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Somewhere in a small hamlet in the Mekong Delta in South Vietnam, a woman prepared for a lavish wedding ceremony. The groom held in his hands a platter of betel nut and betel leaves and lime paste—the traditional wedding arrangement that signified everlasting fidelity and love. Along the wedding route, girls with baby brothers and sisters straddled against their hips watched the ritual from their front steps. Even the earth, replenished by months of monsoon water, rumbled festively under the renewed activities of tadpoles and bougainvilleas. And so the wedding ceremony began and ended with the woman and her groom performing the requisite three bows before the altar.
That night, in the black stupor of her husband’s house, in a village three full days and nights away by horse-drawn carriage, she lay lifeless against a bed of bleached white cotton. The following morning, fresh blood, three drops, dotted the pristine landscape of white. The morning after that, in full fanfare, to her astonishment and fear, she found herself seated in a freshly painted carriage being driven along the winding dirt path back to her family house.
Although she didn’t know it then, red had become a life fluid for her and her family. The woman was returning to her village, fortunately, as an accidental victor in a very old war. Old men and women lined the dirt street and cheered as her wagon passed by. In their hands, strips of white cloth large as bedsheets waved like miniature flags hoisted by a conquered land. An open cart with a red roasted pig led the way, its two plump ears proudly intact, triangular and solid like pyramids pointing at the sky—thanks to the red virginal blood of the wedding night. Along the route, people cried “The bride is home,” and “The pig has two ears.” The moment her parents saw the pig’s uncut ears, they quickly dropped to their knees and knelt gratefully before the family altar.
They had not warned the woman beforehand of the possible doom that might befall the family had she not been able to produce the three drops of blood on her wedding night. Fear and anxiety, they had heard, may cause all the blood, even in a virginal body, to gather in the brain, in which case there might not be any left for the wedding night.
They remembered only too well what had happened many years ago to another village girl. She was “all white and no red,” as people said, like a rotten egg with too much white and not enough yolk. Her husband’s family had thrown her on an old wagon, the kind used to cart animals and dead wood. Next to her, hanging from a pole pierced through its body, was a giant roasted pig, both its ears shamefully shorn into two little stumps.
When the wagon passed their houses, the villagers had thrown rocks at the wagon and spat in the girl’s direction. Several village elders chased after the cart and cursed her karma with hexes they claimed would last generation after generation.
That night, villagers torched the family’s barn and drove all their farm animals and livestock into the fields. Flames leapt into the air, lapping up everything with their fiery tongues. With sledgehammers and scythes, the villagers slashed every animal in sight, and the flesh that hung from the carcasses bled pools of red into the soil. The next morning, the body of the bride was found by an old stream, her blood turning the water the bright color of her wedding-red dress. All the animals were killed except the pigs. The pigs were spared, so that their ears could be slashed as a warning to bad daughters who ventured beyond the traditional circle of virtue.1