I believe everybody has a memory either bad or good. I want to share some of my memories of the one I love the most in my life. Since I have been living in USA for 12 years, I always miss my homeland and family.
As a child one of my favorite activities was to paddle in the boat with my friends and pretend to race like one of the boatmen. Growing up watching my dad work so hard, it taught me to never give up when times get tough.
When I was in junior high in 1998, I watched my dad and his team practicing on the Thapha boat (it is the name of their racing boat) on the Mekong River before the tournament begins. His team had 54 boatmen. My dad’s position was the last person standing or sitting on the Thapha boat. He was the controller of both of the boats. Thapha village has two kinds of boats: traditional boat, which has a big head; modern boat, which has a long skinny head. They are different, between the speed of two kinds of boats, because the traditional boat is slower than the modern boat. I loved to watch it because it is unpredictable which boat’s going to win, because they race head to head and the exciting part of the boat racing is that they only beat each other by an inch. My dad paddled the boat from 1984-2011.
During this time, the living conditions of my father’s generation were not good, so they did not have a variety of food to eat compared to the United States. The main food that locals would ate in Laos is fish. They got their fish mainly from two places: the Mekong River and the ponds, but the United States has a variety of food such as cheese, milk and many more that Laos did not have in that time period. Since there was no money to buy vitamins or supplements people lacked the right nutrients to build a strong body and have better health overall. However, they had other ways to complement their lack of nutrients in addition to their daily intake of fish. Today life in Laos is much different than back in the day, because they have more variety of food, similar to United States and they have better life than before.
In 2000 my dad team had a state tournament for Laos’s competition. So boatmen would start to practice two months before the tournament. They woke up at 4:00 am every other morning to run outdoors for an hour. In the evening, they practiced again from 5:00 pm to 7:30 pm with their boats in the Mekong River. They would go out boating every evening—as they trained for the tournament, but boating was also the only way to build their physical strength. It is not easy to make the boat go fast (without practicing).
Even so, I love to tell the story of how life was like back home, how traditional people used to live despite the scarcity of food and technology. I chose to share this memoir because it brings back childhood memories. I also want to remember my dad’s story and share it with you. My dad set the example of how he lived to me and the community by training hard to complete an important competition. That is why I want to cheer on other sports players who have a hard time completing the goal.
Posted on Oct 1, 2018
Boat Racing Festival (Boun Suang Heua) 