Ever since I can remember things, my first house is always a starting point that I often look back to find its trace that is becoming more and more vague to me. But still it is so close to my heart that I can even fantasize it with the wildest fairy tale and fantasy. The farther I go, the bigger houses I have been to, the farther and blurrier my dear house is away from me. Still, I try hard to grasp as much as possible the fragments of my precious memory of places and moments that time would never return to me. There are details I can’t picture clearly: what the kitchen was really like? What flowers were in the pots in the front yard? Was there really a secret side way next to my house? But there are pictures that I remember clearly too, the places a kid would spend the most time in, the yards and the rooms except for the kitchen. For example, the guava tree in the front yard that I wished so much to bear some fruits but it only yielded tiny green guavas and shade for me to play under it. The poor old tree was there before I could even remember, and is still there 20 years later, standing in peace and loneliness. The back yard was larger and busier. There was a tank full of water that my mother usually washed us there. Only then I remember we didn’t even have a proper bathroom. I thought my mother would bath at night in the empty room behind the house that we used as a kitchen also. Life was too simple and carefree at that time. Yet I was filled with happiness, I didn’t complain as I would in the future, when my own bathroom didn’t have a tub but a standing shower. Maybe it is because we were close to nature at that time; we have a very large front and back yard. The summer berry tree standing next to the water tank somehow bore berries all year round. I still recall the eagerness of early morning when I woke up and ran to tank to pick up fallen berry, washed them and ate enthusiastically, although they were sour and seedy. There was a grove of trees standing against the neighbor’s wall also. There trees were so tall and appeared so powerful to me. I would never forget the sounds of wind rushing through the foliages that tickled my ears, the dancing shadow of the leaves on the old rusted wall whose yellow paint matched elegantly with sunlight forever into my nostalgic mind. The little girl those days standing there, with her head held up, dreaming in the music of nature, wind and sunlight swiftly danced on her face- the first notion of beauty was formed. Happiness was not known but actually experienced, was not sought but came naturally. I was happy because I didn’t know what to compare, I valued every single leaf and flower, even the tiny dirty kitchen, the small bed that we all shared, every spare sheet of paper that I could find to draw on. I was contented. My little world was the biggest world I ever fully ventured out. And I learn that though we get bigger and modern house with every possible piece of furniture now, I am never contented. I don’t even spend time to feel connected to them; I crave for more and better. I don’t know how to value, how to live, how to be as simple and carefree as I was. The more I possess the emptier I am inside. What house is about? What is architecture for? Why do I only look back that way but have to move on the other way?

How good is life? Life is simple and carefree.

The house is lost in far far away land, we properly don’t even know, maybe in the midst of the jungle of Southeast Asia. But now as we views map of the world from satellite, the image of the house is very blurry. It is properly just a dot on the delta of Mekong. My fantasized house is floating with me everywhere I go.