The world is large but in us, it is deep as the sea
R.M.Rilke
Since May, the farthest that I’ve been is to your house in a small alley on Minh Khai street in Hanoi. Barely a dozen steps away from the roaring waves of traffic noise, the area is a serene oasis of alleys inside alleys. The whole alley is taking a nap. There are only the snip-snips of the barber’s scissors and the tappings of two kids’ hurried footsteps which quickly disappear into a green door.
Your building has recently been renovated and a key card is required for entry so I wait for you beneath the star fruit tree opposite the gate. This star fruit tree is just as slender as many others. Dozens of plum star fruits are embracing the branches, still deep in their afternoon dreams under the foliage’s emerald sky. I have devoured hundreds of pots of braised fish with star fruits in my thirty-three years of existence but this has been the first time that I actually spend a few minutes just to attentively look at a star-fruit tree.
In the alley, there are only the security guard and I who is looking up at the tree – an act so odd that the guard keeps stepping out of his box, peering at me suspiciously. The star-fruit tree in Minh Khai alley reminds me of other star-fruit trees, ruminating in the yards of quaint old houses in Luang Prabang, a crisp spring morning in 2018. They were just as quiet, and fallen fruits scattered around their roots. Do the Lao people think of star fruits when they think of their homeland like the Vietnamese?
When do we travel, and when do we merely visit a familiar place?
When I draw, your cozy 60-square-meter flat is transformed into a foreign land. Drawing means immersing yourself into new sounds, new scents, new colors, new textures. The rumbles of airplanes from the nearby military air base. Occasionally, a small plane passes by so close we can see the sparks from its metallic belly. The claws of your 20-year-old cat clatter on the polished tiles. He’s too old to be able to retract his claws. Now he’s dozing on the sofa; his belly – matted with fur knots – heaving gently. Once in a while, he frowns at us – the two lazy humans, coughing out some raspy groans while waiting for someone to comfort him with a chin rub. From your laptop, the voice of a speaker presenting passionately about the history of the South China Sea on a webinar and the clickety-clack of your keyboard as you’re transcribing.
If sounds embrace me tenderly like ripples on an old pond, colors respond fervently to my gaze, perhaps because every color is, first of all, reflected light. The chrysanthemums’ multitude of petals glow in their honey hue. It feels as if autumn just flew by your always wide-open window and accidentally touched its wings on the flowers you so adore. Two sun-soaked pomegranates press their freckled cheeks to each other on the table; their dry crowns look like they are made of red bronze. Your home shares the same pulse with the season, and your objects are always sensitive responses to seasonal change.
On this warm background of autumn’s sweet yellows and oranges are the scarlet and mulberry color of the cushion, the azure of the sofa’s cover and a dash of deep cobalt blue on the earthen figurine on the shelf. All these colors twinkle, or rather they tinkle together like wind chimes – a kind of sonic visual so full of movement that it makes me smile.
To draw someone’s home is to experience their different manifestations, all of which stemmed from the same DNA. Strips of dried grapefruit peel hanging under the stove scent the air with a fresh, slightly bitter fragrance; an old coriander soap bar that you bought in the last Tet slowly perfumes clothes in the wardrobe; a jar of bergamot oil sprinkles zesty notes in the bedroom and in your V60 pot, rich brown drops are dripping – the kind of coffee that leaves a scent of apricot wine in your mouth, as you once told me. You are Hương (“Fragrance”) and your name fills the air of this room.
Because drawing someone’s home requires the sketcher to look at their objects closely and find a common thread among seemingly unrelated items, to draw is to seek to understand the owner’s identity, their history, their evolution. In front of the speakers is your picture from when you were a college student – Rosy cheeks, bright smile and over your shoulders, a colorful ethnic brocade bag. You loved ethnic brocade and quilted textiles back then. Even though you rarely wears brocade or quilted clothes now, your love for rusticity is still there, manifested in your myriad of coarse, earth-toned ceramic vases or your Lê Cát Trọng Lý s album, the case of which is a bamboo box made of rough ripples – pure and simple just like the music.
You said “The room is messy! I haven’t cleaned it yet” when I pulled out my pen and sketchbook, not knowing that a “messy” room makes a much more interesting subject than a neat one. A “messy” room is an open world where your objects spill out – your unfinished books on the blanket, the yoga mat that you haven’t rolled back after the session, the hand lotion bottle you just used this morning and put back on the desk in a rush, near the edge that looks like it’s about to fall. A ‘messy’ room instantly reveals different glimpses of the owner’s quotidian life.
Between the bookshelf and the desk is your ‘shame’ spot. It’s the most disorganized corner, full of unused objects. Several carton boxes which used to be the rice cooker or pressure-cooker packaging, a stack of old clothes that you haven’t managed to give away, a row of glass jars which, in their past life, contained candies or essential oil but are now shimmering in their emptiness. In your eyes, they are not garbage but rather objects waiting for their second life. And so, you don’t want to throw them away.
It matters not where or how far you travel – the farther commonly the worst – but how much alive you are
Thoreau
Piles of books scattered everywhere in your flat – on the bedside table, on your bed, your sofa, and even on the TV cabinet. Books, or the questions you have been pondering, seem to follow you everywhere. “A missed victory”, “A hundred years of Tân Sơn Nhất airport”, “A war report”, “A gust of dursty wind” – The books you are reading tell me those questions, planting in me a new curiosity for the historical period in which I’ve always been satisfied with a knowledge limited to dates and the picture of a tank knocking down the Saigon’s Presidential Palace gate.
People tend to think that in order to broaden their mind, they have to travel far from home, to a new land, a new country or even a new continent. Yet if one pays attention and sees the world around them with the eyes of a child, even a familiar room in a Minh Khai alley offers many marvelous things, like the “trám” (canarium fruit) sticky rice with chả rươi (sandworm omelet) that you cooked for me. This is only the second time that I’ve tried a sandworm omelet. The first piece of sandworm omelet that I ate had more minced pork and egg than sandworms, and I couldn’t actually see the worms in it. I don’t often eat meat or fish dishes that resemble living creatures. The ingredients have to be sliced, chopped or minced so that they are completely detached from their original source. It’s harder to swallow when my food is ‘staring’ at me, reminding me that it was once a living creature that was not born to end up on my plate. But your sandworm omelet smells delicious. I can imagine the creaminess of fried egg and the fruity zest of mandarin peel. But wrapped around the omelet are dozens of red sandworms which look like they are wiggling their tiny tentacles. After spending a few minutes warming up with the idea of eating worms, I put the omelet in my mouth, relishing the harmony of autumn’s flavors.
Xôi trám (sticky rice with canarium fruits) is a completely novel culinary experience for me. As I eat mostly familiar foods, I only read about stuff canarium fruits from Dương Thu Hương’s “A Childhood’s Journey”, a book that I had almost learned by heart when I was a kid. The flavor of black canarium fruit is similar to black olive’s – piquant, slightly astringent with a whiff of wine (perhaps, it is why canarium is also called Chinese black olives). While cured black canarium on its own is still an acquired taste for me, the rich taste of the fruit compliments so well the soft sweetness of sticky rice that I keep asking for more of it. It took a Google search for me to realize canarium is also called “cà na”, the foreign-sounding tree that a farmer in the Mekong Delta has once enthusiastically talked to me about as a potential crop tree amid the persistent price decline of rice.
The afternoon is still sound asleep. While you’re listening to the recording of your interview last week, I focus on drawing. Occasionally, you pause the interview to check the webinar that is still streaming on your phone, or to simply nuzzle the chrysanthemums, muttering to yourself “How beautiful!”. The rhythm of your day feels gentle and calm, just like this very autumn afternoon. Water is bubbling in the boiling kettle; the switch flipped a dry clack. Your old cat is still dozing on the sofa. You make a cup of black tea, drop a cinnamon stick in each cup, and then both of us continue to get absorbed by what we are doing.
Every time I want to escape my current life, I would imagine myself at the airport, buying a ticket to any small town (not too small so it still has an airport) or an island, to live a day that is unlike my typical day and be someone who’s unlike myself at home. But today, without impulsively getting any plane ticket, as I draw quietly, I feel like I’m melting into the autumn sunlight which is filling all corners of this little room with a green window, disappearing into the air of your ordinary day – tranquil, poetic, yet captivating like the rhythm of Lưu Quang Vũ’s poems which you sometimes murmur to yourself:
“Evening birds sing their innocent songs And passionately, how the evening sky blue The last sun ray tangles willow leaves Evening balcony, the sound of faraway wind A passing rain Fresh, mellow air Around the lake, leaves rotte A scent of wine rises gently Dracontomelon flowers fall on the door steps…”
L.L
12th December 2021