Return from Vĩnh Long

We had slept at Lữ's cousins' house on our last night in Vĩnh Long. In the morning, I noticed that the countryside sun seems to rise earlier than in the city. A hundred miles away in Saigon, the streets lay quiet in the still shade cast by tall buildings. Yet in Vĩnh Long the sun was already high in the sky and the world was vibrant and alive. The sun shone down on palm leaf-thatched houses and fruit orchards, and caused the chalky-brown river to sparkle. Neighbors gathered to gossip around the vegetable cart in the lane between the houses and the river bank. A flat barge covered in a blue tarp chugged downstream. Standing in the center of the barge, a little girl in a pink shirt and capris stretched her arms over her head and waved to the world.

The sun hid behind the clouds. Somewhere in the distance, three white, waggle-tailed ducks waddled their way into a lush paddy. Mudskippers, with googly, frog-like eyes, poked their heads from their bankside holes and skipped across the surface of the water in the irrigation ditches in the orchard. The wind carried signs of rain, and soon the world was awash in curtains of water that beat down on tin roofs like billions of angry feet. Almost as soon as it began, the rain let up, and the sun shone again on the glistening verdant countryside.

We said our goodbyes to Lữ's cousins, hopped on scooters, and sped off to Dì Tư's house. There, we had left some belongings that we needed to pick up before we left. And Dì Tư had some fruit for us to take back with us. Mike and Lữ groaned. We'd have to carry the fruit by hand from shuttle to bus to shuttle to taxi and then up the two flights of stairs home. How bad could that be? I thought to myself, it's just a little fruit. Just a little fruit turned out to be two-dozen coconuts, a jackfruit the size of a five-gallon bucket, and a burlap sack full of pomelo, longyans, limes, green-skinned oranges, and the 25 pounds of rambutan we had picked from the orchard. We stacked it all on the side of the road in front of Dì Tư's house, waited for the shuttle to the bus station, and wondered, how are we going to eat all this fruit before it spoils?

The shuttle pulled up, and through the window the passengers gawked at our pile. The seven passenger van was already carrying eleven people, so the matter was not only the fruit, it was the question of how we were all going to fit. We found a way, and within a few miles, squeezed an additional two people into the van. We were packed in like clowns. The driver passed Lữ our bus tickets, and the man next to me said he overheard her name and was related to her family somehow. He was a tiny man, with receding gums and ears that stuck out at ninety-degree angles. He, Mike, and Lữ held a brief conversation that petered out shortly after the man said he had fought with the Việt cộng during the war. I spent the rest of the trip with my camera behind my head, trying and failing to capture a picture of the 15 people squished into this 7-passenger van.

Our fruit bounty,
all we could carry

We got to the bus station. Mike and I unloaded our mammoth stock of groceries. The man who said he was related to Lữ joined us to grab his own bags. Mike smiled at him and cracked a joke about the imperialist Americans. The man laughed, dug into his satchel, and fished out two mangoes that he handed to us before he left. Not that we needed any more fruit. When we finally got home, we piled it all high on the table to marvel at what we were faced with consuming. Five days later, we still have a large bowl of rambutan, eleven coconuts, four pomelo, enough limes to make a pint of juice, and one of the mangoes. The fruit is a delicious reminder of our time in Vĩnh Long. It was nice to bring home a piece of the countryside--as much of a piece as we could carry.