dig up wild forest plants and sell them at the market. Together the couple toiled tirelessly in the woods, digging up whatever they could find, but their life didn’t get any better. Still, Mr. Buong never complained or asked his neighbors for anything.
I knew that my father loved Mr. Buong. Sometimes when my father caught fish, he’d ask my brother to invite Mr. Buong over to eat and drink with him. Mr. Buong usually drank in silence. But one night, he took a drink, then sighed and told my father, “I am worried about my daughter, Xuan. She dropped out of school and now has to take care of the buffaloes. She’s not as good-looking as the other girls, so in the future …”
My father interrupted. “You’re thinking too far ahead. She’s a good, hardworking girl.”
Xuan was Buong’s oldest daughter. She was two years younger than I, but we treated each other as peers. Xuan looked like a typical peasant, with a scrawny neck and dirty black feet. But she was unusually strong and hardworking. I couldn’t even pull her bundle of firewood. In school she studied poorly, so she always sat in the last row, and every month she was named the worst student in her class.
From our house, we could hear Buong’s wife shouting, “Oh, Xuan! Xuan! I pay the tuition and contribute rice to the school every month, but you always get the lowest grades. You’re a big girl now, but you’re still studying with the little kids.”
Xuan was embarrassed and went to cry by herself underneath a palm tree outside. She didn’t dare enter the house. I stood in my family’s manioc garden, listening to Buong’s wife berate her daughter, and felt sorry for Xuan.
Eventually I went off to college and only came back to my hometown twice a year to visit my family. When I came back, I noticed that Xuan had grown up—she was taller, and now we called each other anh and em, “brother” and “little sister.” She had become a youth officer, and I heard that she was doing a good job.
A few years later I joined the military. At the end of 1975, I returned to the village. On the day I got back from the South, my mother asked me, “Did you see Xuan, Mr. Buong’s daughter? She sent me a letter saying that she’d gone to Gia Lai to look for you last May.” There were stories that women who went to the highlands became infertile, that the malaria fevers they might contract could wreak havoc on their bodies and cause baldness. I had seen it myself.
In 1979 Xuan returned to the village. She carried a huge rucksack on her back, but she walked with perfectly straight, upright posture. She spent all of her money to buy her mother a cotton blanket, because she said that her mother had never slept under one. At the age of twenty-five she’d lost most of her hair, and her skin was much darker now. She’d stayed in the highlands after the war to help cultivate land for rubber plantations in Doc Co, Le Thanh, and Chu Pa. Several people had died, Xuan said, from the remaining bombs and land mines hidden in the earth. She’d asked for permission to come home finally because she missed her family. So she was allowed to come back, and she eventually returned to the work of tending to the buffaloes.
Xuan was still single when she turned thirty. Because she had no formal education or experience, she was not qualified for a comfortable position in the local government. She worked on her family’s farm for a few years, but there was still no marriage proposal, and Xuan was extremely sad.
“Do you want to be a single woman forever, Xuan?” her mother asked.
“I will get married, Mom. I’ll even marry a crazy man with cracked lips and a belly button that sticks out,” Xuan replied bitterly.
But eventually this prediction came true. A dull, slow-witted man with a limp was introduced to Xuan by the man’s family. Xuan didn’t look at anyone; she just nodded in agreement and the wedding was arranged. The man’s family offered five chickens, twenty kilograms of rice, a bundle of areca fruit, and several bottles of manioc wine in exchange for Xuan’s hand in marriage. During the wedding, Mr. Buong sat hugging his knees and watched the neighborhood children eating around a tray of food laid on a bed of banana leaves. He sighed to himself. He loved his daughter Xuan a lot. It was unfortunate that this had to be her fate.
Xuan and her husband didn’t have their own house, so after
