Describe an important river or lake in your country

I'd like to talk about the Red River, or Sông Hồng, which runs through northern Vietnam and which I grew up about three hundred metres from, in a village in Hưng Yên province. It starts in China, enters Vietnam at Lào Cai, passes through Hà Nội and reaches the sea in the Gulf of Tonkin. The stretch inside our country is roughly five hundred kilometres long. As for what it looks like, the name is accurate: the water carries so much silt that it's a reddish brown, like milk tea, especially in the rainy season from June to September. In the dry months it shrinks and leaves wide sandbanks where people plant maize and bananas. Along both sides there's a huge earth dyke, and the road on top of it was my route to school. Its importance is hard to overstate. That silt is the reason the Red River Delta is so fertile, and the delta feeds a large part of the north. The capital exists where it does because of the river. At the same time it has always been a threat. My grandfather used to point at the dyke and say, 'That wall is why this village is still here.' He remembered the 1971 flood, when the water broke through in several provinces, and every summer he still walked up there in the evening to check the level, as if he could personally do something about it. I think that mixture is what I find interesting. Tourists photograph Long Biên Bridge and move on, but for families like mine the river is both the thing that grows our rice and the thing we keep a nervous eye on.