The story of the sweet potato vine (khoai lang ta)
Years went by and Phuoc grew into a robust man in his 20s. He was granted a piece of land close to the forest at the border of the village. Every day he could be seen in his rice fields, where he ploughed from dawn to dusk, or was heard whistling on his way home with some fish that he caught in his field for the grandmother to cook.
One evening while Lan and Phuoc and other families were eating their dinner in front of their houses, thunder crashed and lightning struck all around them. Suddenly the forest surrounding the village was covered with fire. Everybody rushed out carrying buckets of water and tried to extinguish the fire in the hope of rescuing the forest, the rice fields and the crops to be harvested, but it was all in vain. In despair they just knelt down and wholeheartedly asked Buddha for help. Amazingly, heavy rain suddenly poured down. Lan gave a sigh of relief and recalled the terrible suffering from the catastrophe of the past decades which she had wanted to forget.
The villagers waited until the following morning to survey what had happened, only to see a vast area almost totally ruined. Trees, plants and rice stems had all been burnt and the ground was scorched. They thanked Buddha for the rain and agreed that without it, things could have been worse. As the soil was still wet, everybody started to dig it up with their hands, searching for anything edible.
Suddenly Phuoc yelled out. He pointed to an area that was only half burnt, and some leaves and plants were still green. Everybody rushed over to look. Lan broke one green leaf and put it in her mouth. "It tastes all right," she said. She then dug into the soil under her feet and a big root came up. Although it was half burnt she tried cleaning it with her dirty hands and tentatively ate it. "Delicious," she called out. In no time everybody followed that stem and under their eyes a green vegetable bed opened its leaves under the first rays of the sun. Again the villagers knelt down and thanked Buddha for giving them that gift. Without this precious root they would have suffered a famine just like Lan had done two decades earlier.
Afterwards they all took turns to look after that vegetable, which they called khoai lang ta (sweet potato) and divided the crop equally among themselves.
Sister Hue Can
Here is a recipe for sweet potato which is one of the first meals consumed when celebrating an ancestors' anniversary. Canh kiem: vegetable soup from South Vietnam
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