The beautiful bride held the microphone and sang “I will love you, love you forever” amid cheers from many young people with disabilities from the blind groom’s massage centre. Even those who had fiercely opposed the young couple’s marriage were moved to tears as they clinked glasses in congratulation. Because their pure and enduring love swept away every barrier and prejudice!
Bride Bich Tram holds groom Xuan Long’s hand in the ritual of pouring the wedding wine.
Will you marry me?
At noon on the first weekend in August, the hall of Dong Son parish, 30km from Buon Ma Thuot city, was fuller than expected, forcing the groom’s family to hurriedly add more tables. Farmers came from villages around the area, nuns and priests from religious houses inside and outside the province, and many young people with disabilities, couples who are “blind in the eyes but bright in the heart”, travelled by bus and coach over long distances to this farming land of endless maize and rice fields to bless this special couple.
Groom Xuan Long, when he was a fourth-grade schoolboy, was playing with his younger brother when he had an accident that shattered his eyeball, leaving him blind and hard of hearing. As the eldest in a large family, Long had to encourage himself, train his optimism, his love of learning and his sense of humour so that his parents would grieve less and his younger siblings would follow his example and strive. Thanks to Braille and the kind teaching of volunteer teachers at the Vi Nhan centre for children with disabilities, Long finished lower secondary school and then felt his way into life, earning a living through massage and physiotherapy.
The mountain town market did not have room for hundreds of young people with visual impairments to earn money with their massaging hands, so Long moved down to the lowlands to work for the Khanh Hoa Association of Blind People. There, Long happened to meet Bich Tram – a student at Central 2 Preschool Teacher Training College – when she was looking for part-time work. The closer they got and the more they talked, the more Tram admired the humble, kind-hearted young man. And Long could not help being moved by Tram’s sympathy and her gentle, thoughtful gestures of care.
After asking Tram to take him to the bus station to visit his family, Long pined for Tram until he was exhausted and distraught, and in panic he called on his master for help: Master, with your experience, please show me how to declare my love to Tram, or I shall die!
Not well versed in literature, his “master” racked his brains and sweated before managing to suggest that Long send a very… cheesy text to Tram’s phone: You are like a meadow, and I am like a rain shower that wants to water your life! That afternoon, while teaching a class, his phone rang insistently, urging his master to run outside, beaming, to hear his disciple cheering: It worked, master! Tram has agreed to give me the green light to come closer!
When Tram asked: Do you want to marry me? Long was so happy he nearly cried! That “green light” shone for a whole year while the lovers patiently got to know each other and persuaded others, the hardest being Tram’s relatives. With a determination that nothing could shake, after graduating from teacher training college, Tram went up to Dak Lak to look for work. Luckily, the Hoa Mi Kindergarten near where Long worked had exactly one vacancy, Tram was accepted, and she immediately rented a house, taking Long to work every day before going to her class. At the joyful wedding in the parish neighbourhood, the bride, who was so beautiful, encouraged the groom by singing a solo, off-key and out of tune, yet it still brought tears to many eyes.
And the heart rejoiced again
Long’s master is Nguyen Thai Duong, head of the Dak Lak Youth with Disabilities Club. After a bout of polio in childhood, his right leg shrank and he was often teased by friends about his limping gait. Overcoming countless obstacles of a poor family background and social prejudice, when he graduated with excellent results from the classical guitar department of Dak Lak College of Culture and Arts, Duong was not given his diploma, only because the college leaders at the time did not correctly understand the state’s policy on ensuring fairness for people with disabilities.
The wedding of Hung and Thuyet.
Without a diploma, Duong could only teach music to students with disabilities at Vi Nhan for a token salary. While working there, Duong fell in love with teacher Mai Thuy. His greatest pain at the time was the fierce opposition of Mai Thuy’s family, who had a college degree in special education, simply because they feared their daughter would suffer if she fell in love with “a man with a disabled leg, with no money and no career”! Many times, his blind friends had to shield and protect Duong from threats of violence.
Then, with a great deal of intervention, including by the Tien Phong newspaper’s representative office with the leaders of Dak Lak College of Culture and Arts, Duong was finally given his graduation diploma. From then on, Duong and Thuy were officially employed to teach at Hy Vong School – the short name of the Centre for Support for Inclusive Education Development for Children with Disabilities in the province. And their love story finally ended happily with a simple but joyful wedding in 2006, inspiring many young people with disabilities to cast aside their inferiority complex.
One after another, many blind young men who grew up at Vi Nhan married wives who were lovely in both character and appearance: Gia Hung married village girl Vu Thi Thuyet; Suong married Thu Ba, a school clerk from Binh Phuoc; Hoang married the vice-chairwoman of the Association of Blind People in Nghe An province; Van An married Hoang Thi Tien, who teaches music and art at a lower secondary school; Xuan Quyen, having just received a bachelor’s degree in special education, already has a girlfriend who teaches children with disabilities in Dong Nai. The home of each young man with a visual impairment has been blessed with healthy children. Although the income of these simple homes is only enough to live frugally, they are always full of laughter and happiness.
On the two journeys – there and back, more than 60 kilometres – taking the blind young men from Vi Nhan to Dong Son to celebrate the wedding of Long and Tram, I asked: Whose wife is the best? Everyone agreed in giving the highest marks to Thuyet, Hung’s wife. Thai Duong joked: My wife is the best in weight – when we married she was 52, now she is 73 kilos. And Hung’s wife is the best both in diligence and in caring for her husband, sister.
Midweek, taking Van An along, we crossed Ha Lan Pass to Krong Buk district to visit the home of Thuyet and Hung. Every time he says goodbye to his wife to catch the bus up to Vi Nhan for a visit to ease his longing, Gia Hung usually brings a bottle of wine and some snacks to sing and play music all night with the friends who helped and tutored him through his years of study, such as teacher Duong and teacher An. Hung was the first blind person to complete the teacher training programme in Music, Youth Union and Young Pioneers at Dak Lak Teacher Training College. Hung has a warm, attractive deep voice, so much so that he once crushed every narrow prejudice about blind people being unattractive to win first prize in the provincial televised singing contest. On the day of Long and Tram’s wedding, when he sang the final part of “And the heart rejoiced again”, Hung’s voice rang out over the electronic band playing far too loudly, making the whole hall applaud like rolling thunder… After several years of travelling back and forth by bus, a hundred kilometres a day, to teach at Vi Nhan, Gia Hung returned home to open a massage room at home. Baby Gia Hien, from the moment he opened his eyes at birth, brought joy to a family with many people born blind, seeing a healthy grandchild; he is now five years old, climbing and playing non-stop. He often takes his father’s hand to the back garden to watch his mother bathe the pigs.
Life suddenly seemed wonderfully beautiful as we heard the hearty laughter of Hung and Thuyet mingling with the sound of cool water spraying…
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