KVT – Nostalgia for: Tet Trung Thu…Mid Autumn Festival…Children’s Festival

KVT – Nostalgia for: Tet Trung Thu…Mid Autumn Festival…Children’s Festival

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KVT 2014

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KVT, in nostalgic mood for simpler things, explores Tet Trung Thu ….especially, hand- made TET things

FOREWORD:

‘For the Vietnamese, in its most ancient form, the evening commemorated the dragon who brought rain for the crops. Celebrants would observe the moon to divine the future of the people and harvests.

Eventually the celebration came to symbolize a reverence for fertility, with prayers given for bountiful harvests, increase in livestock, and human babies. Over time, the prayers for children evolved into a celebration of children. Confucian scholars continued the tradition of gazing at the moon, but to sip wine and improvise poetry and song.

By the early twentieth century in Hanoi, the festival had begun to assume its identity as a ‘children’s festival’.

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PART ONE: PINK VILLAGE

Once upon a time there was a busy little village called Hong, the pink village. It nestled on the tranquil banks of the beautiful, green To Lich River that meandered through paddy fields about ten kilometres from the center of Ha Noi. The 50 or so farming families who lived there in low, thatched, Red River houses had, for decade upon decade, supplemented their incomes by making tin toys from scrap sheet metal and tin cans that they’d purchase from the army of collectors who roamed the city streets and industrial areas salvaging and scrounging recyclable material.

The craft people of Hong Village on the To Lich were, for a long time, caretakers of three harvest moon folk tale symbols: a rabbit, a boat lantern and two butterflies.

The farmers and their families were adept at making tin rabbits that rolled along on tin wheels beating a drum, or tin butterflies on wheels that children pulled along on strings so that the wings fluttered. Then there were the tin boats that were able to chug along under their own steam when you filled a tin tray with paraffin, lit it and placed it in their holds.

Hot air built up in the body of the boat and was expelled through tin pipes into the water at the stern and the vessel magically traced a wake across village ponds.

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The toys were hand painted with enamel paint and stock piled in houses until a week or so before Tet Trung Thu when they were transported the bumpy journey on overloaded bicycles and, later, motorbikes, to Hang Ma street.

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………. and sold to city folk to give to their children because this was the Tet that was dedicated to them because they were considered to be the purest of beings and hence closer to the good vibes of the spirits and gods.

PART TWO: LANTERNS, MASKS, DRUMS, SCHOLARS and CUOI

Hang Ma Street was the most popular place in the city to purchase toys and essential decorations for children on Tet Trung Thu.

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Tin toys, papier mache masks of characters from folk tales and myths that were worn to disguise your identity as you carried lanterns, lit by a candle inside, in parades that snaked through lanes and alleys when the sun set and the full moon rose golden in the sky.

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Because, still stranded on the moon is Cuoi or http://www.culture-4-travel.com/moon-boy.html

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In legendary times Cuoi’s wife (so one version of the story says) accidentally urinated on a sacred Cay Da tree in their garden and the offended tree began to float into the sky. Cuoi held onto the roots to try and pull it back and was taken aloft to the moon where the tree took root and flourished. Now, when you look up at a full moon, Cuoi is there resting under the tree.

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Every year since, on this particular night of the full moon children have held lantern parades so that Cuoi can try to find a lighted path back to his home.

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In Hang Ma Street there were lanterns shaped like stars. There were lanterns in the shape of lotus flowers that you carried at the end of a bamboo stick, and lotus lanterns that rotated when they were pushed along on attached wooden wheels.

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There were paper lanterns like mini pagodas that had traditional characters drawn or glued on a cylinder of thin paper and when you lit a small candle and placed it in a holder inside the cylinder, the air warmed and the cylinder moved slowly around and you had a miniature shadow puppet play.

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There were lanterns shaped like rabbits to celebrate the Jade Rabbit who also lives on the moon.

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And who can be seen pounding ingredients for moon cakes…..or, as another story states, the elixir of life for the moon Goddess.

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And if you were lucky you could get fish shaped lanterns from the South that were celebrating the legend of a golden carp who desperately wanted to be a dragon.

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There were papier mache masks of lion heads to be worn in lion dances by kids who followed the professional troupes that performed dynamically and ear drum poppingly loudly during the Tet-and by kids who were inventive and made up their own lion dances.

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There were bright pink masks of a smiling man, Ong Dia-and more recently of his chubby wife, Me Dia. They were the cheerleaders of the dance and led the lion on its way.

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There were small drums that you could bang and bash during lion dances to help to scare away nasty spirits. There were cardboard toys that clattered and clacked to sound like the fire crackers……..

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…………….that were, once upon a time, a necessary accessory for the thrillingly scary lion as he pounded and leapt and boomed through streets.

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Scattered throughout were paper statues of Confucian scholars (Tien Si Giay) that parents would take home and put on family altars and offer prayers and offerings to so that their children would study well in the new school year and become successful students.

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And the scholar takes us back to his, and my, association with boat lanterns.

PART THREE: BOATS and BUTTERFLIES

Once there were paper lanterns in the shape of boats

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…….that may have originated in another memorable folk tale where a beautiful village girl was forbidden by her father to marry her handsome scholar lover so on the night of the full moon she wandered off to the village pond to drown herself. Being alerted to this the father asked the villagers to float lighted boats and lanterns on the water to search for her.

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In a Romeo and Juliet type scenario, the scholar threw himself into the pond and the two lovers were united. In the blaze of boat and lantern lights the couple were seen emerging from the dark water as monarch butterflies and they flew aloft silhouetted against the yellow orb of the moon.

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And some ancestor in Pink village was so impressed with the tale that he/she had the bright idea of realizing it in tin
Another lovely tin boat story that has floated into legend -and that couldn’t have occurred without the creativity of Pink Village – is of a particular Mid-autumn Festival during the American war when Uncle Ho gathered some children together and took them to Hoan Kiem to float boats on its tree lined water.

Whether or not Uncle Ho and his little band of children floated the tin boats that we know today will be preserved in some elderly person’s memory. If they launched vessels similar to those that have been made by Mrs Mai’s family for the past 50 plus years then they were gun bristling warships invented to celebrate a particularly joyous Vietnamese attack on some US Navy invaders…..the picture below showing a Vietnamese P4 under fire from USS Maddox in 1964.

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Fifteen years ago when I first discovered Ha Noi’s tin ships they were sold by a couple of adults from Pink Village who squatted in strategic places along Hang Ma behind a large basin of water. They’d silently light up ship engines and let them putter around the temporary ponds, hoping to attract customers amongst the throng that crowded the street.

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Near them were a tin rabbits, usually blue and pink, and tin butterflies.

Over the next ten years the number of sellers reduced to two, from the same family, and if you went around the corner into Tin Street you could see Mrs Mai’s boats displayed for sale there at inflated prices with the shop owners declaring that they had made them from scratch.

It was plastic and cheap Chinese toy imports that almost nailed shut the tin toy production in Pink Village- just as another American invasion -led by characters such as Spider Man, Mickey Mouse and Barbie and more recently Japanese Pokemon images- just about put the kybosh on the papier Mache mask makers…though, somehow, lanterns have survived with a few nods towards the images and materials of modern, globalized, popular culture.

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In those far off days-fifteen years ago when Ha Noi only had about 2 million registered motorbikes and another two million unofficial ones, one taxi company and you could keep a tally of the number of private cars you saw each day, when helmets were ignorables, when a family of five or six could ride unarrested on a Honda Dream, when traffic lights were a hazard to ignore- I got caught up in a buzz of nostalgia for my own childhood. Nostalgia for things hand crafted. So I bought up big time.

I had fleets of tin boats sailing up and down four flights of stairs in our narrow house in Ly Nam De Street. I had window sills covered in drum beating rabbits and wing wiggling butterflies. Walls were alive with staring masks. Schools of cellophane fish swam suspended in the stairwells. Shadow play lanterns hung from light fittings.

PART FOUR: FULL MOON and THE GOOD OLD DAYS!

And on the night of the yellow harvest moon I’d try and be in a village in the countryside where children, often with home- made lanterns, lit a path for Cuoi.

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Where afterwards you’d sit in a courtyard waxing lyrical about the moon, sipping jasmine tea or sweetened rice wine and biting into sections of huge yellow pomelos- some taken down from the family altar having been sculpted into animal shapes- and eating moon cakes.

In those lucky days even store bought moon cakes were safe to eat without a hint of the life threatening chemical preservatives and food colorings that have now turned lots you buy into ornamental altar offerings.

They were deliciously sweet and salty with egg yolks surrounded by lotus paste to symbolize the full harvest moon. Symbols such as the Sino Viet one for longevity was imprinted on their surface.

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For lucky kids there were little pastry pigs in paper cages that represent woven bamboo cages that some farmers still use to carry their live pigs to market.

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……..and sometimes those delightful To He figures made by the villagers of Xuan La -just south of Ha Noi. In those day the figurines of characters from myth and folk tales, moulded around bamboo sticks were made of unadulterated rice flour and rice paste and natural food dyes so that toddlers, who, like me, can never resist temptation, could safely nibble at them.

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Oh those good old days!

PART FIVE: BACK TO PINK and MRS MAI and TIN SHIPS

I became so infatuated by the tin boats that, in 2002, I got myself invited out to Mrs Mai’s house to see the manufacturing process.

Pink Village was no longer and had become a stretch of Suburbia along the banks of the turgid, black and smelly To Lich River, itself no longer the stream of beauty about which poets and scholars used to wax lyrical.

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As major roads extended in all directions the place had bustled and the inhabitants had turned their attentions to commerce and had become relatively well off as they sold surplus land.

Two households were left buying scrap metal and metamorphosing it.

Mrs Mai’s old house was jammed full of tin and, as it was the end of summer, tin ships were being hammered into shape, soldered and painted.

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But the profits from the ships was declining and more and more floor space each year was given over to the making of more prosaic things like altar sticks to hold small incense spirals.

Annually until 2008 I visited Mrs Mai and bought a consignment of her best boats, and each year I noticed that she made fewer, until finally she made only to order. It was far more economically intelligent to build a guest house and shop on her land.

By 2010 the tin boats looked as though they would be relics of a bygone era. Icons facing extinction.

A relative attempted to capitalize on the vacuum but somehow couldn’t get the quality right and the results were scrappy and a mere shadow of their early glory.

This year a couple of Mrs Mai’s nieces realized that nostalgia for the past was rearing its head amongst middle class Ha Noi-ans and so they encouraged Mrs Mai, the expert to teach them the tricks of the trade.

I was ready to leap over the proverbial Mid-Autumn new moon when Mrs Mai contacted me to say that a brand new consignment of ships was in the offing.

You can purchase them at Bookworm which has a contract with Mrs Mai and her nieces for the best of the best vessels. Others can be seen in shops in Tin Street where if you ask you’ll still be told that they are made on site.

Once upon a time purchasing a fleet of ships was laughably cheap. The smallest cost 5 000 Dongs and escalated in multiples of 5 until you reached the top of the range super doopers- that in those days had spirals of fine metal spewing from their decks – priced at 60 000 Dongs.

By 2011 the top quality large variety were on sale to savvy collectors for a million VND.

It will be interesting to see if the new manufacturers can keep to Mrs Mai’s original standard. All I can say is that I’m glad that I have a few of the old time fleets still floating around… including a mark 2014 set on order as well.

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Some strategic info for those collectors who, like me and inquisitive kids, like to see if things really work as promised.

When you lift up the stern section of all but the smallest boats, there should be a tin tray on a platform in which you put some paraffin wax, light it, place the boat in water and watch it chug along.

However….beware!

Once upon a time all of the rails, funnels, canon and other ship board paraphernalia were soldered firmly in place and all you risked when you fired your boat’s engine was a bit of blistered paint if the ship’s hold got too hot. Now the bits and pieces are glued to the ships’ superstructures and tend to fall off with increasing heat.

Of course the ships float beautifully -but again beware! They tend to rust and if you don’t mind your kids playing with rusted hulks in the bath you’ll be happy.

Nowadays the ships tend to be objet d’art and if you pay for some top of the range vessels, they are stunning acquisitions to any art collection.

I’ve mounted a couple of my fleets on a 2 meter long perspex shelf along a wall and they look superb.

NOW ROLL ON TET TRUNG THU………

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AFTERWORDS:

Other Craft villages around Hanoi that used to make or still make Mid Autumn festival items include.

Bao Dap

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Hai Ai

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And if you manage to get out and about in the countryside a couple of days leading up to the Tet you’ll still find village youngsters involved in traditional games like tug of war or smash the glazed pot hanging on a string when you are blindfolded so that the small treasure inside is yours.

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AND my apologies:

for any misinformation that may have slipped into my research;
for a couple of images that may be more Sino than Viet;
for omitting other stories and folk tales that relate to this particular Tet;
for not finding out if star lanterns were an invention to celebrate the founding of the modern Vietnamese state mid last century or have traditional connotations
and for the use of images from recent times that I’ve used to illustrate my rampant nostalgia

KVT

Kiem Van Tim is a keen observer of life in general and the Hanoi cultural scene in particular and offers some of these observations to the Grapevine. KVT insists that these observations and opinion pieces are not critical reviews. Please see our Comment Guidelines / Moderation Policy and add your thoughts in the comment field below.

2 COMMENTS

  1. An interesting piece.
    Pedantically I’ll point out that the ‘poke’ associated with pigs is not a basket in which they are kept: it comes from an English expression which sums up a situation where someone has purchased something without checking it before handing over the money, the ‘poke’ referring to a bag or sack (from the same root as ‘pouch’ or ‘pocket’).

    http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/a-pig-in-a-poke.html

    A later confusion is with the ‘poke bonnet’ which became popular in the early 1800s:

    http://oregonregency.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-to-make-regency-poke-bonnet.html

    A more modern, sexist usage suggests that a man could become interested in an ugly woman wearing such a bonnet as the hat shaded the face head-on and in profile. He would then feel cheated once the bonnet was removed and the wearer’s face fully revealed: ‘No, she was a pig in a poke’.
    There’s enough evidence to suggest that the earlier mediaeval usage is the true one.

  2. KVT to AMANDA BUSH:

    Thanks for your comments and research on pigs in pokes.

    I was totally off the beam in my usage of the idiom and will get the editorial team at GV to change the sentence: ‘For lucky kids there were little pastry pigs…….often in woven paper pokes’ to: ‘For lucky kids there were little pastry pigs in paper cages that represent woven bamboo cages that some farmers still use to carry their live pigs to market.

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