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Quiet X’mas in Vietnam when we picked orchids
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Wild orchids and colored, painted pine cones — these things I remember of Christmas in Vietnam. It was in Dalat, the mountain city with its persistent fog and whispering pine forests, that I first celebrated Christmas.
I was five years old, a child running free on fallen pine needles and tall green grass in the forest as I searched for wild mushrooms, pine cones and orchids for Christmas decorations. My older brother, sister and I would each carry a wicker basket and fill them with all that nature had to offer. Those days we never bought any Christmas decorations.
We used to sing. And by singing, I mean spontaneously. As children we were not at all self-conscious and sang with gusto and often off key, but always with gusto. In the woods, early in the morning, we sang Christmas carols and chased each other, and sometimes the neighborhood kids would join in. Afterwards, our sweaters and hair would be embedded with pollen and pine needles.
Dalat was a sparsely populated town then, and our laughter and singing echoed and resonated in the dew-covered forest.
At home we helped our mother decorate the Christmas tree. Its fresh pine fragrance brought the whole forest inside with us. My mother would roll cotton into shapes of little chicks and angels with wings and place them on the tree. The cones and mushrooms she painted green and red and blue and hung them everywhere in the living room. These ornaments were all the decorations we needed.
When my paternal grandmother came downstairs all dressed up in her ao dai dress, she would take us to mass. She held my hand and led me and my siblings on the dirt road to a local church whose bells rang out in the air.
Though I wasn’t a Catholic, I remember feeling a spiritual devotion in that church. People sang and read their psalms.
Afterwards the priest distributed candy for the children. I remember it was early evening, the sun had sunk behind a bank of fog as we walked home, the world was glowing in a lavender hue.
Dessert was enough
At home, the best part of the Christmas dinner was dessert. My mother, a consummate baker, would make the traditional buche de Noel, a chocolate covered cake in the shape of a log with a tiny Santa Claus sitting on top. Then my father would open the Champagne and pour each of us a glass. We didn’t receive any gifts as children did in America, but we didn’t need any and never felt the loss.
That was my favorite memory of Christmas in Vietnam. If you think that such a memory is out of place for a country whose image is full of conical-hatted figures working in the rice fields, then you haven’t been to Dalat. Built by the French as a hill station resort, it was for the most part a peaceful town, until near the end of the war.
Unlike the popular American belief shaped by Hollywood films, Vietnamese did not always live under constant terror and in half-burned villages. Instead, what we had in Dalat was a gentle, small-town life that I haven’t found again living here in America.
These days our Christmas is a big celebration in the San Francisco Bay Area.
We vie to show off to one another how well we decorate our homes. It is a testament, I suppose, to how well we have fared in the land of plenty.
So many years have passed since the war ended, yet it is not the horrors of war that dwell now in my mind during Christmas time. It’s the transcending peace in a tranquil world that is now lost.
Dalat, too, like the rest of Vietnam, is crowded with people and the trees are fewer and the forests thinned. Even the weather had changed, growing warmer with fewer trees.
Still, I bet there are children running and laughing, as before, among the pine needles and singing brooks on that high plateau I once called home.
Andrew Lam is an editor at New America Media and the author of “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora” and the upcoming “East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres.” His latest book, “Birds of Paradise Lost,” recently won a Pen Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award.
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