But the day when the fatherland no more exists, our life will have no sense.
Water is omnipresent in Vietnam.
We can say it is here that water and land unite to give birth to a people. It is also here that are found in ancient tombs amulets bearing iconographic representation of the Dragon, a mythical animal with a pig's head and a snake's body, a hyphen between Land and Water because the pig indicates the wealth of the peasants, symbol of the Land and the snake that of the Water. The history of Vietnam is also the history of water. Water may become deadly as she can come out of her bed to engulf harvests and entire villages. To tone down her wrath, people keep building dikes, sealing gaps, raising ramparts, digging canals.