The Giants of the Da River

The Đà River never agrees to run straight.

This great river crosses the land of Hòa Bình, looping toward one side and then curving back to the other. It winds like a soft silk ribbon that someone let fall among the mountains and forests. Long ago, in some places the water slid by smoothly. In others, jagged rocks jutted up, and the water stumbled over them, throwing up white foam and roaring day and night.

The Mường people of Mường Bi have a very old story that explains why such a great river will not run in a straight line. The Mường are an ethnic group of northern Vietnam whose language is closely related to Vietnamese. Mường Bi lies in the land of Hòa Bình. Their story is about two giants.

The Mường say that when heaven and earth were still new, a husband and wife of extraordinary size appeared in Mường Bi. They were more than five times as tall as the highest mountain in the region. People called them Ông Đùng and Bà Đùng. In the Mường language, Đùng means giant, so their names mean Grandfather Giant and Grandmother Giant.

The two of them were so huge that when they stood up straight, their hair brushed the white clouds. With a single step, a whole valley fit neatly under one foot. Yet they were very gentle, as gentle as grandparents who dote on a crowd of little grandchildren.

In those days, the land of Mường Bi was still poor and rough. It rose here and sank there, all bumps and hollows. Wild plants grew in a tangle, with thorns everywhere. Worst of all was the water. It kept seeping up from deep in the earth, spilling over and flooding the whole region. The Mường did not have a single flat patch of ground to build a house on, and not one dry field to plant rice in.

The two giants looked at all this and felt deep pity for the people. So they rolled up their sleeves and set to work.

In just one day, the giants pulled up every wild plant and knocked down the bumpy hills. Then, with hands as wide as big bamboo trays, they smoothed the earth until it was perfectly level. Where the ground rose high, they scraped it down. Where it sank deep, they filled it in. By evening, a broad field lay open, flat and smooth, smelling of fresh earth and waiting for the day people would sow their seed.

But the floodwater was still there. It kept spreading everywhere, with nowhere to go.

The couple agreed to dig a channel, very wide and very long, to carry all the floodwater away. Ông Đùng went first, plunging his hands into the ground and heaving up the earth in great clods. Bà Đùng followed behind, scooping out the bed to make it wider and deeper. He dug and she scooped, on and on, and the earth flew up on either side into two long lines of mounds.

They dug through the whole long day. Then the sun went down and the sky grew dark, and the work was still not finished. Even so, the two giants did not stop. In the pitch-dark night, the old man kept digging and the old woman kept scooping, murmuring to each other as they worked, to forget how tired they were.

On such a dark night, there was no way to see clearly, and the giants could not keep their path straight. Their hands simply felt their way through the blackness. Here the channel drifted a stretch to the left, and there it swung a stretch to the right. So the trench wandered and twisted along, without a single straight run.

The next morning, the sun came up. Water from every direction came rushing into that giant trench and flowed on and on into the distance. That was how a river was born. The Mường say that this river is the Đà River.

The old couple stood on high ground, looked down at the river they had just dug, and burst out laughing. Oh, how crooked and winding it was! It looped this way and curved that way, twisting like a snake crawling along. That was because they had dug it in the dark the night before, and could not see well enough to dig it straight.

And that was not all. In the darkness, there were big boulders the giants had not managed to clear, and these were left lying in the riverbed. When the water reached them, it tripped, reared up, and crashed down again, throwing white foam into the air. Those places became waterfalls and rapids. From then on, the Đà River had more waterfalls and rapids than anyone could count, and every one of them roared.

The Mường tell one more cheerful tale. Once, Ông Đùng saw that the villagers had trouble crossing the river. He stretched one leg across the water as a bridge for everyone to walk over. As for Bà Đùng, she once carried a great armful of big stones for the bridge. She was in such a hurry that she let them all drop into a stretch of the river. Wherever they fell, the water swirled and foamed, and the spot became a great waterfall.

That is the story of the Mường people of Mường Bi, told with deep affection for the two giants. To the Mường, the giants were a huge yet kindly couple. They moved mountains and opened the way for the water, all to leave their descendants a good, green land with rivers and rice fields.

The water of the Đà River still will not run straight. It bends and loops among the mountains and forests. The Mường believe the two giants dug this river on one dark night. And in the sound of the river, day and night, it is as if that kindly old couple are still telling their story, from one generation to the next.