At sunset in Vietnam’s Vinh Long rice fields, Le Dau Em, my mother’s cousin, walks the narrow ledge between paddies, bare feet steadfast in the mud. I follow clumsily, slipping every few steps, dragonflies buzzing at my ears. Dau grew up here. He and his brother share what remains of the land that my great-grandfather acquired a century ago, much of which was seized during the Vietnam war. Dau has never left. His mother lives in a shack behind his house; his brother is across the road. It’s a geography of family written into the fields. My mother’s tie to the soil is more fractured. Though her dad is from Vinh Long, she was born in Saigon. She was 7 when her parents sent her alone by boat from Ca Mau to a Philippine refugee camp. That was in 1981, five years after the war. A year later, she resettled in America with a distant relative in Massachusetts and spent her youth working to sponsor the rest. Returning to her homeland in 2023, she felt the delta’s pull so strongly, she moved back after 43 years. “In the U.S., I am like a crooked tree,” she tells me. “My roots bend me toward Vietnam.”
I grew up in Boston with a postcard image of where my mother was from: a woman in a conical hat leaning over water. I drew her in art class, often, without knowing why. On my first trip, when my mother returned 2 years ago, I finally saw the real thing: a blur of green from a car window, hypnotizing and endless. I dragged along the edges of the fields then, watching Dau until he disappeared into the rows. When I returned again in January of this year, I followed him in. He lugged a jug of river water mixed with fertilizer and moved methodically, up and down the two-kilometer path, pausing only to refill. Mosquitos skimmed my shoulders and fire ants found my ankles. “Do you want to keep going?” he had asked, smiling, and we did. Dau believes his generation will be the last to farm rice; someday, he says, these plots may give way to easier coconut groves. Yet for now, the paddies still define the Mekong Delta, and with it, my family history. This summer, at the height of the rainy season, downpours came hard and off-time, often flooding the road into the fields and emptying many heads of grain on harvest day. I followed Dau through the rows of rice fields yet again—this time with a camera.
