Back to the source

It has become a tradition that every time the 10th day of the 3rd lunar month approaches, she will call to ask if her children and grandchildren are coming home. Her eldest grandson teases her: “What is it that you are coming home for, grandma?” “We are coming home so that the whole family can reunite. We have been gone since Tet, but why have we been apart for so long? And on the Hung Kings’ Death Anniversary, we have to go home to the Hung Temple festival. People from far away still come back to offer incense, let alone us. Come home, I have prepared a vegetable garden and some free-range chickens.”

This year, because she didn't want to call each child individually, she stood in front of the camera, pointing at the calendar on the wall. Chewing betel, she smiled gently like a fairy tale.

Back! My brothers and I all came back. The way home passed through the Hung Temple gate, from afar we could see the stream of people excitedly going to the festival. Sometimes when we got home we didn’t see anyone, everyone was gathered outside the cultural house. The mothers were busy preparing for the banh chung wrapping competition, the young men in the village were either pounding banh giay or working hard for the rowing team. The children were busier than everyone, they were everywhere cheering. But the elders were sometimes more excited than the children, like my grandmother who must have woken up early and invited some old friends to go see xoan singing and the palanquin procession. She said: “I don’t know how many more seasons I can participate in the Ancestor’s Death Anniversary… This year I’m still healthy enough to go to the festival, who knows next year I might just lie still at home listening to the sound of drums.”

The house is not far from Hung Temple, you can see the foot of Nghia Linh Mountain right in front. She has been familiar with the road to the temple since she was little. Since it was a small, winding dirt road, she followed my grandfather's shoulder pole to Hung Temple to sell tea. The festival was very crowded, my grandfather told her to hold on to the shoulder pole but she was so absorbed in looking around that sometimes she lost her grip and got lost in the crowd. Quickly climbing up a tree to observe, she found her grandfather among the flow of people going back and forth.

One year, she was assigned to sit and look after the trays of jujubes, trays of fragrant cinnamon bark, baskets of boiled cassava... to sell to customers returning home. Now, the old road has been invested in widely and spaciously for a long time. But each tree trunk and blade of grass along the roadside still grows with people, existing through many ups and downs of the years. Even each layer of soil and rock on Nghia Linh mountain also carries within it many sediments. There are trees in the Hung Temple relic site, when she was born, they stood tall in the sky, when people are old, the trees are still green and endless for future generations. In the first days of the third lunar month, here, you can hear the sound of the ceremonial drums resounding in the ground. Birds fly to Nghia Linh, hiding in the green foliage, singing loudly...

Every year, the Hung Kings' Commemoration Day is solemnly and respectfully celebrated, with a deep sense of community to preserve, protect and promote the value of the heritage. Many folk cultural activities are held such as: the procession to Hung Temple; the contest of wrapping Chung cake and pounding Day cake; beating bronze drums, stabbing bamboo shoots, traditional wrestling, water puppetry... Before the main festival day, my children were lost in the crowd cheering for the rowing competition at Van Lang Park Lake, Viet Tri City. Entering the competition, hundreds of rowers put all their efforts into the fierce race. The audience poured in more and more, cheering and cheering with the sound of drums and trumpets, extremely bustling. Cultural and sports activities continued to take place one after another throughout the week. Millions of people continuously returned to the source to offer incense to the Hung Kings, praying for prosperity for the country and peace for the people.

The rain washing the temple was like a good omen watering the souls of the children of the ancestral land. It has become a tradition that every year on the anniversary of the Hung Kings, many families in my hometown carefully prepare a tray of offerings at home to show gratitude to the Hung Kings. My grandmother said that this is an opportunity for the family to remind and educate their children about gratitude to their ancestors, about the national morality of "remembering the source of water when drinking".

I hope she is healthy and lives long so that at the beginning of the third lunar month she can call her children and grandchildren to come home for a reunion. As long as she lives, there will be fairy tales. As long as there are roots, there will be homeland, there will be the cultural soul of the nation!