Nourishing the rice, depleting the spirit

INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

HANOI, Vietnam - Every day, sold-out crowds fill a tiny theater here to see the water puppet show, a centuries-old form of entertainment invented by Vietnamese farmers.

Performing in a sloshy green tank, a dozen marionetteers hide behind a screen and manipulate puppets - village rascals, fire-breathing dragons, peasants eluded by clever fish.

In a rapidly industrializing country that has always honored, even worshiped, the connection to land, the water puppet show has become a cultural artifact. Vietnam is still a nation of farmers, the majority of whom own less than 2.5 acres. But as in most of the world, their numbers are waning.

For Pham Thi Mau, a 48-year-old rice farmer near Hanoi, the puppet show is a metaphor for her life.

Living as her ancestors have for thousands of years, the divorced mother of two grows rice on a 1,080-square-meter plot her family was allocated by the government in the early 1990s. She farms it alone, with nothing but muscle, sinew and an iron scythe.

Like the water puppets, Mau is becoming a quaint anachronism in a country that is transforming at a breathless pace. She dangles at the end of a long string of changes beyond her control.

Facing the same powerlessness of Midwestern dairy farmers, Scranton coal miners, and Allentown steelworkers, she perseveres as developers buy up land and her way of life slowly disappears.

To be honest, she says, she won't be sorry to see it go.

Vietnam is the second-largest rice exporter in the world, behind Thailand. In the first five months of 2008, it exported 1.82 million tons, bringing in $850 million. With climate change and hundreds of millions of acres going out of food production every year, the price of rice internationally has gone up 85 percent in the last 18 months.

But the rewards of those higher prices have not brought much relief to small producers like Mau.

The 500 kilos of rice she harvested in June will bring her $150 - up $25 from last year. A welcome bonus, she says, but still not enough to buy the things that would make her spare existence more comfortable.

"She says she would like to be able to afford a pig," says Mau's 28-year-old daughter, Le Thi Minh, translating. "But a pig would cost $600." Mau would also like a kitchen, instead of just her camp-sized grill, and a door to the outhouse in the corner of her vegetable garden.

Mau rests her hands, padded with calluses rough as canvas, on her knees, waits for her daughter to finish translating, then ventures further.

"A door, and a real toilet."

Increasingly across the world, rural women like Mau are finding themselves alone, doing the brutally hard work of running a small farm while their husbands and children move to cities to earn cash.

"This woman sits in the middle of a very fast-moving story about the way the whole global food system operates," says Raymond Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, the antihunger nonprofit, "and how it's changing and changing very fast, driven by a variety of factors colliding at the same time."

Compared with the 840 million people in the world who are chronically hungry, Mau has fared well.

"She's got enough to feed herself, and her daughter has a cash income in the city," Offenheiser says. "But even she could be pushed into difficulty if she couldn't afford the seeds to plant and hold on to the fragile livelihood she's secured for herself."

Tiny pearls of sweat have gathered on Mau's face. She spent the previous three days clearing her field. Now the rice must be dried. The process has its perils.

If the grains are not raked regularly, the strong sun may crack them. A sudden rain can also damage the rice, making it less valuable, even unsellable.

So Mau is attentive. She has just finished transferring her crop from the floor of her one-room house to the tiled patio to dry. It took a dozen trips as she emptied huge scoopfuls into a deep basket, hauled it outside, dumped it, and went back for another load. Once she was done, she raked the lumpy pile smooth, then went inside to steal a few minutes in front of a small fan and the TV.

It is the first television she has ever owned, bought used two months ago with savings. Since then, she says, she's become addicted to Chinese soap operas.

Mau's house is nowhere near as grand as those belonging to farmers who grow roses sold in Hanoi, but it is a vast improvement over the cottage where she began her married life.

The high-ceilinged room is furnished with three blue plastic chairs, two wooden platform beds, and a large, elaborately carved mother-of-pearl inlaid chest, which is the centerpiece of many Vietnamese homes.

The plaster walls are bare except for a wedding portrait of Minh and her new husband and a faded picture of revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh.

Mau finds peace but little rest here in the village of Tien-Dai, about 40 miles northwest of Hanoi. When she turns off the TV, she can hear the crinoline rustles from the rice fields that stretch to the horizon. Her dog, a short-haired mutt the color of dust, lazes in the doorway with a puppy from a recent litter.

Neighbors in conical straw hats ride bicycles along the narrow dirt-path ribs between the paddies. The plants, awaiting harvest, bow tassled heads weighted with cascading clusters of ripe grain.

To protect themselves from the oppressive sun and the blade-sharp leaves, the women - it is mostly women who do this work - wrap their faces in towels, cover their arms in long sleeves, and wear fingerless knitted gloves.

From a distance, they look like egrets, poking their heads up from a marsh.

Mau's face tightens as she watches clouds darken in the distance. Her neighbors look up, too, then grab half a dozen crisp stalks about a foot off the ground and slice through them, gathering an armful before binding the plants with a rope of dried leaves. The bundles are then heaved onto cattle-drawn carts, led by boys tugging at the thick rope piercing the animal's nostrils. They head a few hundred yards to a threshing machine, running on a rusted, sputtering generator.

In 1998, Minh bought her mother a new house, using 8 million dong she earned at a Hanoi crafts store. She has worked there since she was 13, when Mau sent her to the city because the land could not support them both.

"My mother came to Hanoi to get the money," Minh said, recalling how she handed her a plastic bag filled with the equivalent of $1,000 - five years of savings.

During this, her only visit ever to Hanoi, Mau slept on a mattress for the first time.

"She was surprised at all the motorbikes and the nice shops," Minh said, translating with the English she had learned from customers. "She said she would like to live there, but at her age, it's hard to change."

Many Vietnamese farmers, and young people, are abandoning the rice fields.

"Next year, my husband's village will disappear," says Minh, whose first child is due this month. "It's being sold to some companies." Her in-laws, she says, will receive about $6,000 for their land.

Recent newspaper reports have raised concerns about the long-term welfare of farmers like this, who suddenly find themselves with large sums of cash. Like lottery winners, they rush to buy electronics and expensive motorbikes, with little care about how they will live once the money runs out.

Mau doesn't expect to ever worry about how to spend a real estate windfall. She's staying where she is.

Minh says she can't imagine ever coming back. Last year, she inherited the crafts shop from the owner. On a good day, she sells $150 to $200 in silk scarves, lacquer paintings and wood carvings.

When a reporter asked her to come along to Tien-Dai, it had been seven months since she was last home.

After a lunch of rice and roasted pork, Mau closed the shutters so her daughter could take a nap.

She kept busy sweeping and tidying until Minh fell asleep, then padded into the storage area where she'd put the gifts her daughter had brought from Hanoi.

Shampoo. Dishwashing liquid. Soap. Mau examined the bottles, then adjusted the fan so it blew more directly on Minh, pulled up a chair, and slipped a betel nut between her ragged, stained teeth.

Not a minute later, the dogs lifted their heads at the sound of rain slapping the patio. So back out Mau went to sweep up the rice and bring it inside.

At 3 p.m., she and her daughter walked to the road, where a taxi was waiting to take Minh back to the city. Mau handed her a 20-pound sack of rice, still warm from a neighbor's milling machine.

As the taxi drove away, past the lowing cattle, the children on bicycles, and the green and gold fields, the cabdriver said he couldn't believe how calm and beautiful life seemed in her village.

The romance, Minh told him, is only in hindsight.