Lam Tran
Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam
2025, Junior, Creative Writing

In the heart of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, a girl named Mai was born in a quiet village decorated with rice paddies and alive with the hum of insects and whispers of the wind. She came into the world during the rainy season – the kind where the sky shakes with thunder, and the earth opens its arms to drink. Her mother always said the rain had blessed her birth. Maybe that’s why Mai seemed so attached to the land and the sky, like a small piece of it made into a person.

To her, nature felt like a loyal friend.

Her childhood was painted green – the soft color of banana leaves she always saw outside the kitchen window, the wild shade of jackfruit trees – the ones her father climbed barefoot, the sharp radiant of blades of rice that sliced sunlight in the fields. She and her cousins would run along flooded paddies, chasing frogs, collecting lotus buds for Grandma to mix into tea. The Mekong, wide and slow and steady, wrapped around their lives like an old lullaby. It brought fish, it carried stories. It was everything to the people in that village.

The elders in her village spoke of nature like it was a god with moods – sometimes kind and giving, sometimes angry – but always fair. Her grandmother told stories of rain spirits and rice goddesses, of wind that carried prayers. To Mai, those weren’t warnings. They were bedtime songs.

Through her rose-tinted glasses, everything was still beautiful. So when the rice turned brown too early, when the fields of rice cracked, and when the air turned dry and salt stung the soil, Mai thought the golden rays looked ethereal on their little farm. She traced the cracks and dark patterns with her fingers like they were fun games. Even when fish stopped showing up in her father’s nets, she sat at the river and tossed in pebbles, pretending as if they were offerings to something still listening.

Mai didn’t understand the tired look on her father’s face when he came home empty-handed, or the sighs that came out of her mother’s lips when she talked about rising prices. Mai didn’t question why her uncle left for Saigon and didn’t come back.

“Nature is fair, everything will be back soon,” she’d say, believing it like gospel.

But not everything did.

By the time Mai turned ten, the tadpole pond had dried into a patch of brittle weeds. Their mango tree gave fewer fruits. A rainwater tank was built beside the house, and her mother started saving dishwater to keep the garden alive.

At school, the teachers began to talk about climate change – rising seas, warming skies, diagrams filled with red arrows and graphs. But it all felt distant, this wasn’t the reality Mai had lived all her life, as if it belonged to someone else’s future. Until one day, the name of her village appeared on a news report – listed as a “climate hotspot,” where farmers were leaving in quiet waves. That night, her father didn’t say a word during dinner.

Still, she clung to the bits of magic that were beautiful.

She made crowns of bougainvillea flowers and believed they could hold off the storms. She listened to the sugarcane rustle and was sure it had whispered to her.

But at sixteen, the magic started to crumble.

The river didn’t reach their doorstep during monsoon anymore – it hovered far away, hesitating. The soil was salty. Crops failed again and again. Her father came home more and more tired. Her grandmother, once the heartbeat of the house, now spent afternoons in silence. Mai often saw her eyes drifting sadly outside to their dying crops farm.

Why had she not seen it earlier? Why had she thought her love for nature was enough to make beauty eternal?

Eventually, Mai was offered a scholarship in Hanoi. Her parents supported her, maybe they were just happy that their daughter was going to escape this village – one that now had little to give. On the night before her leaving, Mai visited the river.

The moonlight skimmed the muddy surface. The wind still moved through the reeds, but thinner now, like a ghost of a song. A dragonfly hovered near her – a rare sight these days – but then it vanished into the night.

“I see you now,” she whispered.

She didn’t know what would happen to her village. She didn’t even know if her family would stay. And…She surely didn’t know if the river would rise again, if ever. But she knew this: she was no longer the child who believed nature would always heal itself.

The next morning, she packed a small jar of her village’s dry, crumbling soil into her suitcase. It will serve as a reminder. A promise.

The world was changing – painfully, urgently. But she hadn’t stopped listening.

And maybe, just maybe, the river hadn’t stopped speaking to her.

Share Gallery

Where the River Used to Sing