• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 357 0

had a vision, which was particularly unexpected as she had been blind from birth. She said that from now on they would harvest the water hyacinths and dry their stalks for weaving baskets. According to Bão, she even showed them how, devising a pattern so intricate and tight that the baskets held water. Their neighbors thought them very useful and gladly traded some rice for a basket or two. In this way, the family no longer starved. In fact, by the time that the boy who would become the sailor was born, his family knew of no other way to make a living.

On his fifteenth birthday, the boy stopped his weaving and announced that he would travel to the next village over. When his family asked him why, he said, "Just to see." It was the anniversary of his birth and he was the oldest son, so his family packed him some rice, enough for the four-day journey to the next village over. Eight days later, the boy returned to his family's house, surrounded by water hyacinths in full purple bloom, and he told his family that he wanted to move to the next village over. When they asked him how he would survive, he said he would take some water hyacinth cuttings with him and begin a weaving business of his own. Four days away is not so far, and he was the oldest son. The following day the boy departed his family's land with a basket filled with cuttings, poised upon his right shoulder. With each forward stride, he left behind the impression of a slightly tipping scale.

"Can you guess what happened when he got to the next village?" Bão asked.

"He forgot the pattern," I answered.

"No, you ass! A person can't forget a skill like basket weaving because he moves from one village to another."

"Oh."

Bão's words can often be unkind, but I did not mind because he himself was never that way. That is not an implausible thing. Believe me, I am the one who knew him, shared the darkness of sleep with him, heard him humming during the hours before light. So I am the one, really the only one, who is qualified to say what is implausible about Bão.

"Come on, try again," he beckoned.

"The basket weaver didn't have any land," I guessed.

"No, he wasn't the village idiot like you. He bartered his labor during the rice harvesting season for the right to work on a small parcel of his neighbor's land."

"Just tell me then, Bão."

"No water hyacinths!"

"What?"

"No ... water ... hyacinths!" Bão repeated, as if the pauses, the added silence between his words, could also confer meaning.

According to Bão, the family's cuttings would not take to the new land, even though the field was suitably waterlogged and growing conditions were in all other ways favorable. The basket weaver had to pull the cuttings from the mud and the water and replant the plot with a local variety, which soon flourished under his care. He harvested them and dried them, but when he went to weave them, they broke apart in his hands. When the next growing season came along, the basket weaver brought his family's water hyacinth cuttings to the next, next village over and attempted to plant them in another small parcel of land. Again, there was not even a tiny shoot. Again, he tried the local variety, but the stalks proved brittle or, worse, they would hold the pattern of the weave only until he was done, and then they pulled themselves apart. The basket weaver, Bão said, continued his travel from village to village, hugging along the southern coast of Vietnam, only to find that there was not one place where his family's water hyacinth cuttings would grow. Exhausted and literally running out of land, the man ended up at sea.

"There must be another place," the basket weaver said to Bão after weeks and weeks at sea.

"I told him to try Holland!" Bão said, evidently proud of himself for ending the weaver's journey and his story with such practical advice. That, for Bão, was of course the point of telling the basket weaver's story. No matter who else may be present, Bão was the hero in all of his stories.

I think about him now usually when I am between jobs, which, granted, is often. About the