New Year’s Day was not unlike at home. For the most part, it was a day of official rest for all and not much was going on. There had been plenty of food prepared, and it was a kind of fend-for-yourself environment. Diem made us a delicious bowl of pho, and I retired to my makeshift office at the marble table and got some work done while enjoying coffee and watching the village move about. A few hours later, I had a banh mi sandwich and showered. I laid around for a while then all were called to the main living area. 
One of the main customs of the Lunar New Year is gift-giving. It’s kind of like Christmas in that sense, but you only give money. They have these beautifully decorated red envelopes with shiny gold embossing of pigs and New Year phrases. You put money in them and basically hand them out. It’s mostly for the children, but the oldest couple in the family receive them too, out of respect and for my gracious thanks, I gave Ba and Ma each one and the smaller children running around. It’s always a special thing to participate in the traditions of another culture.
The day had bled well into the afternoon, and it was time, I was told, to go for a ride. “Go, beautiful, take a picture” was about all the information about our destination I could manage to understand, it seemed rather reasonable so I climbed on the back of the
motorbike with Quân, and we followed Ba and Ma, Huy, and Tina further into the jungle. Vietnam has a strange way of surprising you. You have these amazing experiences and see some beautiful moments, and then, out of nowhere, she gives you more.
The road disappeared, and I found myself on the back of a motorbike going up deep inclines and around sharp bends on a track barely big enough for two bikes. We came to a stop, dismounted, and started walking up through a young paper field. We crossed over an antiquated wooden fence and then carefully navigated some barbed wire. We settled down into a small field and I realized why we had come here.
I want to say before I continue that there is some imagery in these photos that, at first glance, may be offensive. The Buddhist Manji (Sanskrit: svastika) is a Symbol that has been used in Buddhism to represent the harmonious interplay of opposites in life, for millennia. Light and dark, heaven and earth, day and night, etc.. There are two mirror images of this symbol in use. The one with the trailing ends going to the left represents mercy, and the image with the trailing ends going to the right represents intellect and strength. The Nazis adopted the image representing intellect and strength, and rotated it 45 degrees, bastardizing its meaning and forever ruining its use for a large portion of the world.
Ho Chi Minh was actually a part of the fight in his younger years in the global initiative to defeat fascism. As Westerners, we often have trouble distinguishing between communism and fascism. Just know that the two have always been at war with each other, even in the time of Germany’s nonaggression pact with the U.S.S.R. The relationship was anything but stable. Fascism came to the shores of Vietnam, however, by way of the Japanese, and I don’t think, at least as far as the people in general are concerned, that Germany or its symbols ever mattered here. So you will find the swastika adorning temples, shrines, and even homes. At first, it definitely caught me by surprise, but as I continue to learn, it’s become part of the environment.
As we settled down into the rolling fields high above the rice patties, I saw a humbling sight. I had been taken into the ancient family grounds where the deceased family members had been laid to rest. They were beautiful single or double mausoleums that sat above ground, dotting the landscape. Due to the patties and water table, everyone is buried above ground here. We filled small oil lamps and lit them to place against the altars at the foot of the grave. We placed items that they enjoyed when alive on the altar, cigarettes, cookies, a drink, whatever were their favorite things, in a gesture to provide them with a little pleasure from their life in this world while they traverse the next. We lit incense sticks and took turns stepping in front of the altar, bowing several times, and saying a prayer to the deceased. I took my turn and prayed that God would find them and that they would find whatever happiness they could be afforded in the afterlife. We continued deep into the wooded jungle and found one after another. We continued the tradition at each site. One of the graves was Tina’s sister and youngest of Grandmother’s children. She succumbed to disease at the age of 17. I could tell this grave was special; more attention was given, and more time was spent there. I said a special prayer for the young woman taken so early in her life, and I sensed that the circumstances were painful to recall. I did find out later that she had died from a very preventable and curable disease. It was the early 1970s, and the country was still enthralled in the horrors of war. With a lack of Doctors, medical supplies, and other resources being consumed by the war effort, she was taken by her illness in the village on May 4th, 1972. It appears I had more in common with Matriarch here than I could have known.
We continued through the forest, and the graves continued to emerge from the jungle backdrop. We had placed our last items, lit our last incense, and started heading back. I asked Quân if he minded if I walked a little further. I could see a clearing, and I wanted to check out. He said he would wait, and I went about 30 yards further and emerged onto the edge of an endless sea of rice patties. There was no road here, no trail. I was in the middle of nowhere, deep in the hills at the base of the mountains. On a hill across the rice, I could see more grave sites with their lamps lit and flickering in the fading light. It would be dark in an hour or so, and I couldn’t linger.
As I walked back to Quân, we started heading out of the woods. The spider webs were thick and annoying. On the way in, I was in the back of the line, so everyone in front took the brunt. Now, it was me and Quân walking back with no clear path. It took two spiderwebs before I took up a big, long, thin stick and started waving it up and down in front of me as I walked. An old Indian trick I learned in Boy Scouts. Quân laughed as if to say why had I never thought of that and fell in line behind me. Looks like this old country boy from Georgia had a few tricks up his sleeve after all. 
He wanted to ride around for a while as the sun was setting over the countryside. Sounded beautiful, and I agreed. I think some of it was that he wanted to be seen with the Westerner, but I didn’t mind. He introduced me to everyone he knew as we rode around the edge of civilization. We stopped in at a friend’s nearby, and I sat on a wooden table with some locals and had a beer. I played around with some of the children who had gathered around to see what was going on As it was getting late and I was getting hungry. We said our farewells, and Quân and I rode across the causeways around the patties toward home in the dying light of the evening sun. The flocks of Egrets swooped up from their feeding grounds in the patties and flew in formation across the sky to their nightly nesting grounds. It was such a surreal moment. The beauty all around me was so profound and magical that it can’t be put into words. The fog seemed to reappear over the mountains in the distance as the sun began to retreat almost as quickly as it had dissipated in the morning. It would soon be dark in the countryside, and there would be a flood of receiving guests and being a guest to be done on this New Year’s Evening.
