Ping's house is a wooden hut. The central room is devoid of furniture. The
floor is concrete. In one corner on a tiny shelf is a small colour TV
perched on top of a DVD player and one speaker. There is woman nursing a
baby watching TV. I wonder what programmes come zooming into this village
from around the world. The village is medieval, what I am seeing on the TV
looks like SciFi by comparison. I wonder how Ping and her family make sense
of it.
The TV is switched off in deference to us. The woman, a neighbour, leaves.
Someone brings me a tiny stool to sit on. It is about six inches high and
the size of a paperback book. I look at it and wonder how I am going to
lower myself down that far... with dignity.
A group of children crowd around us. One of them I immediately identify as
Ping's ...he's the naughty one. He looks a little like her and is brimming with
mischief. Ping appears with the ubiquitous blue plastic chairs, two of them.
I think she has borrowed them from a neighbour. It seems that most of
Vietnam park their bottoms on chairs designed for pre-schoolers.
Above us, on either side, are lofts filled with rice sacks and piles of corn
cobs. In the adjacent room is a tiny wooden bed. And beyond that the
kitchen. Dirt floor with a firepit, over which sit a steaming wok. Ping's
husband is crouched nearby. He acknowledges us briefly. But he doesn't speak
English and seems shy.
We watch the kids play. Two of them are playing marbles. They have only
three marbles and a couple of small ball bearings. They play with skill and
precision. One of the boys rolls a steel socket along the ground, like a
small ball. Beyond, one of the village boys plays with a pair of home-made
stilts, while his friends wait to have a turn. These are the kind of toys my
father would have played with 80 years ago. The children seem happy with
their simple pleasures.
There is a barracade made out of bamboo blocking the entrance to Ping's
little front yard. I ask if is to keep her baby from wandering off into the
village. "No." she says. "It's to keep the pigs out." She laughs again.