Eggplant season in my village

Every year-end when the wind blows heavily on the fields, my grandmother often asks someone to buy dozens of bunches of young eggplants to plant. She watered and cultivated them all by herself. Her sweat dripped down several acres of garden. Just a few months later, the eggplants began to flower, bear fruit, and yield the first harvest. The taller the stems, the more fruit the eggplants produced. Continuous harvesting over a period of half a year would cause the plants to become dry and withered. The land would be converted to sweet potato or millet, sesame, etc., waiting for the next eggplant crop.

During the eggplant picking days, the sky was still hazy with mist, and she and the villagers went out to the fields one after another. Sometimes the cold made the children gasp, and each whiff of white steam, whether smoke or mist, made a hill look gray. The small hamlet shrank into a small and gentle space in the opaque white. The space was as unreal as in a fairy tale. The eggplant gardens began to bear fruit. The eggplants were bigger than a thumb, white dots in the moldy leaves. My grandmother and I painstakingly picked them. The leaves were itchy, burning and cutting into my face and skin. The fruit were tough, clinging tightly to the stem. Sometimes I even tore off a branch, and I quietly dug the soil to hide it for fear of being scolded. We worked like that until the blazing sun hung overhead.

Every house in my neighborhood has a plot of land to grow eggplants. Sometimes a few pieces, sometimes a few acres. When the season comes, as scheduled, eggplants, eggplants, and firecracker eggplants are piled up in front of the yard, waiting for buyers to come. My family sells a lot of eggplants. One harvest fills three or four large baskets. Every afternoon, my grandmother takes the eggplants that people have rejected, washes them, and salts them. She puts them in huge jars, salts them very salty, and presses them down tightly with a large rock. She salts them very skillfully so that they can be eaten almost all year round. They are salty and crunchy.

Many people in my hometown depend on eggplants. Eggplants seem to be present all year round in every meal. In the past, during difficult years, my grandmother's pickled eggplants became the main dish. During busy harvest days at noon, I often only had time to cook a pot of rice, then scoop out a bowl of eggplants, pour in the soup of Malabar spinach, jute, chrysanthemum greens... and eat it quickly. Pickled eggplants eaten with rice are rich, rustic, and have a warm taste of the homeland.

TRAN TAM