The Story of Bình An Village
From a Rice Field to Bình An
Oanh Huynh - Founder of Bình An Village
As a child, there were mornings when my left hand planted seedlings and my right wiped away sweat, while inside I was restless, waiting for Má's sticky rice with coconut shrimp and a slice of pickled melon. I still remember the day Má called out that the canal was draining fast. My brother and I worked straight through midday, loading rice onto the boat and out to the main road, where the threshing machine stood waiting. The taste of sticky rice and coconut shrimp, the smell of ripening paddy, the smoke of burnt straw after harvest. All of it settled deep into my memory, together with three words: 'a farmer's child'.
Bình An Village was pieced together from my siblings' childhood and mine, on the very rice field where Ba and Má sweated through two harvests a year and never once seemed tired. When the field work ended, the garden began. There was the squash coming into flower to keep up with, and room to make on the trellises so the gourds and luffa could fruit in season. This is also where Ba gathered dry firewood to cook bánh tét on the twenty-ninth day before Tết, the one day each year when all of us children got to crowd around the glowing coals, grilling our own slices of meat over the fire.
“Some memories only grow sharper the farther you go from home. For me, it is those childhood days out in the fields, planting rice, then rushing the bundled stalks home before the rising water claimed them.
The shoulder pole Má carried out to the fields in planting season, heavy with sticky rice, was the same one that carried vegetables and luffa to the late-night market. The pole that once weighed on her shoulders now carries memories, packed with just enough longing to fill a place called Bình An.
Bình An Village simply keeps a few of the old ways. Some rows of herbs, a trellis of squash and gourd, and Nội's kitchen, still full of the taste of home. I arrange Bình An piece by piece, as the memories return to me, so that anyone who misses their Nội, their parents, their countryside, will have a place to come back to. The way I do."
