The anti-jungle syndrome

Living on stilts: a Katu house on the Annamite Range

In my former life in Saigon, I had rented a floodable plot of land in an island (connected to the city with a bridge) and commissioned the building of three bungalows on stilts. A local journalist sent by a home design magazine to write an illustrated story about the house declined to comply to his foreign editor-in-chief: who wants to live in a house on stilts? Only the Moïs—the savages—do. Civilized people live in concrete, ground-level houses.  In the Mekong Delta, where the river overflows every year, they would rather be inundated to their neck in their flood-level houses than built on stilts. 

Civilized people are plains dwellers who participate in the hydraulic civilization of rice culture. The Moïs, now properly renamed 'the ethnic minorities', live in the mountains, next to jungles where they hunt, pick wild mushrooms and vegetables. The Vietnamese ethnic majority has a name for the jungle: 'the land of poisonous water'. In the Annamite Range that rises to the west of Hôi An where I live, snakes are lethally venomous and of course black. They are called Black Cobra (rắn hổ mun) although they are not cobras but regular vipers with a flat head. I have been told that  their mandibles continued to seep out venom even after they are well dead and decomposed. If you step barefooted on the bony remains you will die. Fortunately, not many of us take a stroll in the jungle in naked feet.

A river crossing towards the Land of Poisonous Water

The people who live on the neighboring strip of the Annamite Range are the Katus and their houses are built on stilts.

The Katu house roof is made of Schefflera palmiformis (lá cọ)

Schefflera palmiformis palm. Photo credit: 60s.com.vn

In addition to living in poisonous water territory with venomous black cobras, the Katus have been the subjects of a diffamatory report in 1938 by a French colonial ranger. Le Pichon dubbed them the 'blood hunters': every now and then, he wrote, the Katus ambushed a young man from another tribe and executed him to honor the gods.

Vietnam is the only country in the world to have called their minority ethnic groups 'savages'. Language speaks for the deep, sacred feelings of a people and reveals, in this case, a yearning for domesticable land that is the nucleus of the Vietnamese soul. Flat lands, floodable lands, rice-cultivable lands. The opposite of the unkempt jungle where monsters thrive.

Land—and water. The word country,  'đất nước' is a compound of 'land' and 'water'.

I would rather be uncivilized and unflooded.