A Visit to the Countryside

Janet here.  This blog post was meant to have gone out in mid-May!  I wrote it and thought I had published it, but it turns out I never did.  So really what we're doing this week is packing our house and saying goodbye to all our friends, but here's a post about something I got to do with Anna a few weeks ago...

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Last week Anna and I got to go with our neighbor to visit her countryside home. Any Vietnamese English-speaker from the countryside will always refer to their hometown as "my countryside."  This is a slight English error that I never correct because I love what it communicates.  It's not the town itself that is important to them.  It is the fact that it is in the country, that it's surrounded by farms, that the people still living there are still farming.  America has been urbanized much longer, but there's an undercurrent of patriotism and nostalgia in the Vietnamese person's voice that I associate with American books about small town life "back then."  Anyway, this was our first opportunity to actually visit a home in one of these villages.

Nostalgia and patriotism are great filters to look through, because without them, life in the countryside is just hard!  If you don't love the land and the people and believe in the value of the work that you do there, you would just feel your life to be a drudgery.  Clearly, my neighbor still has that love when she returns to her home, but she also acknowledges that her early life was like a hardship movie.

 Let me just tell you the summary:  She was born in 1978, the third daughter in her family.  The American-Vietnam war ended in 1975.  Our soldiers came home with a variety of hardships because of their ordeal, but it is difficult to imagine just how awful a time it was for the people of Vietnam, especially those who fought on the losing side, as my neighbor's father did.  They nearly escaped with those fleeing immediately after the war, but her mother couldn't bear to leave her family behind, so they stayed.  The early years of their marriage were simply a matter of survival.  Finding food was everything.  The reason we were at my neighbor's family home on this particular day was that it was marking the day in 1977 when her older sister died as a toddler--from eating rotten food she found discarded in the market.  My neighbor explained to me that many small children died of various accidents in those days because there was literally no one looking after them during the day.  Every adult was needed in the fields.


By the time my neighbor was 10 years old, her teacher recommended to her parents that she be sent to the city for school because she showed promise as a student.  They saw this as an opportunity for the betterment of everyone's future, so they sent her to live with an uncle in the city.  During that time she was treated very badly by her uncle and cousins.  She didn't elaborate, but this was the part she said was "like a movie."  She would sometimes go home on the weekends, but the roads were so bad that she preferred to spend 5 hours riding her bicycle there rather than going by bus and getting car sick (our drive took just over an hour, but she said it was much longer then, before the road was paved).  Of course, she had no food for the journey, and would sometimes stop at people's homes to ask for water.  Her older sister went to work in a factory to earn enough money to pay for her schooling. None of her siblings went to school beyond what the village could provide.  So my neighbor has been the hope and success story of the whole family.



Her schooling years were grim, but they paid off.  She succeeded in college and works as an English teacher in the talented and gifted high school.  She married well.  She says that when she goes home to her village she is quite famous because she is the only woman who knows how to drive a car, and she owns her own car!  She saved money and built her parents a concrete house when she was barely out of college herself.  The house is simple, and not unlike the others in the village, but theirs was the first concrete house when she built it about 12 years ago.  She financially supports every member of her family in some way (there's another whole tragic story about how her sister contracted HIV from her husband and passed it to her child, now a young teen. And then there's the younger brother who gambles and can't be trusted.  Just like a movie, eh?).

As she was telling me all of these stories, I was trying to think of any family stories of my own that she would be interested in.  I'm sure there are plenty of things that would interest her, but all I could think was, "My recent family history is so stable. So boring. So safe."  I'm so grateful for my past, and so aware that many people have it much, much worse.



In addition to learning lots of family history, we also got to see how peanuts are turned into peanut oil.  One of the crops of the village is peanuts, and it's harvest time.  The farmers bring their peanuts to the house next door, and that family runs the press for making the oil.  This family is blessed to have 5 sons, and they all work the family business.  Most other families by this time have sent all their young adults to the city, and the village contains mostly older people and children--the grandparents and their grandchildren.  But the family of 5 sons can keep everyone busy and reasonably prosperous by being the peanut mill.  We learned that it takes about an hour to turn one farmer's bag of peanuts into a 20 kilo jug of oil.  The farmer stays on to watch the process, to make sure all of the oil is put in the right jug.  First, the peanuts (in their shells) are run through a grinder.  Then the the grinds are cooked in a huge vat heated by a wood fire.  When they are done, they are the consistency of sand and are packed like sandcastles into buckets and then dumped onto a piece of rice-bag material.  The material is wrapped around the sandcastle, and then one of the sons steps on it to smash it into a bamboo ring that has just been made by the dad.  About 20 of these rings are filled by one batch of peanut mash.  The rings are then stacked in the press, which turns like a screw and pushes the oil out.  At first it is turned by machine, and the oil comes gushing out.  Then, when it would be damaging to run the engine so hard, they stop the engine and turn it by hand every few minutes.  I watched them do it for a while and could tell that it was hard work, but when they gave me a turn at it, I could barely move the metal bar even when I pulled on it with my full body weight. Strong guys.  When everyone is convinced that no more oil can be coaxed out of the now-compressed discs, the farmer weighs his oil and the mill operators unpack the press.  The warm peanut mash discs are unwrapped and stacked--they'll be mixed with other vegetable matter and used as pig and cow feed.

Now, I know that it is trendy in America right now to talk about small processing plants and farm-to-table lifestyles and all that.  I have a lot of respect for that movement and think it's a healthy direction to go.  But we also have ideas about hygiene and quality control, and hooray for that!  I'm glad peanut oil is used for high-heat cooking and probably nothing really unsafe would happen with it, but as I watched people working on the dirt floor, stomping on food products with bare feet, using equipment that may have never been cleaned (looked like years of cobwebs to me!), letting their chickens roam in and out, and filling jugs that were being used multiple times without cleaning, it made me a little bit glad that we have a lot of laws about food safety.