Kinh and Bahnar Are Brothers

On the high plateau, on early mornings when white mist still hangs low, a call made at the foot of a mountain travels very far. It strikes one rock face and bounces to another. It slips through crevices and threads between the leaves. Then it comes back, as if someone were answering. The Bahnar live in Tây Nguyên, the Central Highlands. They say there is a reason the mountains carry a human voice so far. That reason lies in a very old story about two brothers. One went up into the mountains, and one stayed on the plain.

This is the origin legend of the Bahnar, a tale the elders tell their grandchildren by the fire. It is not history with dates. It is an old story told again and again, warm and gentle as the heat of the fire in the village communal house.

Long, long ago, when there were still few people on the earth, a family lived on a vast plain. The land was flat, and the horizon ran in a perfect circle. Toward the sunrise lay a great lake, its waves splashing day and night. And strangely, that lake gave people salt. The family only had to go down to the lake to bring salt home, so every meal was well seasoned.

The family had a father and two sons. The brothers loved each other, but they were very different. The elder was calm and thoughtful. The younger was carefree and quick to laugh. When something amused him, he laughed out loud until tears ran down his face.

One sultry noon, the father lay down to rest, and his outer coat slipped to one side. The elder son saw it and quietly drew the coat back over his father, so he would not catch a chill. The younger son, for no clear reason, found the way his father lay very funny. He held his belly and laughed and laughed.

The father woke with a start. In a moment of temper, he spoke some very harsh words to the younger son. As soon as the words were out, everyone fell silent. Hurt, the younger son bowed his head and quietly packed his things to leave. He went west, toward blue mountain ranges that rose one behind another up to the clouds.

The elder brother stayed on the plain with their father. He kept the family ways, the fields and the lake that gave salt. The younger brother walked on and on toward the mountains, until the plain vanished behind him.

But the younger brother was not alone. He had a wife. When she learned that her husband had gone toward the mountains, she could no longer sit still at home.

She made up her mind to find him.

She walked west, toward the mountains where her husband had disappeared. The forest trails were hard. Thorns tore her clothes, jagged rocks cut her feet, and slopes rose as steep as walls. In some stretches the forest was so dark that it stayed gloomy even at midday. Still she kept walking, day after day, month after month.

Wherever she went, she called out, "My love! My love!" Her voice flew into the deep forest and struck the cliffs. Then it seemed to fade away among the endless trees. Her husband was somewhere far ahead, too far to hear her.

Then, the story goes, the mountains and forests themselves took pity on her.

Each day the mountains heard her longing call, and they felt so sorry for her that they gathered to help. One cliff caught her call and passed it to the next. Rock crevices led the sound through every nook and corner. The wind carried the call far, and the forest leaves passed it from branch to branch. In this way the whole range of mountains cradled the call of the wife and sent it farther and farther.

Then one day, halfway up a mountain in the west, the husband was making his way through the forest when he suddenly froze. In the wind and the rustle of leaves, he faintly heard someone calling for him: "My love! My love!" The call was as thin as mist, but it was surely the voice of his dear wife.

He stopped and stood still in the forest to wait for her. Passed along from cliff to cliff, her call came closer and clearer. Then at last his wife reached him, and husband and wife were together again. They were glad and tearful at once, tears streaming down while they smiled.

From that day on, the couple never went back to the plain. They stayed with the mountains and forests that had sheltered them. They built a house on the mountainside, cleared fields, sowed seeds, and grew rice and corn. The mountains gave them cool spring water, and the forest gave them bamboo shoots and firewood. Season after season, the voices of children filled the little house. In time it grew into a hamlet, and then a village.

The descendants of the couple grew in number across the windswept plateau. The Bahnar say these were their own ancestors, the children of the mountains and forests of the Central Highlands.

Down on the plain, the elder brother kept the old family home. The fields were still planted, the lake still gave salt, and the hearth still glowed. His children and grandchildren also grew in number and spread across the flat land. And the line of the elder brother who stayed on the plain, people say, became the Kinh. The Kinh are the majority ethnic group of Vietnam.

So it all began with one family. The younger brother went up into the mountains and became the Bahnar. The elder brother stayed on the plain and became the Kinh. One lived high in the mountains, the other down on the plain, with so many forests and streams between them. But their roots were the same. They had one father and one first home.

The Bahnar say that the Kinh and the Bahnar were brothers of one family from the start, who each chose a different place to live. One grew used to the plain and its wide open rice fields. The other grew used to the mountains, the hillside fields and the sound of gongs ringing through the valleys. Two ways of life and two homes, but one shared blood.

Even now, at the foot of the mountains in the Central Highlands, a call often carries far, passing from one cliff to the next. Such a call recalls the wife who long ago walked so far to find her husband, and the kind mountains that passed along each of her calls. It recalls, too, that at the two ends of that echo were once two brothers of one family. One went up the mountain and one went down to the plain, yet their hearts never parted.