With Wings Outstretched

Time to take off. We flew out of Viet Nam and had a two-hour layover at the airport in Taiwan. Tung and I wandered around the airport, stretching our legs before the long flight back to the States, exchanging currency to get Taiwanese coins and buying bottled water from vending machines. We played at the huge Hello Kitty store, sporting pastel colors and kiddy, cartoonish decor.





We browsed shelves of intricate, flowery fans and opera dolls.


We looked through the paper cut-out artwork on display.




We visited the potted orchids, hung heavy on their stalks in a wash of pastel colors.



As my travels draw to a close, I think about all the sights, scenes, and people whom I'll miss when I'm back in the States. I am by nature wary of strangers, so receiving such a warm welcome from family whom I'd never met greatly astonished me. They hugged and held my hand and bestowed familial kisses on the cheek as if I were their own daughter, coming home after having spent a long time away.


As I boarded the plane out of Viet Nam, I passed a young woman already strapped into her aisle seat. She was wearing an elaborate traditional "ao dai" and had gold and pearl jewelry around her neck, wrists, and fingers. But what was most striking about this woman was that she held up one hand to pinch the bridge of her nose, trying to contain the tears trickling out of her eyes. Two older people sat to her right, slightly looking away as if to give her time to come to peace with herself. As I took my seat and clicked on the seat belt, I couldn't help thinking about what her situation may be. Perhaps she was scared, having never flown before. Perhaps she was a new bride, leaving behind the country she had grown up in to start a life with a strange husband in a foreign land. Perhaps she was thinking about her family whom she may not see again for a long while, if at all, still standing outside the glass doors of the Tan Son Nhat Airport, peering in at the place they last saw her, trying to memorize the gait of her stride, the scent of her perfume.

There is a Vietnamese song that I really like, "Giac Mo Canh Co," about a white crane that spreads its wings to fly the world far and wide. The lush, golden rice fields of Viet Nam knew the crane when it was young. They throw their longing melody up to the heavens, and season after season, they wonder when the crane would hurdle the obstacles of tall mountains and deep seas, once again flying back to land in fields that it once called home.


Even before this trip, the song brings tears to my eyes, as if I were hearing the whispered longings of some voice that beckons me back to my homeland. There is also a famous Vietnamese saying about rural areas with patches of rice fields, stretching the horizon as far as the eye can see. The Mekong Delta, in Vietnamese known as "Dong Bang Song Cuu Long" (Nine Dragons River Delta), is an area especially conducive to fishing commerce and vegetation growth. They say these lands are where the crane can "bay thang canh"--fly with wings outstretched.

The city is crowded with people, traffic, and dense houses built with barely an alleyway in between, but I've been fortunate enough during my trip to South-Central Viet Nam, to be able to see these fertile, green-and-brown fields marked off like a giant checkerboard. I was born and raised a city girl, but it is there, in that clean air and open space, where my heart felt free and at home, as if it could suddenly sprout white wings and help me soar.