Trang Falls of Minh Long

On the wall of a house in Minh Long, a bronze gong hangs silent. Its face is round, the color of old bronze, bright in some places and dark in others, like a moon setting into the shadows of the room. Strangers passing by usually give it no more than a glance. It is a ring of metal with a rim that curves slightly inward, and its hanging cord is worn thin by human hands. But in this land, the gong is not an ornament hung up for its looks. It is a mouth that can speak. And for generations, what it has spoken of is the mountains, the water, and the Hrê people.

The house stands in Thượng Đố hamlet, in the commune of Minh Long. The province is Quảng Ngãi. This is the land of the Hrê people. The Hrê are one of Vietnam's ethnic groups, and most of them live in Quảng Ngãi. Here the gong art called Chiêng Ba is kept the way a fire is kept in the hearth. There is no noise and no show, only the care never to let it go out. The name itself already holds the word ba. In Vietnamese, ba means three. A little later, that three will appear once more, out there in the forest, written in water instead of bronze.

A gong has to be heard at least once to be understood. A hand rests on the bronze face and finds it warm and slightly rough. The sound of the gong is not harsh. It is deep and round. It spreads out and then lingers a long time in the air, like a ring of ripples widening on still water. The Hrê do not beat their gongs to fill the silence. They beat them to call one another home, to mark a day unlike other days, to tell the whole village that something worth remembering has just happened.

Not far from that house, another sound rings all day and all night without anyone striking it. It is the sound of Thác Trắng.

The path to the falls leads through green. There is the young green of new leaves, the damp green of moss on the rocks, the dark green of the forest covering the mountainsides. The deeper the path goes, the cooler the air becomes, and the smell of leaf mold mixes with the smell of water. Then all that green is cut across by a patch of white.

Water pours down from high above, splitting into three branches. Three white streams plunge together into the lake below, side by side yet never alike. One may run strong and another gentle, depending on the season and the day. Here it becomes clear why the place is called Thác Trắng, the White Falls. Nobody invented the name to sound pretty. It is simply what the eye sees first, before there is even time to think.

Three branches of water. It is the same three again, only this time it does not hang on the wall of a house. It hangs on the wall of a mountain.

Standing on the shore at the foot of the falls, people often forget what they were about to say. The lake is calm. Above, the water falls without rest, strikes the rocks and bursts into white spray. The spray drifts in the air and settles on hair and shoulders, cool, almost cold. The sound of the water strikes the cliff and comes back, layering over itself. It is another deep, round sound that lingers a long time. It is another ring of ripples spreading out, only this time it spreads through the forest instead of through a room.

Hardly anyone standing at the foot of the falls still thinks about numbers. No one measures. No one counts. What people take home is the feeling of tipping their head back to look up, and then feeling themselves grow a little smaller, in a very pleasant way.

The gong in the house is kept by human hands, passed from one generation to the next. It is wiped when it dulls and mended when it breaks. The falls are kept in another way. The scenic site of Thác Trắng was recognized as a provincial historical and cultural site on January 22, 2007. On June 8, 2016, the protected area of the site was adjusted.

That means somewhere there are pages that put it in writing: this place, where people come to cool off on an afternoon, is held in common, and it must be protected. The Thác Trắng eco-tourism area now has a management board to look after it, so that the white in its name stays white, and the forest around the falls stays forest.

Back in the house, the gong does not hang alone. Beside it there are often things woven from rattan and bamboo, which the hands of the people of Minh Long have made for a very long time. Rattan and bamboo weaving is a craft for hands that know how to wait. The strips are split evenly, shaved thin and soaked soft. Then they are woven, strand catching strand, tighter and tighter, closer and closer. When evening falls, those same hands come to rest on the face of the gong.

And when the gong falls quiet, people sing. They sing Ta lêu, and they sing Ca chôi. These songs need no stage and no lights. They travel from one mouth to another ear. One person sings and the next learns it by heart, and so the songs stay on in the land of Minh Long.

Someone may stand one day on the lakeshore below Thác Trắng, head tipped back toward those three white streams. Listening closely, they will find that the sound of the falls is not strange at all. It is like one very long gong note, a gong note that never ends, struck by the mountain itself.

Night falls, and the gong is hung back on the wall. It is silent. But it is not empty. Inside that old bronze is the sound of a whole region calling to one another. There are the words of Ta lêu, a strand of rattan just woven, and even the sound of the water falling out there.

Out there, in the dark forest, the three branches of water are still white, still pouring into the lake, needing no one to watch. Inside, the bronze moon rests silent on the wall, waiting for a hand. Both of them are ringing. The only difference is that one rings with water, and the other rings with silence.