The Warmth of “Đồng Bào”
Home is also the place where strangers refuse to leave one another alone in hardship.
This is an editorial English translation of a Vietnamese essay first published on Facebook. A Japanese friend once asked whether Vietnamese people were rich after hearing how much ordinary people often contribute when central Vietnam is struck by storms. The answer was not wealth: many donors are themselves calculating rent, school fees, medicine, and food. Yet they still cannot bear to watch others suffer unaided.
For Lữ Minh Trí, Vietnam is made of different voices that crossed his life: Chinese-Vietnamese roots in Chợ Lớn, a mother from the Mekong Delta, a wife from Huế, a first mentor from Hanoi, and a close companion in Japan who was Chăm. Difference in accent and origin did not weaken the thread between them.
In Đồng Văn, his future wife became ill from food poisoning. At three in the morning, elderly people and late-night vendors gathered around a stranger searching for medicine. One crushed leaves, another brought ginger, honey, and lemon; they put everything into a bottle and refused payment. Years later, travel made him understand how extraordinary that ordinary act was.
On another trip, a blunt bus driver in Ninh Bình kept and returned a forgotten hat exactly as promised. In childhood, two strangers in the Mekong Delta offered his family 200,000 đồng when their motorbike repeatedly broke down. His father, proud of being a mechanic able to care for his family, refused the money. The wish to help and the dignity of refusing were both memorable.
His life was assembled from many such Vietnams: a bottle of herbal medicine at dawn, a driver's terse promise kept, money offered beside a broken vehicle. Warmth is not always expressed with elegant words. It may be awkward, loud, or brusque, but still real.
The phrase đồng bào literally evokes people from the same birth-sac. In daily life it begins with smaller things: a stranger helping a stranger, a place embracing someone who is not entirely like its residents, and a person remaining grateful to all the regions and communities that shaped them.
Home is not only where one was born. It is also the place where, at the hardest moment, someone makes you feel that you are not entirely alone.