Vietnamese Tales - Uncle Cuôi

[swanchika]

George Méliès had it wrong ; what we see on the moon isn't a giant face... at least, not according to Vietnamese folklore.

Once upon a time, there was a buffalo herder named Cuôi. He was very poor, as his master barely gave him enough to eat. To avoid dying of hunger, he had to work day and night. When he was not leading buffaloes to the fields, he fed the pigs, cooked the rice and cut firewood in the forest.

One day, as he was cutting trees, he saw a young tiger, barely larger than a dog, in the bushes. He captured it, wanting to raise it himself. But he suddenly heard roaring ; it was the mother tiger, looking for her child. Cuôi panicked, dropped the little tiger and climbed up a tree to hide himself. In his haste, he had been so brutal that the fall had broken the animal's neck.

When she saw her cub dead, the tigress growled with fury, looking left and right for the monster that had done this. Hidden in the tree's foliage, Cuôi was holding his breath. Finding nothing, the mother tiger walked away and tore a few leaves from a tree. Cuôi saw her coming back towards her cub ; she started to chew on the leaves, then put them on her child's neck and let some of their juice leak from her mouth. After a short while, the baby tiger was walking alongside its mother as if nothing had happened. Then, they left. When they seemed far enough, Cuôi climbed down, and took some leaves from the miraculous tree.

On his way back, he saw a dead dog floating in a pond ; he fished it out of the water, chewed on the leaves and put them on the animal's head. The dog started to move and ran away ; it was indeed alive. The next day, Cuôi came back in the woods, uprooted the tree with great care so as not to damage it, and planted it in his garden. Knowing that magic and filth did not get along, he advised his wife to take good care of the tree : "Whatever you do, don't put waste on it", he said ; "the tree would fly up to the skies !"

In the village, it soon became known that Cuôi had a magic tree whose leaves could cure the sick and awaken the dead, and everyone came to admire it. Some tore the leaves off, others cut the bark to see if the sap had special properties, and soon enough, Cuôi, fearing that they would end up killing the tree, forbade anyone to come near it. His neighbours were furious, and decided to take revenge. While Cuôi was away, they killed his wife, eviscerated her and left her corpse at the foot of the tree.

When he came back, Cuôi, trusting in the tree's power, did not cry. Instead, he chewed on some leaves, let their juice leak in his wife's mouth, and put them on her head. Then he killed a dog, took its entrails and put them in his wife's abdomen, carefully stitching everything back. She ended up coming back to her senses... On the next morning, she was already at work, but she remained absent-minded, forgetting everything that was said to her, as if she had lost all intelligence.

And so one day, as she did not remember her husband's instructions, she put waste at the foot of the tree. The plant immediately started to twitch, and tore itself from the ground, slowly soaring to the skies. Cuôi, who was just coming back, was already too late ; he was only able to grab a root, and the tree took him with it.

They stopped in a strange world, an otherworldly landscape ; it was the moon. Cuôi has been stranded far away from his home ever since ; and, on very bright nights, one can still see, on the moon, Cuôi's shadow at the foot of his tree...