(PICTURE: Hong fruit.)
As I'm sure my mother will comment on, as a youngster I loved climbing trees. In the backyard of my first house on Longacre Drive, we had two evergreen trees. I'm pretty sure I climbed each tree about 1,000 times. In fact, I think me climbing those trees may be one reason my mother went a tad gray (before her hair naturally turned back to brown).
The morning after my day of horrific stomach pain, Huyen's dad force-fed me hong fruit. We don't have this fruit in America so I'm not sure what the English name for it is.
I like hong fruit but I was a tad skeptical when Hong, Huyen's father, encouraged me to eat it. A week or two earlier Huyen and I ate this fruit in Hanoi and Huyen told me that it was a good source of fiber. I'm no doctor but loading up on fiber when one has horrific dirrhea just doesn't seem like a good idea. However, Hong encouraged me to eat four hong. Well, they did the trick. After eating the fruit I felt a lot better...although it might also have been because I ate four bowls of plain rice and took anti-diarrhea medicine too.
(PICTURE: Hong collecting hong.)
Later that afternoon, Huyen's parents suggested that we go to her old house and pick hong fruit from their garden. As Huyen and I started to leave, her father said he was coming along. Now, I love my father and think he's an amazing man but there's no way he could do what Huyen's father did on this day. Huyen's dad scampered up the hong trees and collected a huge bag worth of hong. Hong (again Huyen's Dad, not the fruit) is 57 years old and easily climbed these trees way better than I ever could climb when I was in my climbing prime...roughly eight years old.
(PICTURE: That's me climbing about fifteen feet lower than Huyen's dad.)
