Wandering Through the Summer Heat

Chẫu Chàng

Bird Village, 5-6-2026

© Generated by ChatGPT

The Bird Village Bulletin is a wonderfully diverse publication. Some might call it complete chaos. Either description works.

A quick scan of the major headlines from the first month of summer:

– Old Owl predicts another hot, dry year—but whenever it does rain, it will probably hail.

– Mrs. Wild Duck has once again laid her eggs somewhere in the rice fields. No one can remember where, and now nobody knows where the eggs have rolled off to.

– Mr. Jay apparently ate something strange and has broken out in a full-body rash, scratching branches so vigorously that entire trees shake like earthquakes.

– Coucal has announced that this year he will become a vegetarian by eating golden apple snails.

– Word is that the World Cup is coming. The village youngsters have responded by organizing bird-trapping expeditions...

[...]

Kingfisher seems entirely deaf to the matters that has the village residents shouting across palm canopies beneath the blazing summer sun.

It is not that he does not care. He simply has other concerns.

Village news has become predictable. Owl's forecasts resemble last year's forecasts, which resemble the forecasts from every previous year, and all are equally wrong. Wild Duck never remembers when she lays her eggs in the first place not to say where. Jay not scratching himself would be far more alarming than Jay scratching himself. As for Coucal, he has spent half a decade arguing that golden apple snails count as vegetarian food while water snakes are decidedly non-vegetarian.

Any bird capable of settling these disputes would deserve to be crowned Great King.

The reality, however, is that Bird Village has never even managed to elect a village chief, let alone a Great King.

Better to concern oneself with grander matters. More dignified matters. International matters. That, after all, is what true wandering is about. During a scorching summer month, nothing compares to international wandering, does it?

But what exactly qualifies as wandering?

Drawing upon his professional expertise, Tree Frog offers Kingfisher a simple framework. For a bird accustomed to meditating on branches above ponds, wandering can be divided into three categories according to the object of questioning:

First, questioning others.

Second, being questioned by others.

Third, becoming the excuse for everyone else to question one another.

Any of the three can be delightful entertainment.

On the hottest days of the year, when Bird Village seems on the verge of collective meltdown largely due to temperature rather than genuine disagreement, Kingfisher embarks on the first form of wandering: interviewing Ayn Rand [1]. Managing to knock a towering intellectual monument off its pedestal with a satisfying thud felt like a considerable achievement in carefree wandering.

The second heatwave brings the opposite experience. A young woman from the Land of Stars and Stripes subjects Kingfisher to a barrage of difficult questions [2]. The defining feature of this particular wandering is that it feels anything but carefree. The questions are so difficult that he often has no answer. Maintaining a thoughtful philosophical expression while suppressing the urge to blurt out nonsense requires immense energy. It is exhausting.

Then comes the third heatwave, when Kingfisher himself becomes the topic of debate in another village's literary gathering [3]. They argue among themselves, yet every time his name surfaces, he cannot help but panic. Their collective debating mechanism is truly terrifying. They appear to be questioning one another, yet every so often someone will point dramatically toward a poster bearing Kingfisher's portrait. Reflecting on it afterward, he realizes there is something profound about it: even carefree wandering can contain moments of sudden panic.

The essence of wandering, after all, requires a certain amount of exaggeration. Without exaggeration, one is defeated before the journey even begins.

The deeper mystery is that all three wanderings are fictional.

And fiction, somehow, is also truth.

Zhuangzi himself complains about those debaters who insist on separating right from wrong, black from white, good from evil, never realizing that such distinctions ultimately arise from the same source.

Kingfisher continues pondering. “Wandering” is Zhuangzi's word. According to the sage, one wanders in order to understand the Way of Heaven and become a True Person.

If anyone in Bird Village ever reaches such an exalted level of wandering, perhaps he will become... a True Bird.

He is enjoying this thought immensely when suddenly he hears the birds in the canopy stop arguing and begin chanting in unison:

"True Bird! True Bird! True Bird!"

Startled, he turns to Tree Frog.

"Why True Bird? Have they discovered something?"

Tree Frog, blessed with remarkably sharp hearing, replies immediately:

"They're arguing. They've been debating how one can tell when a bird is getting old."

Kingfisher sighs with relief. The Dao, he reflects, is truly mysterious.

References

[1] Nguyen, M.-H. (2026). Ayn Rand and Kingfisher on zero-carbon bombs and a sustainable future. Visions for Sustainability, 25(13474), 1-13. http://dx.doi.org/10.13135/2384-8677/13474

[2] Tran, T. M. A. (2026). Conversations with Kingfisher: Wisdom from Vuong’s wild wise weird stories. https://planetforward.org/story/kingfisher-stories/

[3] Codex, A. (2026). A story of a review of a book. http://books.google.com/books/about?id=V4TiEQAAQBAJ