Four seasons are better than two

 

That was the year that Cong Tuyen and Le Huynh Duc played for the National Team.

After Cong Minh, the prodigy from the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta, Huynh Duc was Vietnam’s greatest footballer. He was tall for a Vietnamese, and skilled and powerful. He was the first Vietnamese player to be good enough to play abroad, first in Europe where he didn’t fare well, then to China where he fared better.

Cong Tuyen was even shorter than the average Vietnamese, but he played big, it seemed to me, because he played with heart. My Vietnamese friends didn’t understand my ‘afficion’ for him. Many of them had no ‘afficion’ at all for their National Team, which they disparaged, or for Vietnamese footballers (except for the great Cong Minh, who had retired to the rice paddy hamlets where he taught football to the young).

Although Huynh Duc was famous and very good, he played for the Ho Chi Minh City Police team in the domestic league, and my Vietnamese friends didn’t like him because the police, like the entire civil apparatus, were corrupt.

Cong Tuyen played for the Army Team in the domestic league. I never met anyone who paid any attention to the scores or the standings of the domestic league. It felt like they played their matches in empty bleachers or on pitches where there were no bleachers, which is how I imagine football is played around most of the world. I saw the previous day’s scores in the office when I worked at the daily English-language newspaper, and it seemed like wasted space on the page – like the horoscope or the Prince Valiant or Wizard of Id comics.

Huynh Duc played center midfield and he was a strong presence and had a good right leg.

Cong Tuyen played forward, the wing, and he always seemed to be out of position, but I loved his playing because he was just always attacking when they were on offense, and when the ball was with the opposing goalie or defenders, he was pressing them, forcing them to act or react.

That was the first year I didn’t experience all four seasons. I didn’t experience the months of blackflies or mosquitoes, or the high summer drought when the duck ponds and trout creeks would dry up and the turtles and muskrats would become refugees. The peak of fall when the sugar maples came orange and yellow and the mountain maples breaking up the hillsides in their orange and red. The first snowfall or the first days of winter when 25° Fahrenheit seemed very cold. Not the high blue skies of January and February or the hue and tint of the conifers in the early spring before the rain: a dirty green like Korea-era fatigues with some brown. Not the soaking, thawing rains of early spring or the noisiness of the April winds in the poplars and pines and the rushing high-water rivers.

Instead, I experienced only the dry season and the Monsoon season that year, and for many years afterward. And now I can say with some authority that the more change in some things – like the seasons and weather and earth and trees – the better.