Bac Lieu Salt

The seasonal wind has come back to the coast of Bạc Liêu. It sweeps across the flat shore, where no limestone hill rises. On the canals, the water ripples into small, layered waves. This year's salt season opened on the day the wind first returned. Salt here is made in the dry season, the season of strong sun.

While the sunlight is still pale, the salt maker is already out in his fields. The coast is so low that seawater is easy to lead along the canals and into the fields. Three river mouths help bring the seawater in as well. One is Gành Hào. The others are Chùa Phật and Cái Cùng. The soil under his feet is salty and full of clay. It holds the seawater and lets very little of it seep away.

His field is only a small patch in a long belt of salt fields. The belt runs from the coast bordering Vĩnh Châu to the river mouth at Gành Hào. All of it lies in the old Bạc Liêu, which now belongs to Cà Mau province. In Điền Hải and Long Điền Tây, many hamlets go by the name Salt Hamlet. Another name for them is Diêm Điền, which means salt fields. There, hundreds of families live by making salt.

He walks along the bank of the holding pond, the part of the field that stores seawater. The pond is brimming, its surface still.

These days, a pump brings seawater into his holding pond. In the old days, the work was much harder. In some places, people had to bring water from the defense dike all the way to the fields, along a channel nearly 3 kilometers long. They dug ditches for the water to run in. Then they lifted the water with a frame whose two legs spread wide and met at the top. One salt maker remembers the first years in the trade, and many nights awake until dawn, keeping watch to let seawater into the yard.

Salt making here began early in the 20th century, when settlers came to clear the coastal land. The trade is now more than 100 years old. Many families have made salt for three generations or more, and some have reached the sixth. At the end of 2020, salt making in Bạc Liêu was recognized as national intangible cultural heritage.

He steps past the holding pond. Ahead lie five or six small plots, set one after another. Water flows slowly from the pond into each plot in turn. There it lies in the sun, evaporates little by little and grows saltier. Families who want cleaner salt dig an extra pond where the water can settle.

At the end of the bank is the salt yard, where seawater turns into grains. Its surface is flat and smooth, the fruit of his work since the start of the season.

Back then, the yard was still lumpy with weeds and rubbish. He cleared it, raked away the rotting topsoil and leveled the ground. The top layer of the yard is clay mixed with sea sand. Over it he poured filtered seawater, saltier than ordinary seawater, and tamped it down again and again. The wet earth turned thick and sticky. With each round of tamping, the soil packed tighter and sealed itself, so seawater could hardly sink through.

After several rounds of seawater had dried on it, the surface of the yard grew hard. Then he pushed the hủ lô, a roller for the soil, back and forth across the whole yard. Wherever the roller went, the surface turned smooth. Only once the bed was firm did he let in the water for making salt.

This morning, a layer of salt covers that yard. The water has lain there through many sunny days. It grew thinner and thinner, until it set into grains of salt across the whole surface. On cloudy days, the salt forms more slowly. Salt making depends entirely on the sky.

In Vĩnh Thịnh, a salt maker once told of a day when only a few passes had been raked before the rain poured down. The salt all dissolved, and the yard had to be made again. Rain out of season is something the salt maker never wishes for.

Today is the 13th day of the lunar month, and the sky is clear. The sun climbs.

When the sun blazes like fire on the fields, he takes up his chang, a rake for gathering salt, and pushes it along the yard. The grains heap up in front of the blade into little mounds. On the yards nearby, people are busy too, raking salt and carrying it away.

His yard is an earth yard. Families who spread plastic sheeting over their yards get whiter salt. Even so, many still keep the old earth yards. They say salt formed on earth tastes better, and its grains are glossier and prettier.

Bending over each mound, he picks out by hand the bits of debris in the salt, until the mound is clean. Under the sun, the mounds of salt glitter.

Salt from Bạc Liêu is a pinkish white, not the clear white of salt from central Vietnam. The grains are dry and firm, with no other smell mixed in. The taste is a clean saltiness, never bitter or harsh. When the saltiness fades, a faint sweetness lingers.

He shovels the clean salt into baskets and loads them onto a cart. He pushes the cart up a small ramp onto the bank. Up there, the piles of salt grow taller and taller. He covers each pile with a layer of coconut leaves. Some families use plastic sheeting instead.

The last pile is on the bank now, under its coconut leaves. He looks along the bank, where the leaf-covered piles stand in a row. Long ago, people called the land south of the Hậu River by the name Ba Thắc. The salt made here took that folk name too, and was known as Ba Thắc salt. The names of Long Điền salt and Bạc Liêu salt still ring out in one song. It is called Biển Cạn. The song is a vọng cổ, a southern Vietnamese lament melody that is sung with many different lyrics. The words are by the songwriter Ngô Hồng Khanh.

Long ago, the salt from here traveled far by water. People dug the Dòng Me canal to carry salt from the coast all the way into the town. There it was sold to boats bound for the trading port of Saigon, or up the Hậu River as far as Cambodia. In Cambodia, it was used to salt fish, make fish sauce and dry fish.

In those days, a salt warehouse called Tu Muối stood on the bank of the Bạc Liêu River. It was nearly 1 kilometer long.

The yard is bare and clean now. Every year, at the festival of the communal house and when the seasons turn, salt makers lay out offerings to heaven and earth and to the spirits. They pray for a good season. Today, when it is time to let water into the yard, he sets a few simple offerings on the bank. He prays for gentle rain and kind winds, for rain and sun to come at the right time. When the prayer is done, he lets the water down into the yard from the small plots, where the sun has made it salty. A layer of clear water spreads out and covers the yard he has just raked clean.

The afternoon passes, and the water lies still in the yard. Then dusk falls. He stands a while on the bank, looking at the new layer of water.

Tomorrow is the 14th. Salt makers usually avoid three days in each month: the 5th, the 14th and the 23rd. On those days, at every stage of the work, they avoid travel and avoid starting anything new.

Over the salt yard, only the seasonal wind still glides past, ruffling the new water into small folds.