All of a sudden Vop coughed. The sound rang out loudly across the river.
The couple froze. Then the man, who was lying down, rushed to the stern and grabbed the oars.
Ah, so he is not her husband, Vop thought, as he turned and started to swim away. She’s just sleeping around.
But the man had started rowing the boat in a hurry. The oars slapped the water around Vop violently. They were like two sharp blades churning the water. One of the oars traveled down Vop’s belly, practically cutting him open, but was stopped by his penis, which was still erect.
Vop sank deeper into the water. He felt dizzy and coldly numb around his belly. Desperately he swam to shore, and when his feet finally touched the muddy soil, his head felt completely empty. Looking back, he saw the boat speeding away and the oars churning fast. The boat seemed to metamorphose again into a giant sea crab as it vanished into the dark river.
Vop’s stomach pain felt unbearable. He reached down to his groin.
Oh no!
The sky, the river, and the water all became one, dense and black. The pain was like an arrow piercing his entire body—stomach, heart, lungs, head. The dense blackness all around was overwhelming. Vop fainted.
It was August, the beginning of the louse crab season. After the heavy storms, thousands of louse crabs had come to shore, as if God wanted to compensate the poor villagers for his destructive acts.
In the vastness of the sea, the muscular male crabs mated with the flirtatious female crabs. As a result, millions of tiny crabs were born. They looked like little lice. The mother crabs felt no responsibility toward their tiny offspring and abandoned them to the sea. The sea was their birthplace but also a challenging place to survive. They floated among the aggressive waves, pulled every which way by the rising and falling of the tides. Their survival had to do mostly with luck. Most of the louse crabs died in the dry sand of the shore. Their tiny corpses became black, minuscule grains on the beach that together formed a long black line that resembled dry blood stains around the mouth of a fierce carnivore who had just consumed raw meat. Only a small number of the tiny crabs were pushed farther inland by the tides, where they managed to survive in the water of the river mouth.
These surviving louse crabs were very valuable. People caught and sold them to sea crab hatcheries where they would be carefully raised until the day when they would be served at fancy parties. The cooked crabs made buffet tables look even more luxurious because of their vibrant red color. Their large, strong legs looked delicious. The boiled red crabs made people whose faces already were red from drinking alcohol even more excited.
In order to catch the tiny crabs, the fishermen had to leave at twilight on days when the tide would be high. They used a tool called a riu—a thin net that resembled mosquito netting. They stretched the riu net using two long bamboo poles; the poles were bound together at one end while at the top they spread open, fanning out the riu net. To make the net sit deeper in the water, the fishermen put pieces of heavy lead on the upper part and stitched a three-meter-long sac to the bottom.
At high tide, the fishermen stood in the water up to their necks and used all their strength to pin down the riu over the seawater that poured into the river. The sac attached to the end of the riu struggled in the water like the tail of a giant python as the fishermen pushed forward, trapping the crabs in the net. After a few hours of this, the fishermen went to the shore, emptied the riu sac, and used flashlights worn on their heads to separate crabs from sea detritus. The crabs were as tiny as lice, and one needed excellent vision to see them. That’s why it was impossible to catch them with bare hands. The fishermen used chicken feathers to gently and meticulously gather all the tiny crabs and store them in bottles of seawater.
All night long they repeated these steps. On lucky days they could catch hundreds of crabs. But often they came home empty-handed. Only nature could determine when exactly the louse crabs would appear. The village was happy when the fishermen were able to catch many crabs, but then the calculating market traders would lower the price and the village would make very little money. On the other hand, when not many crabs were caught the price would go up. The village people put up with cold and hunger in order to earn only about fifty dong.
I didn’t want my daughters to live the life of a louse crab. They were girls with unpredictable fates and no clear destiny. I must live. I must persevere. But that fateful night—the night I saw the couple in the boat—had directed our lives down a treacherous path. Still, I had no choice—I kept walking, despite the thorns in my feet and the harsh words targeted at me.
When I opened my eyes after passing out that night, the sky was still black. I knew that I was lying on the dike in the middle of the rice paddy, but I couldn’t stand up. My pain seemed to be caused by an invisible hook running through my private parts and latching me to the ground. I tried very hard to stand but could only sit up. With all my energy, I dragged myself across the dike, like the time back in the military when we’d learned how to roll and crawl across the ground.
I was exhausted after about ten meters and collapsed. There was some sort of buzzing sound around
