A friend of mine, Tran Thanh Minh, sent me several pictures of the Flower Show on Nguyen Hue Boulevard a day before Tet. The pictures were so beautiful – and interesting – that I was determined to see all those places myself.
But when I came to the Nguyen Hue boulevard this morning I hardly find anything like the scenes in the photos. The street was crowded as usual, and many people seemed as bewildered as I was. Where had the flowers and the pottery pigs gone? The answer was in this morning newspaper. An article on Tuoi Tre (the Youth)explained that there had been a binge of looting the evening before. Many people – young and fashionably dressed – had looted the pots of flowers and minatures of pigs displayed for Tet festival along the street. The writer quotes “readers’ complaints” about the lack of ethics and manners in the young people and considers this youthful binge a dirty stain spoiling the beautiful picture of Tet in Saigon.
But the few young men I talked to on the bus didn’t agree with that viewspoint. They didn’t confirm if they had been taking part in the trouble, but they insisted that it was a “custom”, fair and a lot of fun – getting something from the “public gifts” is a variant of the traditional practices “hái lộc đầu năm” (get manna for a good new year). My grandmother always practiced this and taught me to do so when I was a kid: On the first day of the new year, she chose a good direction to begin her walk, picked a green branch on the way (usually a bamboo branch), or went to a pagoda to beg Buddha for some manna – usually a banana or an orange (offerings to Buddha from villagers like her). Coming home she staked the green branch into the ground, somewhere in her garden, and checked it often. If the branch grew she would be happy that the new year would be good one of “mưa thuận gió hoà” (favorable rains and harmonial winds). She saved the manna from Buddha for her beloved children or grandchildren – I was often forced to eat some of that manna to be blessed. I think it’s a kind of like the bread and wine that Catholics eat and drink at church. My grand father prefered a bite at the village dinner to a whole dish in his kichen nook “một miếng giữa làng bằngsàng xó bếp” – That meant you had a role and a share among your folks; and the honor, not the material, that mattered so much in the “good old days”. Men of the old days like my grandfather respected “ơn trời lộc nước” (word by word translation: blessings from the sky and manna from water – nước, water, also means country, society).
The customs have been handed down to the young generation in a weird way. The young men on the bus explained to me: Yesterday evening was the closing ceremony of the flowers boulevard, which cost billions of dong – of course from our taxes – to be set up in the first place. The flowers and other displays at the show would become rubbish after only a week. A waste, anyway. Why couldn’t we salvage some of them? Like 30,000 people at the Banh Tet Feast, who were there not because of hunger, but for something else besides “a bite from the manna of the country/society”, those at the Flowers Show closing ceremony were finding fun in trying to get a share of the “ơn trời lộc nước”!
A spring wandering brought me back to the alleys in Cho Lon, where I hoped to find my memories of my childhood. I did. One of a few things that hasn't changed much in the whirlwind of change in Cholon nowadays is the back alleys being used as playground for poor kids. An admission ticket to an amuement park like Dam Sen or Suoi Tien is 45,000 – 50,000 dong (an average daily income for a factory worker). So I found again the memory of the little girl newly-evacuated from the village to the alleys of Cholon among the kids of today -- using their little lucky money to buy some tet fun in a lotto game.
Nót far from the kids’s lotto is a big crowd of some dozens of adults standing in a circle. When I came closer I realized it a casino! An informal street one. They put down cash on a board of numbers for throwing dice. I’m reluctant to say it is another “practice” on Tet, but the little casino, which is illegal, has been allowed to “let go” during Tet days.
When a newspaper in Hochiminh city asked me to contribute something about Tet celebrations among the Vietnamese in America, I found my article would be boring or at least misleading because in my Bellingham, the Vietnamese don’t have many special events to celebrate Tet except going to casinos – the biggest casinos in the area sometimes have shows performed by Vietnamese or Chinese entertainers on the lunar new year. I didn’t think gambling habits on Tet should be encouraged, so I could not finish my article. It seems I missed a chance. Today I found this article in the New York Times. My husband forwarded the link to me with a note: “This is brilliant. You should write about it in your blog. Dragon dances, mechanical pigs with moving eyes and snouts, special dinners (for only $2000) and lucky money envelopes filled with gambling chips -- in casinos in Vegas. All for our beloved Asian-American citizens. Isn't America great?"
