Skip to content
Vuong Nguyen avatar Vuong Nguyen
About Archives Explore

Cruel Kids, The Animals I Know and How to Neuter a Cow

Learning

Cow

Growing up in a quiet part of southern Việt Nam, I loved waking up to all sorts of sounds: pigs squealing, cows mooing, cart wheels on dirt roads, and neighbors calling loudly to each other.

You would have loved it too if, at twelve years old, you could run outside to relieve yourself while enjoying the breeze from rows of banana and sugar apple (custard apple) trees as part of your morning routine.

It was freedom in the truest form. Seriously, you would have to try it sometime. Unfortunately, “indecent exposure” is an actual crime in Boston, where I now live.

Life in a farming village meant there was not much entertainment. As kids, we either went to school, helped on the farm, or played until our mothers called us home for meals. In a natural evolution, every child developed a keen ear to recognize their own mother’s voice across the fields.

Children playing in a rural village

We had to invent our own fun while our parents worked. My parents owned the largest pig farm in town and also ran a brewery that supplied rice wine to an entire city.

So what did I do for entertainment? For starters, we had no toys. That old joke about kids in “third-world countries” playing with sticks? That was us. There were rules and preferred qualities of sticks though, so it was serious business.

Clay was another favorite. Good clay meant an adventure to the river two towns away, carrying back a batch to turn into cows, carts, pots, pans, guns, dolls, and our favorite, marbles for slingshots.

I also shot bows as a kid. It was unusual at the time, since “Cowboys vs. Indians” movies had made guns more popular. Even the highlanders I knew used crossbows. But I digress. Let me get back to the real animals, the living and breathing Kingdom of Animalia.

Red stop sign against a rural backdrop

Disclaimer: I do not intend to scare, shock, or disgust you. If you are easily offended or squeamish, this may not be your ride.

What I want is to share stories from my childhood in Việt Nam, where food and farming were part of life. These are reflections on culture, meat consumption, and the distance, or lack of distance, between us and our food sources.

This piece began as one long post, but by the second story it was far too long. I decided instead to make it a series. Here is the outline (some parts are still unwritten):

Follow the series to the end if you really came to learn how to neuter a cow. As you may know, demand for cow neutering skills is only growing, given the so-called “teenage pregnancy crisis” in cows.

Okay, I am joking. But do read the conclusion when it comes out, because the small stories only make sense as part of the whole.