Did you know that the deepest canyon in Southeast Asia is located in the Hà Giang Province in North Vietnam? The Tu Sản Canyon – that’s Sản, phrased as a question – stretches 1.7 kilometers in length, and is one kilometer deep – impressive, right? It’s the greenest, lushest thing, even the water is green. Not swampy-toxic fumes-Elphaba green, but something closer to turquoise. There must be thousands of life forms in that water, along those cliffs.
The canyon is especially awe-inspiring to me because they don’t exist where I live. The land is mostly flat. The fields are green and rapeseed yellow and stretch as far as the eye can see, all the way out to the horizon, where people used to believe ships fell over the edge and perished. Denmark’s highest natural peak reaches a mere 170,86 meters, and the longest river stretches 158. In Danish it isn’t even called a river. River translates directly to flod similar to the English flood, but we don’t use that word at all. We refer to it as å, as if insinuating that it’s actually supposed to be understood as something smaller than a river. I used to think it was terribly boring, living here: couldn’t you have gone somewhere more interesting, I admonished o– my parents. I’d been very small, back then. With no grasp of how little of their refugee journey had been their choice.
But I’m getting off topic.
Tu Sản used to be below water. See, canyons take millions of years to form. They’re carved by rivers, by weather, by the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates and other crustal processes. You wouldn’t think that something as soft as water could cut something as hard as rock, right, but these things happen slowly, over time. There’s a saying in our my mother tongue: Nước chảy đá mòn. Water flows, rock erodes. For a country like Vietnam, with its countless rivers, it makes sense to have such a saying. There are too many to list, eighteen within the Mekong Delta alone, but examples are: the Dinh River (which goes through our family’s province!), the Red River, and of course, the Nho Quế River, where I am writing this, while looking up at the cliffs the river channels through. It took Tu Sản millions of years to emerge from the water in the shape we know it today: lush and steep and larger than life.
But don’t think of it as a finished landscape. Canyons never stop forming. It happens much too slowly for the human eye to perceive, but really, nothing on this earth is at a standstill. Just like the way we move from one point to the next, whether by plane or by overcrowded fishing boat, there is movement in the earth. Tectonic plates shift beneath our feet, trees expand upwards and outwards, the planet spins, rivers flow and rock erodes, and all of it occurs before, during, and after our lifetimes. Unless we manage to wreck the planet entirely, but I’m getting off topic again, sorry. Where was I?
Canyons never stop forming. Right. Water doesn’t stop eroding once it is satisfied with its work. Before coming here, I read that the Grand Canyon, carved by the Colorado River, gets wider every year due to weathering and erosion, and isn’t that crazy to think about? Who knows what this place will look like hundreds of years from now? Is the gorge wider? Deeper? By how much?
You know, places such as these really make you think. Maybe it’s the grandiose sublimity of the cliffs. The sound of the water. I think of how our parents were in the water once too. In that boat. Stuck on the open sea. If time is relative, how long were they there? Maybe as long as it took for Tu Sản to emerge. Of how the water will stay with them always, wearing away at them over time. Shaping them in ways the human eye is blind to. How you and I were born with seawater in our lungs because water penetrates everything. Because water is fluid enough to slip through any crack, and given enough time, it will break down even the sturdiest rock.
I think of you and me. How we’d started in the same place. I’d been born mere minutes after you. I think of the turquoise river (as in flod, not å) running between us (as in You, period, Me), how rivers carry with them boulders that cut and hammer away at the sides of the cliffs, how it will only be a matter of time before someone climbs to the top of my cliffs and will no longer be able to see across to yours—
Oh my god. I can’t believe it.
I’m in the deepest canyon in Southeast Asia, and I can’t believe I still find a way to relate it all back to you.
Loc-An Thi Nguyen is twenty-four. Born to Vietnamese parents who arrived in Denmark in the eighties, she grew up in Aarhus, and continues to live there to this day. She just received her master’s degree in English from Aarhus University. She loves to write, read, and play Dungeons and Dragons with her friends.
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