A Journey Begins

by Lance Mason

The sun through the door cast a hard rectangle of light across the red soil embedded in the wooden floor of the hut. Hoa squatted in the shadows, watching a black beetle scaling the reed screen over the window nearby. With an empty face, she dwelled on the decision announced by her parents. She could not leave her village to study at the school in Dien Bien Phu. Her hands and body would be needed in the rice terraces and mango groves in the year ahead.

The Northern Upland High School, or Truong Pho Thong Vung Cao, was a boarding academy in Thái Nguyên Province for children from neighboring hill-tribes and the surrounding towns. During the previous year, Hoa's family had been notified that she was a candidate for acceptance at the school. The female students were expected to wear traditional dress but, despite its prestige, in a country depressed by decades of war, there were no public funds for clothes, no tailors or seamstresses at the school. So, Hoa, of the Tai Den, or Black Tai, had spent these many months weaving cloth and sewing, preparing the embroidered vestments of her clan.

Long before this, when their northwest province of Lai Chau was formed, Hoa’s Auntie Phuong had left their village to attend the Thong Vung Cao school, then gone on to university in Hanoi to study commerce. For many years, Hoa had dreamed of following the path of Auntie Phuong, but to become an engineer, to help her country grow strong and self-reliant, according to the teachings—so said Grandmother Lan—of Great Uncle Ho, founder of the nation.

Phuong only rarely came back to visit the valley, but Hoa had decided that she would return—with her engineering books and her knowledge—and build a highway bridge across the nearby river, the Song Nam Rom. The farmers on the opposite bank could then more easily bring their rice and fruit, vegetables, eggs, and animals across to the market traders who traveled the north-south road in their rubber-tired tractors and tiny, diesel-powered trucks. Hoa would build the bridgehead downstream from the village, on the rocky promontory where the river's bank shelves away to the tumbling muddy currents and clear eddies below. Then, she would damn the mouth of Ancestors Gorge, the brawny, reckless tributary a kilometer upriver. This would store water for the rice fields and for the new fresh-water shrimp farms in the province, bringing income and prestige to Hoa's village and, so, to her family.

First, though, she must go to the school in Thái Nguyên, and Mother and Father had said no.

North of Dien Bien Phu, but south of Hoa's home, three imported SUVs, shiny and nearly new, powered up the tar-sealed road. The middle one was silver, and carried men from a foreign country whose colorful flags—red, white, and blue—snapped and fluttered from the fenders. The first and last vehicles were black, and full of local government and Party apparatchiks to conduct the day's negotiations. They had left late from a meeting in Dien Bien Phu and were hurrying through Muong Lay, the next town.

Behind tinted, armored glass, these mid-level bureaucrats and their entourages were on a diplomatic mission to the northwest provinces claiming to investigate the needs of the people, but, in the end, the meetings were about money, and the poc-faced drivers in the black cars were specially trained to prevent any threat to the well-being of these indispensable officials. So, the local people stopped, even jumped aside, to let the speeding luxury transports pass.

Sitting in the family hut, Hoa thought back to earlier years, how Mother had sat with her, helping her with her lessons and pushing her to achieve. Why now that Hoa had won a place in the academy was Mother joining with Father to oppose this? It was clear from Mother's face and tone that she was of two minds about holding Hoa back. Was it really about Hoa's role in the paddies and the orchards? The school had few funds, but the State would pay her tuition and board, so Hoa would need little from her family except her clothes. Another village girl could take her place in the fields and, even after the girl's pay, there would be some profit in the family's books.

Mother, however, still weighed life's outcomes on ancient scales: more offspring meant more security for the elders in times of want. Perhaps she wanted her daughter to stay and marry, to make grandchildren for the household, the family fabric. But Hoa knew the modern world. Uncle Ho's disciples, under General Giap during the French and American Wars, had wrestled Vietnam, the Land-Water, from the power of the West and set it on a track to greatness and plenty. The grandmothers and grandfathers of Vietnam would be more secure in the future without needing a dozen grandchildren to help them. Hoa knew this.

Hoa craned her head around and looked down from the doorway of the pole-house onto the smooth, fat back of one of the buffalos. The hair of its hide bristled black through a thin, even coat of dried mud, and its moon-crescent horns curved back to its shoulders. The beast twisted its neck and looked up at Hoa, looked into her clear, black eyes with its own, and the two of them, ox and girl, seemed to merge on a common path.

Hoa sighed at the animal. "I know my way, Buffalo," she said, "but how can I clear the stones?"

Father had also objected to the school. Perhaps Father didn't want Hoa to go where she might hear things that reflected badly on the ways and customs of her peasant tribe, the Black Tai, or because she might, like Phuong, marry a stranger and not return. Yet Hoa knew that deep within her body, and running in her limbs, was the sap of her clan strength and spirit. She could never leave Mother and Father, Younger Brother and Younger Sister forever.

She rocked back onto her rump on the smooth-worn timbers and tugged her plaited hair and slapped her bent knee and tried to think of a way. The school was not something that could be allowed to escape her future. Hoa needed school as the rice shoots needed water and the sky—a direction to grow. She had to be at school the next term, but it had to be done the correct way, not by obstinacy or rebellion. The family, the village, had to say, "Yes, go."

At least a year had passed since Hoa had talked with her friends about her ideas and her plans for life, and two years since she played children's games or danced and sang in the village fêtes. Her week now was study, sewing and weaving, cooking with her mother, fieldwork with her father, and feeding, watering, and washing the two water buffalo. These oxen, mighty, diligent beasts, drew the cart, dragged the plow, ferried children, and bequeathed to Hoa the power of their presence. For they were descendants of the animals that had built the robust rice culture of Hoa's country, the Land-Water, and were wealth in themselves.

Of the two, Hoa preferred Black Face, the big, dignified, younger one, for when he spoke to her with his head-swings and snorts and rollicking gait, she felt his understanding of her moods and dreams. He paused when she needed time to talk, and he moved in a graceful near-pirouette when she had to rush through washing him in the paddy race. His bulk bore the richness of history, and when, from the pole-house floor, she stared down in need of a quiet friend, it was his face that met hers.

The three-truck convoy snaked and surged through the hills, past the roadside hamlets of the Dien Bien district, on its way to happenings of great consequence in new Lai Chau Town.

Just to the north, on a wooded slope below Ban Nahi hamlet, Chinh, a distant cousin of Hoa, talked to his dog White Legs as they took a shortcut down to the main, tar-sealed

road. Ban Nahi also had many Black Tai families, and Chinh's grandfather was the uncle of Hoa's father's sister's husband. Chinh carried a throw-net and was going to meet his first cousin and dear friend Duong to go fishing in the small eddies and side currents of the Song Nam Rom. White Legs, snuffling and scratching at the roots of trees, loved this trip. He had been making it once or twice a month with Chinh since he was a pup. Duong would bring his dog Lanh, and the two dogs would sprint over the trails and tromp through the undergrowth, flushing out every bird and small animal between the road and the river.

The diplomats' vehicles raced on toward afternoon, through a swirl of leaves and dusty sunlight. The stern-faced drivers honked their horns willfully, and the villagers scuttled off the pavement, sometimes dancing over ruts or ditches to dodge the trucks. Great Uncle Ho had taught that the people were the government's backbone and provisioner and, so, must be honored and respected. Yet the new officials were tempted by hubris and power to treat Ho Chi Minh's lesson as an outdated fable, and the people's daily needs as a spouse's humdrum carping.

Chinh aimed his steps for a tree grove on the near side of the road, halfway between Ban Nahi and Duong's hamlet of Ban Tau. In the grove was a small bridge crossing the irrigation canal that ran hard beside the road. White Legs looked up at Chinh and shivered with anticipated joy.

The sun threw warm, yellow light onto the west side of the mountains now, and Hoa walked with her arm looped over Black Face's left horn, tugging easily on his ear with her fingers, as if to let her words fall in.

"The school is part of the order of things in my destiny, Buffalo. My ancestors, with Grandmother Lan, carved out this path before my time. Father and Mother are burdened with the crops, the seasons, and Brother and Sister. They do not see the future for me yet." The animal twitched his ear away and back, to catch the girl's attention, then dipped and nudged his head against her hip. They were bound together through his ancestors and hers, and through the family's many-layered strategies, but he knew the future must be embraced, and he had perhaps another year with her. If he simply left her to her present discontent and far-off dreams, her spirit would sour like a stagnant pond. While he could not carry her body on the journey to the school, he could bear her soul on its passage through this important time.

When Hoa and Black Face reached the field, she left him to graze along the forest edge while she helped her father load the cart with baskets of corn, cornstalks, and the odd bit of firewood. The buffalo used his molars to strip leaves from branches and yank on weedy clumps, watching Hoa and her father for a time, before slogging off toward the river. Now he stood where the low, curving cliff jutted out above the rolling water. From his mouth hung a few strands of grass. He held his chest and shoulders low, and arched his neck, raising his snout to the downstream breeze. He closed his eyes and let the years unwind to thoughts of his mother, to thoughts of the twig-shaped girl who played games on his mother's back, the girl who first lifted the baby Hoa onto his shoulders. In his thoughts he saw this bony girl, small and thin, but later tall and shapely, and then she was gone for many seasons, and now returned only rarely.

Black Face lowered his head and opened his eyes. He looked upstream, then down. In the mist along the riverbank below, he could see his mother's spirit and, beside her, the visiting spirit of the young twig-girl. He called down to the girl in a quiet tremolo groan, and she looked up at him and smiled.

Chinh skidded and hopped down the slope toward the grove of trees, catching sight of Duong and Lanh on the path ahead. They were still on the near side of the canal that ran beside the road. A kilometer away, roiling dust and clouds of leaves chased the government’s shiny vans up the narrow highway. Lanh stood by the canal now, bold and quivering, eager to race White Legs over the footbridge and across the road into the bush toward the river. Chinh greeted Duong with a warm pat on the arm, and Duong replied as a group of peasants strolled up the road, blocking the view to the south.

As soon as Duong’s dog Lanh saw White Legs in reach of the bridge, he bolted ahead of him. Duong rebuked Lanh loudly, but he didn't stop. White Legs charged after Lanh. Chinh heard the drivers’ engines grind and growl and, for the first time, saw the speeding trucks. The government SUVs pressed on, swerving around the crowd of peasants and speeding up the middle of the road as Lanh sprinted clear of the bridge and across the road. But White Legs, suddenly confused by the mechanical roar, dozens of legs in the road, and Duong's scolding, froze. Chinh cried out, Lanh turned back and barked, and White Legs dashed into the road—in front of the speeding cars.

The “crump” of the impact sent White Legs in a tilting, cartwheeling arc through the air and back toward the bridge. This shocked the crowd, and Chinh stood dumbly, stiff and helpless, as White Legs tumbled downward and into the water-filled ditch. Air bubbled up from the dog's nose, and blood blossomed like a rose between his lips.

A few minutes and two kilometers later, safely away from the dead dog and protests from the villagers, the drivers stopped to inspect the truck—no damage to the paintwork. The lead driver nodded. He would escape chastisement. He picked some dog hair from the joint in the steel bumper bar, and the procession moved off to Lai Chau town. There were no more thoughts for the peasant boy and his dog, or for Uncle Ho's platitudes of the past.

Hoa would hear later of the death of Chinh’s dog. Now the sun was low in the trees, and Black Face trod along the paddy dike. Father, with the cart hitched to the other ox, had gone ahead home. When Black Face stepped down from the dike, Hoa slipped onto his back, and then rode him into the village, thighs encircled by his horns. For the first time in many months, two of the village mothers took the time to ask Hoa about her sewing. Their daughters stood by, eyes shy and smiling. Hoa felt an unexplainable pang. At the family hut, Father’s cart waited, not yet unloaded. At the top of the steps, three people stood outside the hut door. Open at their feet was the chest where Hoa kept her sewing for the academy in Dien Bien Phu. Mother held the clothes, Father nodded slowly, and, standing on the elevated porch of the hut, Auntie Phuong smiled down at Hoa. Then Hoa felt Black Face raise his head toward the three people there. Phuong looked down into his eyes and remembered his mother and the years that had flown away.

Author’s Note: From two visits to Vietnam. 1. A friend was US Amb in Hanoi 2004-08, so I witnessed instructive, high-intensity face-to-face political meetings in the NW provinces. We traveled in three SUVs, one of which killed the dog. Mike gave a talk at the boarding school described. My second visit (2014) was related to an action/adventure novel I've been unable to sell.

*Originally published as "In the Eye of the Ox" - https://thebookendsreview.com/2022/01/10/in-the-eye-of-the-ox/

BIO: Lance Mason's writing reflects both his farm-town origins and his extensive travel abroad. He has explored, lived, and worked overseas for decades, traveling the world by foot, bicycle, motorcycle, train, tramp steamer, and dugout canoe, about 15 years of which was spent living in current or former Commonwealth countries. These experiences that have both enhanced and interfered with Mason’s writing life. His work has appeared in 50+ journals, collections, anthologies, etc., was included in Fish Publishing's 2025 Memoir Prize (Ireland), received a Silver and 2 Golds in the 2024 and ’25 Solas Awards, and his fiction recently appeared in ShortStoryStack (Palisatrium), Eerie River's BLADES, and Cowboy Jamboree's PRINE PRIMED.