Have you ever wished that: I wish I can back to childhood ?!
"Childhood" - whenever I wishpering this word, suddenly I find something awakening in my heart....
As providers and caretakers, a dults tend to view the world of children as happy and carefree. After all, kids don't have jobds to keep or bills to pay, so what could they possibly have to worry about? No worry but thinking !!
" Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Albert Einstein said that. My childhood also like this: happy and carefree with many dreams (50% of them now I know forever I can't make them come true , there are just childish-dreams ). One of biggest dreams that I wished I was going to be a women-captain, on a ship with many sailors, cross over the ocean just want to know: what are there....
I love my childhood, as loves the ricefields in the afternoon with buffalo sleeping under shade of the trees, in the silent afternoons resound with sound of cock, and loves so much papers-kites of graze oxen-kids flying on the blue sky.
I was born and grow up in Saigon city, so there is not any ricefield, buffalo and graze oxen- kids in my past. That I know via books and interesting poems. I was growing up with pictures and poems of books from school-days. However, in my childhood, I got sounds of cock suddenly resound in the silent afternoons, got paper-kites fly on the blue firmament, and got many interested child-games which children today no longer accept such play. In the old days, when summer vacation begining (about at the begining of June), we start arranged paper (normal from old newspaper or old notebook) to made kites. I am a girl, so to fly the kites is the work of boys, I just sitting and looking at our kites flying higher and higher......
A summer vacation has arrived in Saigon again. I am standing motionless looking for my childhood experience. Suddenly I see a kite flying on blue sky - the Kites used to be the soul of Summer Vacation in Saigon, and used to be the soul of my childhood...
How to say how much I love my childhood, how much I missing ?
I am very lucky to live in the family in which the parents always pay all their attention to their children. Whenever I am tired from working, my family is always the safest shelter for me. Most of all I missed the cosy atmosphere of family reunions in the Vietnam's traditional festivals.
I still remeber, in every Mid-Autumn festival, my friends all asked their mothers for money to buy a favorite coloured lantern. The man and women making coloured lantern, their hand seemed to have a magical power which could turn coloful glazed paper into a world of fairy characters such as Ton Ngo Khong, Tru Bat Gioi, dragons, horses, little pigs, chickens, etc. All of them were so alive that they seemed to have imbued them with a soul.
In the old days my mother often decorated the Mid-Autumn feast with to he figures (a kind of children's toy in the old days, they made by colourful "mochi", they knead dough - colorful mochi - into coloured paste animals, we call "to he"), including pigs and chickends. Looking at these to he, I felt they were alive. They sow lay down deliberately for the baby pig to suchle. The many young childrens with yellow feathers followed the hen in search of food. My mother explained that pigs and chickens symbolize a prosperous and comfortable life. So people decorated the feast with them in the hope that their family would always be prosperous. I myself longed for the time when the Mid-Autumn festival cakes and fruits were dealt out and to play with the many to he figures.
It is said that to he and coloured lantern are not only traditional children's toys, but also a plastic art, and that the ho he and coloured latern makers are talented artisan. And I think that, they make them not to earn a living but because it is my passion. They want the young generation to know about this traditional toys. They are our traditional cultural features...
