Last autumn when I was in Sweden my friend E. Dahlstrom who is a professor of sociology took me out on a drive around the port city of Gotehorg. It was a wonderful morning. We stopped at the Naval Museum to admire a sun- haloed statue atop a 70-metre-high cylindrical tower. That was the woman who waits for her sailor husband. The monument is dedicated to the Swedish sailors killed during World War II. My friend was surprised when I told him of the existence in Vietnam of similar monuments, natural monuments because they are rocks in the form of a woman with a child in her arms.
The most famous is incontestably the statue of Madame To in Lang Son. a town in the northernmost province. Legend has it that her soldier husband was sent to a border post high up on a cloud-clad mountain and never returned.
The statue, perched on a rock 200 metres from the ground, recently fell victim to vandalism on the part of unscrupulous quartiers. The authorities have intervened, and the statue has been restored.
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In Thanh Hoa, Khanh Hoa and different parts of southern Vietnamese one can see along the coast oilier natural rock formations representing a woman carrying a child.
The one in Khanh Hoa is related to a tragic love story. Once there lived a peasant family at the foot of a mountain. One day, while the parents were out, the six-year-old son accidentally struck his sister on the head with a knife. Frightened, he ran away.
Sixteen years later the young man got married. Then, one afternoon, as his wife was washing her hair, he saw a long scar on her head and realized with horror that she was his own sister. Full of remorse, the husband left home in a hurry, pretexting some urgent business. He never showed up again. Ever since his wife, clutching her baby to her breast, has been waiting in vain for him from the top of a cliff facing the sea.
But what is more beautiful than all those immovable rocks is perhaps the literary monument that sings the pain of all women waiting for their men and the best work is no doubt the long poem titled “Lament of a wife whose husband has gone to war” written by Dang Tran Con and wonderfully translated by Madame Doan Thi Diem (1705-1748). There are the complaints of a loving wife reparated by war from her husband. They express a despair so great and are so poignant in their sincerity that they arouse an instinctive hatred to war, although the heroine, thoroughly educated in Confucianist rules, never utters a word against the king, the war Lords and all other feudalists – the cause of all her suffering.
