Meals on the Mekong

The tables sometimes were only a foot off the floor, and a woven mat of bamboo was where you sat.  Sometimes there were no tables, just cloth. There was one meal that was on the roof of an unfinished 4 story building, where the rebar was sprouting out of the blocks threatening to impale unwary diners once the sun went down, and our seat was a large green tarp on top of the rubble, the table a woven cloth placed on top of the tarp.  Portable gas burners cooking rice and liquids stewed in various combinations of hot, sour, salty, and sweet. The meals were not for the sole purpose of sustenance but provided community, conversation, and connection. The meal was conduit, something used to pulse and move culture and contact. There was always water close by, a body, fluid and moving. And out of all of those bodies it was most often the Mekong.  

The Mekong river begins in the northern air, creeps its way down, slowly at first, with ice melt and condensation, collecting tributaries as it goes, and it trickles until it begins to flow and run. And with it, trade and language flow up and down its banks. We use the water to carry things in its flow, to move us through. We use the water to clean, to cook, to drink, and to nurture. When, at last, it reaches its end, it booms and opens outward into a million eddies, oxbows, and outflows, the mouth, the delta.  

Here, the river lets go and deposits the primordial sludge of a region digested, the death and rot of a landscape flushed out to then be used again for growth and birth.  The mouth becomes out of nothing, an open maw, and here the dead can dance in funerals and feasts until the morning.

You are always served, and you always serve others. In this way your plate is filled. Often starting with rice, then a selection of stews and pickles and spice. There are drinks and toasts and merrymaking and song, and if the mood takes, sweat from the alcohol of fermented rice wine. When I was younger I would smoke tobacco that tasted of metal and plastic and I would sing songs from home in the southern USA, in some desire to relate to music made in the heat and the humidity.

Time and time again with no question or hesitation I would be invited into homes, to gatherings and weddings, to so many places I did not expect. I often would wonder what a similar situation would feel like in New York, or Toronto, or Atlanta; but I knew that the the openness felt different here, on the banks of the Mekong river.