Molar and Fang

My hands felt gritty with sweat and grime from the pig pen. Ascending the narrow, wooden stairs, I wiped my hands on the cleaner leg of my jeans, taking care to avoid the pristine, woven scarf that the farmer had pressed into my hands as we left her home. 'She says thank you,' Cuong had translated. 'Thank you to Australia for its aid.'

Upstairs in the roadside restaurant, between a field of swaying blades of green and the rocky path back down to the village, we sat cross-legged on the rough wooden-slatted floor with knees pressed under the low table. At Cuong's beckon, a woman with a smile as wrinkled as her apron approached, a large bowl steaming in her lined hands. 'Chay,' I proclaimed, pointing at myself and immediately exhausting half of my Vietnamese vocabulary. 'Chay, làm on.' She laughed and set the bowl on the table. Bean sprouts wilted over a protein I couldn't recognise.

'Bees,' Cuong announced over the noise of the local office staff arriving, taking places at the table and calling for more food.

'Beans?' I suggested, with the hopeful raise of an eyebrow.

'Bees!' He imitated waving a swarm away from his face. 'Bees, province specialty.'

'Bees? Bees are... not chay. Bees are meat.'

Cuong laughed uproariously and snatched the bowl with a flourish, piling the stir fried delicacy over his portion of rice. He pushed the bowl back towards me with a crooked smile. 'Try the sprouts. Not as good as bees, but...' He trailed off with a chuckle and a shake of his head. I reached cautiously for a small mound of mung bean shoots and a girl from the village program office, dressed younger than her age with pigtails and crooked glasses, giggled softly as she corrected my chopstick grip. 'Higher, here, see?' She was right, and I lifted the bee-seasoned sprouts to my mouth with ease.

They burst with a flavour I couldn't place, with a shiver passing down my throat. Whether it was venom, psychosoma or simple MSG, I was never able to ask over the buzz of unfamiliar tongues in conversation. I carefully helped myself to more sprouts and leaned back in sated hunger and the torn satisfaction of feeling home among strangers.

As we later lurched forward toward Hanoi, limestone karsts rose alongside the roads. Like Ha Long Bay sucked dry, the formations were close enough that they seemed prone to crumble into the paths of departing cars. I wondered if they ever had. I parted my lips to ask, the tingle of bees still on my tongue.