Under the Le and the Trinh, Ho Tay (West Lake) was the scene of many royal parties. It was also a rendezvous for the literary clan in old Thang Tong, or the City of the Soaring Dragon.
In an effort to revive that long-neglected tradition, a score of Hanoians, all lovers of nature and art, organised a boating party in the evening of the 16th Day of the Fourth Lunar Month. The group comprised poets, musicians, a woman singer, journalists, a painter, a lawyer, a medicine doctor and pensioners.
The rallying point was the venerable communal house at Yen Phu village in the suburbs. The monument, dedicated to a hero of the national struggle against foreign invasion and now the local genie is imposing with its massive beams, its hieratic statues and its secular trees.
We were received by Mr Tao, now in retirement, in his oldish house about two hundred metres from the communal house.
The master of the house, in defiance of all family planning, has sired eight children, all of them hoys. His wife, on the wrong side of fifty but quite young as compared with her mail, told us with a smile while glancing at him: “It was all his fault. He wanted to get the Golden Calf at any price.” It is still widely believed in the area that the first family that produces ten male offspring will make a fortune by finding the Golden Calf said to be hiding in the lake. At seven in the evening, after sunset, we boarded four bamboo rowboats provided by the children of the family. We rowed out into the darkness, and soon the city was just a faint glow behind us. Under the starless sky, the rustling sound made by the oars in the water reminded me of the phu (prose in rhyme) written by Nguyen Huy Luong two centuries ago in praise of Ho Tay:
“At Yen Thai, morning mist trembles at the pounding of pestles
Near Nghi Tam, fishing nets drift along the current.”
Then, as if to echo those reminiscences, the crystalline voice of Madame Tuyet, accompanied by her husband, Mr. Thoai, on the moon-shaped mandolin, rose into the evening breeze in one of those nostalgic, languorous boatman’s songs from the region of the Huong (Perfume) River.
We rowed on, waiting for the moon to rise. Unluckily, it started to rain, and we had to head hack in a hurry.
But the party went on, on firm ground, far into the night. We made up for what we had missed on the lake by engaging in a poetry contest followed by a delicious “landlubherly supper” consisting of chicken soup prepared by the mistress of the house.
