Erosion: A Mediation of Home Loss

Leaving was a privilege of those who had a place to leave and return to.

Oct 04, 2024

Many years ago, my grandmother decided to stop living.

She lay in bed, refusing food and quietly drifting into her half-unconscious world. She didn’t respond to any family members, including her husband and her sons. My mother was summoned to take care of her when the situation worsened. Mom caught a two-hour bus to her older brother’s house, where my grandparents lived. They moved in with him six months before her self-starvation.

I knew about this time from my mother’s words: Grandmother lay facing a white wall. She didn’t want to turn back and see anyone.

Every morning, mom took off her clothes, dipping the towel in warm water, scrubbing her skin, and changing her into a clean bathrobe. While doing that, my mom felt life was leaking out of her body. Her skin got ragged and lost flexibility. Her hair tangled like a hairball, although my mom combed her hair every morning. Her palm was left open; her knuckles lost motion. Her limbs turned heavy logs of their own weights; her lips a dry dike of sealed words.

When my grandmother was healthy and happy, she loved to be clean. She cleaned everything with passion, seeking dusty spots and wet marks and eliminating them in a blink, constantly sweeping the garden in the morning and late afternoon. When I visited her 20 years ago, she gave me a bath in half an hour, cleaning all my nails, hair, and rubbing my skin until it turned red.

As a clean person gave up on her desire to live, it was the cleanliness that she gave up first. My mother stayed there two weeks, feeding her liquid congee, singing lullabies by her bed, talk-telling her old stories of the time she grew up. But my grandmother had already made up her mind. She died after my mother left her just a week after.

My childhood memory had some delightful sparks about my grandmother’s house. It was a three-part house with six bedrooms in a shadowy alley, with coconut trees in front, a bell fruit tree bearing lovely and juicy fruit every summer, a pineapple garden behind, and all strangely postured bonsai trees belonged to my grandfather. There, I was attacked by a beehive because I tried to pluck a gloriously red bell fruit next to the nest. Some seasons, my grandpa showed me how he sculptured a deer out of bear’s breach branches. But it was the humidity, the warm and fruit-scented air of the Mekong Delta that made me yearn to return in summer, cocooning in its thick and fluffy air, as if sweetness and textures of busting mangoes, juicy pineapple, dropping coconuts and clusters of longans marinated my skin and my hair in their generous growing pulses.

Then it became a garden of no return because I didn’t get along with my relatives and never came back. Longing for the smell of home, I found another way to return to every garden in the Mekong Delta: I became a journalist; all farmers would love to have me around and show me how the swamp and muddy land blessed them with endless fruitful seasons.

After my grandmother refused to continue living, I went back to the delta more, ruminating, welcoming a strange question coming to my awareness: How was one defined by one’s home?

I visited Mrs. Hà Thị Bé’s Garden through word of mouth from people in the market.

“Just walk straight until you see the water,” a butcher pointed his knife toward a crumbling asphalt road, narrowing just enough for two motorbikes to pass each other.

“The floor broke in half,” the grandmother in her 70s squinted her eyes, trying to measure up close how the horror happened just in a split moment. The white ceramic floor was separated, forming gnawing teeth. The house lay bare like a carcass of a giant animal, scattering soot dented pots, a mini gas cooker, a wooden sofa, enormous rubble of wooden poles, concrete slabs, and aluminum toles reflecting the sunlight from the water.

That night, Bé was singing a lullaby for her grandson, Còi. She murmured the rhythm

again, and I realized,

“O crane, where do you eat tonight

perching on a soft branch falling in the pond.”

The crane in the folk song flew out in the dark, seeking food for her young, mistaking a soft branch for a sturdy branch, missing her foot, and drowning. In the last part of the song, she wailed for help and a fisherman saw her; she begged him to save her. In return, she swore to sacrifice her body for the man’s bamboo shoot soup. She had him promise that if he cooked her, he would only use clean water, never use murky water, because murky water broke her young’s hearts.

Whenever listening to the song, I was urged to ask the crane who cared about her children’s wealth and dignity, about the fisherman saving her, but why didn’t she care about her own life? – But I stopped myself from asking Bé because her song was fractured when the wooden posts of her stilt house rubbed against metal and sang with her. Then aluminum toles shrieked desperately. The floor shivered. She tugged Còi beside her arms and launched herself out of the house. In a jiffy, the earth roared, slowly getting lower and then exploding, waking all her neighbors up. Half of the floor and roof were wrecked into the water. White dust powdered the black night.

“Cò whispered to Grandma if our house was dancing, that was when I knew we had to run, right Cò? You are my smart little man,” The little grandson clutched by her leg. She cuddled his hair, and I saw water in those transparent eye cones. When Bé stepped closer to the eroded edge, he held onto her leg, curiously looking down the steep patch of land. After examining it, he sat on her feet, gazing at a blue plastic car toy crushed into pieces below.

Survivors of land erosion responded slowly to the immediate reality. At first, if you asked them about their situation, they told you a vivid story with absolute calmness. Some went down to little details like Bé. She explained to me every minute, the last moment, the collapsed posture of wooden poles, which were swept, which were left, what she should have taken. She told with eloquence as if it was someone else’s tragedy, distant and unrelating to her.

Bé reminded me of my grandmother, her wrinkled eyes, generous smiles, dried and frail hands, and the little stooped posture. I wanted to know more about her life, “Do you remember how long you have lived here?” Bé went quiet, wandering in her head, trying to lift a foggy curtain of the past.

“Since I can remember, I have been here. My mom and I washed our clothes or washed dishes there since I was a little girl. My dad made a small pier from eucalyptus wood to anchor our boats. The river edge used to be over 300 meters behind our house,” the pier disappeared a long time ago, together with a corn patch they grew for summer harvests. Nobody put on another dock on this side of the island, fearing that the river consumed anything growing. The spot that used to be Bé’s home pier was now a calm water surface, reflecting the crispy blue sky in the delta as if there was never a stretch of homes, land, or lives there. It was a void of an emptied memory that Bé couldn’t hold up against time and massive erosion.

There lay two soot-coated pots twisted on top of broken ceramic pieces and cement chunks. They were remnants of a disrupted, warmhearted kitchen. Island people used to be so poor that they started home with cooking pots, a symbolic object of a fulfilling future. Bé’s mother gave them to her nearly 40 years ago in her marriage. The pots had served her family since her husband was alive, and they bore three kids together. She cooked a farewell dinner with the same pots when her husband passed away and cooked the first meal to welcome the daughter-in-law, Còi’s mother, into the family.

Now their bottoms were torn amid the rubble, unable to bless Bé by her mother’s words.

When my grandparents bought their house in the Mekong Delta, they lived up to their dream of wealth in the opening economy.

Before that, they lived in commune housing or company housing, depending on my grandfather’s job. Having a house with six bedrooms for all their grown-up children was the most satisfactory dream. My grandparents achieved that with years of growing and trading fruits from their small farm. They insisted that we visit every Tết holiday because they had enough space for all their kids to be together like in the old days.

Mekong Delta was a land of generosity. My grandmother told me that if you accidentally spit out a papaya seed, the delta gives you a fruit-laden papaya tree. The heavily alluvial water flew from Tibet down to Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia and ended up in the Mekong Delta, where the abundance landed on the muddy feet of Mekong farmers. We never thought of things like “food security” because we were the country’s food security. We grew enough rice for Vietnam to feed the world. Maybe one day in the supermarket, you will recognize the rice from the Mekong Delta that you serve for dinner, grown in some unknown rice field like my grandparents’. In summer, I slept on a hammock strung between two mango trees. I dreamt of mango growing out of my palms, exquisitely tangy and sweet. I heard jackfruits cracking open and indulging their heavenly smell.

Years ago, I went to Sa Đéc, the flower capital of the delta, and walked into the flower district late afternoon. A woman asked me where I was heading to. I told her I wanted to smell flowers. “Go to my place, we have a spare bed, you can sleep, you can go see the garden tomorrow.” I followed her home. Her house was a flower and frog farm, floating halfway out of the river edge. I opened the window from my bed and smelled the slightly pungent mud mixed with marigold. The frogs gossiped to the moon, disrupting my sleep-in which marigolds quietly laughed beside my shins, crossing and touching their leaves.

In the morning, the flower farm woman told me that her village had grown flowers for generations, six or seven, she couldn’t tell, but she grew up with acres of apricots, water lilies, and marigolds, as her grandparents’ time. When the flood season came, they moved flowerpots to bamboo shelves built upon water level to water them and not let them drown.

Suddenly those gardens returned to my head when Bé walked me through her disappeared home garden toward the river edge. The smooth asphalt road rose and concaved down into shallow holes and rugged paths. The asphalt broke like rice crackers into black bitumen chunks on jagged edges. The road ended abruptly on a steep drop, exposing layers of the earth’s flesh. “Some years ago, this used to be the main road of our village,” Bé described while chopping giant grass away to make way for us through an alternative path to her used-to-be garden.

The swift rapid had been gnawing on roads and pulled houses one by one into the river on many secretive nights. Bé’s house was just one of over a hundred unlucky ones that ended in the same riverbed. Under a giant grass bush, my feet felt the slippery surface of ceramic tiles and cement floors. It used to be homes of someone, of many people who drifted away when their village eroded into the river. Bé used to harvest corn now and then and grilled corn with fried scallion. She would sit in front of the house and turn fresh corn on the top of glowing charcoals for her grandchildren when they finished school and dropped by her house for snacks. She grew morning glory, mustard greens, okra, sponge gourd, and bitter gourd every season. She kept listing the names of them because memories flooded out of her mouth and vaporized into this devastating wreckage. She couldn’t stop; I couldn’t catch all of them.

A small clay Earth God sat discreetly in the bush in the middle of the grass-covered patch with his enormous wealthy laugh. Some houseowners forgot him when they ran for their lives. Bé picked him up, putting him on a clean tiled spot, rubbing muddy spots off his ceramic feet, and genuflecting him with prayers.

Bé’s new house was built in a resettlement area in the middle of the island, about 1,2 miles from the corroded site. Since they moved in, Cò woke up at midnight, sobbing quietly, holding his grandma’s arm tight, anchoring himself on a safe foundation he had lost. Then he gradually drifted back to the far-flung dreams behind the closed eyelids when grandma whispered a lullaby in his ears.

Since the erosion, Cò insisted Bé take him to the riverbank after school for months since the house faded. He wanted to walk on the same path “home” until he reached the broken edges and watched the falling scaffolds and the rubble sink deeper into the water. He stared down the edge, then quietly pulled his grandma’s hands and they left together, leaving the home alone for another night.

“I miss being here. At night, the water burbled through the sandbank. Now we live on the main street. I have to listen to young people race their bikes through noisy pipes. The smell of gas. Sound of engines. I can’t sleep,” Bé moved her shoulders as if she was struggling in an invisible suit, a new house suffocating her.

Share Khải Đơn

“Your grandmother asked me if you still remember the red bell fruit tree. I thought she lost her mind,”

my mother mentioned this during her final caretaking trip to my grandmother. I could hear the roaring engines of container trucks screeching on the highway in her phone's background. Living in Saigon meant suffocating in the concrete jungle and a swamp of industrial noise.

I didn’t take her description of my grandmother seriously, thinking old people had their own uncomfortable clutch to hang onto it with intense disapproval and nastiness. Once grandma got angry with me when I accidentally broke the pottery jar that she used to preserve yeasts to make bread. She kept many beautiful metal tea boxes with Chinese poems carved sophisticatedly next to white-bearded men and storks. She wore a faux emerald pearl on her neck for years because it reminded her of her mother. Now Bé told me that she missed the water burbling. I didn’t understand the disruption of surroundings could wreck their lives havoc. One’s life was defined by the beloving air, sound, the vegetables they grew, the spices and herbs they harvested, the land and mud touching their feet. Their lives were the land’s life itself. Detaching them from the land was cutting nutrition from a growing baby in its mother’s fetus. What did my grandmother yearn for? Did she keep returning to her sweet bell fruit tree until her breath exhausted?

I stood next to Bé, crouching by a slaughtered wall with a window frame looking out the horizon afar. The broken house window framed a losing past and an uncertain present no longer co-existing with the Mekong as their ancestors used to do. The horizon behind the window was disrupted by giant metal arms of sand dredgers: clear-cutting the landscapes into fragments. They were gutting the river leisurely in hums of engines, every season, every day for years and years to come.

Hồng Ngự, Bé’s hometown, was the sand capital of the Mekong Delta. The sand was liquid gold, simply scraped off the riverbed, dried up on immense metal barges, and transported through the network of rivers to anywhere thirsty for development, from Saigon to Singapore, Dubai, or Hong Kong, erecting skyscrapers that we saw in blockbusters like Crazy Rich Asians. None of these glamorous financial buildings and theme parks had space illustrating houses committing suicide in the river. People of the developed worlds admired Asia getting rich; I counted tiny villages and islands sacrificing themselves for that pride. It was as if you were watching an irony in operation.

I walked around the same village, seeking to talk to a sand miner.

Old grandparents disapproved of the idea, saying they were violent and distant, hostile outsiders. From afar, dark skinned men walked and shoveled on barges floating lazily on the water. There was no sound. They worked persistently like an army of ants, moving mountains to mountains, rivers to rivers, looting islands’ foundations discreetly. Rarely did I see any of them look up or look toward me on the riverside. No eye contact.

A tall man in the market invited me to his home because he claimed to know the story about sand miners.

“I was a sand miner,” Thành poured hot tea in a white ceramic cup and pushed it toward me. His house was well-built with good quality wood and new aluminum toles. Behind the house, there was a fish farm and a duck farm. We talked among the busy quacking ducks.

Thành became a sand miner because his father’s farm eroded completely. He had no land and no job. His fellows said he just needed a pump, and he could make a living. Thành went out every night on his wooden sampan run by a small Yamaha boat engine. He dropped a pipe into the water and pumped sand up to the boat. He rode to the sand wholesalers and sold it for over 10 million VNĐ (~500 USD) by morning. He and his sister became sand miners like that for years, earning the amount of cash that no farmer could imagine all their lifetime.

“I quit when my mother got cancer. I want to stay at home more and take care of her. I grow fish and duck now,” Thành finished his monologue, and I wriggled in my chair, not knowing what to ask. “I think it is karma. My mother is paying for what I did,” Thành sipped the tea, and his eyes squinted because the sun was too bright on the river afar. Sand miners knew what they caused, but it was quiet reasoning among them that they worked for a living, munching their motherland for food. Thành turned from a first-hand victim to a perpetrator himself. He and his neighbors didn’t talk to each other. It was everyone else’s business that the island corroded.

“We gathered the villagers to chase them away. We filed lawsuits against them. They just went about their business because nothing could harm them. Our house eroded. We were too busy to take care of our homes. People moved away when their houses collapsed,” Bé described the cycle, which explained the dynamic between houseless farmers and sand miners. Environmentalists in Cần Thơ University found giant water holes underneath sand mines in the river. They created a stronger water flow. Hence, rapids “chewed” both riversides where alluvium and silt are soft, sweeping the land away on its path. The local government assured that the holes were natural. Naturally, like that, Bé and her neighbors turned into refugees in their fatherland.

***

Bé’s island lay by the same river near my grandmother’s garden. Mekong people said that we all were born from water and dissolved into water.

My grandmother didn’t fulfill that prophecy of the land. Before putting herself to starve, she discovered that her son, mom’s older brother, sold her land and her house to pay out his debt. “She missed her home,” mom explained as if it was a justifiable reason to die. My grandmother was uprooted to Saigon and buried in an urban graveyard somewhere I had never visited. She didn’t dissolve into water. Could one abandon one’s life for the sake of a piece of land? – Does anyone out there do that?

Bé was uprooted from her riverbank. She had a small ledger to keep account of the housing expenses for years now. She could see her resettling house was draining them up in a frightening new life. Her finger moved along a new column of spending, shaking quietly with things like a fan, water usage, gasoline, electricity... She didn’t buy a fan before because her house was full of breeze and rice-scented air. She didn’t pay for water; a small well provided, and she washed her clothes in the river. No motorbike was needed; they lived by the market and a ferry. She walked with a basket to sell fruits and bring food home. Suddenly, everything cost.

***

In the very last days of my grandmother, she changed her side toward my mother.

It was easier to clean and to help her sit up. Tears came from her eyes while my mother was wiping her face and neck. She exhaled, and her shoulders trembled. My mother sat closer to her and hugged her. “She was leaving.” My mother admitted her caring couldn’t pull my grandmother back from her path. She had no home to which to return, better leaving the unbearable noise of the city wrapped up in its chaos.

But “leaving” was a privilege of those who had a place to leave and return to, like my grandmother. One only left when there was a place to depart, a ferry, a bus station, a home. If one’s home disappeared, one was abandoned in the void, disoriented and disgraced. One didn’t know where to begin or to continue. There was nowhere to start again.

Bé led me through the path cut into a busy village market. Nearby, some houses were abandoned. Two graves lay cold in front, no incense, no flowers. Mekong people used to bury their ancestors in the garden to continue their next lives close to their grandchildren, watching descendants thrive. Bé whispered to me: “They were my parents’ friends. Their children left. All their rice fields and garden went into the water some years ago.”

I wonder how long these two graves would still stay with their grandchildren. Would they still be here when the children come back?

The livings have no home to return; the death waited for the river to call them in some random night corrosion.

Khải Đơn