Nga Son

Legend has it

The place enters the story as somewhere a man could be killed without anyone laying hands on him. Angered by Mai An Tiem's arrogance, the king banished him to a sandbank outside the sea mouth of Nga Son district, with no human track on any side, leaving him food enough for four or five months and meaning him to eat it and die. Then a white bird came flying from the west, settled on the corner of the hill, called three or four times, and spat out six or seven melon seeds onto the sand. The seeds sprouted and bore fruit; he kept the seeds and planted more, and traded what he could not eat for rice. Fishermen and traders who tasted it all liked it, and people from villages near and far bought it for seed.¹

At the close of the tale the place is named: the sandbank where he had lived was called An Thiem and the village Mai, and the book states that it is today in Nga Son district in Thanh Hoa. This is the collection's habitual way of telling — a story has to explain a name the reader can see in front of him. But in its very last clause the book adds an account that softens that origin itself: one version says the bank was where An Thiem's parents and forebears had lived all along. If so, he was not banished to a strange place but back to the land of his own forebears; the book sets down both and chooses neither.¹