The Flower That Tells Everyone Whether Your Mother Is Alive

On the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, which this year is Thursday 27 August, you will see people going into temples across Da Nang with a small flower pinned to their shirt. Some of the flowers are red. Some are white. Nobody will explain it to you, because everybody here already knows.

The red rose means your mother is still alive. The white one means she is not.

That is the whole thing. You wear it on your chest for the afternoon, everyone can see it, and everyone knows without asking. In a room of a hundred people you can look around and know, immediately, who still has a mother to go home to.

The day is called Vu Lan. It is the Buddhist festival of filial piety, of remembering and repaying what your parents did for you, and it lands in the middle of the seventh lunar month, the one people call ghost month, when the old belief says the gates open and the wandering souls come back. Families clean the graves. They cook and lay out food. They burn paper offerings, money and clothes and sometimes paper motorbikes, so the dead are not short of anything. On the rivers, people float lanterns.

But the flower is newer than any of that, and it did not come from Vietnam.

In 1962 a Vietnamese monk named Thich Nhat Hanh was in Japan around their Mother's Day. Somebody pinned a white flower on him. He asked what it was for, and was told that people whose mothers are living wear red, and those whose mothers have died wear white. He had lost his own mother. He wore the white one for the rest of the day and he thought about it for a long time afterwards.

He wrote an essay about it called Bong Hong Cai Ao, a rose on the lapel. A few years later Pham The My set it to music, and the song became one of those songs that everybody in the country knows without ever deciding to learn it.

And then the ritual attached itself to Vu Lan, and now it is simply what you do. Sixty years later it is on every temple lawn in this city, and most of the people wearing a flower have no idea it started with one monk and one afternoon in Japan.

The essay is not really about the flower. It is about the fact that people who still have a mother often do not notice, and people who have lost one notice constantly, and there is a short window between those two states that nobody can see while they are inside it. Thich Nhat Hanh's point was blunt: say it now.

If you are here on the twenty seventh, the temples will be full and nobody will mind you standing at the edge. Ngu Hanh Son, the Marble Mountains, is where a lot of the city goes, and the pagodas up there are busy all day.

You will not need anything explained. You will be able to read the room off people's shirts.