The Betel And The Areca Tree
This story revolves around the two brothers, Tan and Lang. Tan and Lang looks so much alike that people usually mistaken them to be twins. Tan and Lang comes from Cao family. One day, their father died and they come across difficult situations, yet they always have each other. They then went to stay with Magistrate Luu, a good friend of their father. Magistrate Luu never have a son of his own but he have a beautiful daughter who is still single. Tan and Lang fell in love with the magistrate daughter, and the magistrate decided to let one of the boys marry his daughter. In order to identify the eldest, he eat together with the boys but he asks his servant to only provide one chopstick so that he will know which one is the eldest. The magistrate plan works and end up giving the hand for marriage to his daughter to Tan, which is the eldest of the two boys. As soon as Tan got married to the magistrate's daughter, their brotherly connection was not present anymore. Lang was so sad that his brother, Tan, no longer cared for him as they used to. Lang decided to run away and while running away further from the place his sadness, hunger, and tiredness took over him that he stop running away. Lang then died after crying so much and then he turned into a white rock. Tan heard that his brother had run away, he got extremely ashamed for his selfishness toward Lang. Tan then set foot to look for Lang and the further he goes the exhaustion also increase. Tan then stop into the white rock, he wept for he had not found his brother, and then he also died. Tan then turns into an areca tree. Tan's wife, the lovely maiden, misses her husband, decided to follow the path where the brothers took. She then stop into a white rock with an areca tree next to it. Out of deep sorrow, she also died and turn into a betel. A peasant dreamt about the three people, decided to build a temple for the white rock, the tree, and betel which symbolizes fraternal and marital love. Years later, King Hung Vuong III saw the white rock, the areca tree, and the betel. He heard the story about it and announced that the areca tree and betel plant should be planted everywhere for it symbolizes fraternal and conjugal love.
Love is the main theme found in the story. The story was in third person point of view. The characters include Tan, Lang, Magistrate Luu, the lovely maiden or Tan's wife, the peasant, King Hung Vuong III. The setting was somewhere in Vietnam's village.
While reading, summarizing, and understanding the story, I realized that love comes in a different way and that love is not only about loving someone from an opposite gender. I realized that love is closed to the word family and that love have different symbols. The Areca tree symbolizes brotherly love or fraternal love. The Betel plant symbolizes marital or conjugal love. And I think the white rock symbolizes pure emotion. In addition, this story somehow showed the reader about the origin of some Vietnamese culture and the idea that Vietnamese have a different symbol for love.
What I learned from the story is that love can be define in different ways. It can be the love for someone else, the love for one's siblings, the love for family, etc. I also learned that love has different symbolization, like, the heart shape symbolizes love, a rose symbolizes love, but in this story, the author showed us that love have different symbolism.
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