Sifting Minnows

If the floating house had had a door, we would have been out of it before 4 am, and as I watched the sun set over the west side of Tonle Sap, still sweating and still hunched over a pile of mixed finger-length minnows, my back was reminded what commercial fishing is like. Mr. Gran was towing our four-boat procession to a new area of the lake, not willing to let anything like darkness make him call it a day. The catches seemed to have been good for most of the day, I’d guess averaged around 400 pounds of fish per haul, and each haul taking around two hours to complete, we were about to start our seventh set of the day. The crew hauling the net got a short break as Mr. Gran moved between areas, and the fish-sorting crew usually got a few minutes to inhale a couple of butts as the net was closing up, before a new pile of silver minnows were scooped onto deck. Everyone seemed happy, but to be honest I was ready to stand up straight, and my fingertips were sore and bloody the many surprise pricks from shrimp shells and catfish barbs.

Over the past five days, I’d come to really respect this fishing gang. Despite being unable to speak with them beyond a few basic words and phrases, they all proved to have good hearts and to only poke fun at me in a good-natured kind of way. As we hauled back the net or tied the same hitches- the repetitious work of fishing, the men would keep me smiling with animated outburst of English words and phrases they knew:

“Coconut!”
“Sweethaat!”
“I don’t know!”
“Do you live here?”
“Where you from?”
And of course my old favorite, “Wow!”

This is a group of ridiculously hard workers who get up at sunrise and worked until the light runs out, and longer when out on the boat. With the exception of Mr. Gran and his wife, they sleep on the bare wooden floor or on one of the boat decks, only sometimes under torn mosquito netting (on still nights the bugs are bad). They seem content to eat rice and fish for every meal, talking about an upcoming meal like it’s a exotic dish. In the 20- by 70-foot floating house, 15 men and boys, 3 women, one baby, and one strong-willed tomcat with a stubby tail all make peace. I’m still not sure how or if everybody in the group is related, but this doesn’t seem to matter. During the couple of days not spent fishing, everybody worked on mending old net or hanging a new one, repairing a boat, or keeping the mob fed.

Each of the three women are as much involved with the fishing operation as any of the men. Like I’ve seen in other parts of southeast Asia (and beyond), women are often the ones running the show. In this home, they oversee net repairs, sort re-sort fish before they go to market, and handle the sale of fish to market. The exact same thing could be said for women in the 4,000 Island region to Laos- despite not often being aboard when the fish are caught, the women are absolutely crucial to the small family fishing operations.

All day the sets had yielded a mixed bag of small fish, mostly of the size sold in the US for ice fishing bait. The majority of the catch was what looked like a shiner, and the second-most common catch was what looked like a freshwater catfish/shark sold in pet shops, with comical whiskers twice as long as its body length and a tiny tail like a thresher. A funny duckbilled catfish was also common, and these were sorted separately. Each set carried with it a few pufferfish, this kind spineless but with a large fake eye painted on each of its sides. Of all things, the crew was very afraid of the bite of this tiny-mouthed airbag- perhaps they are poisonous or perhaps this is superstition, but I found this fear hilarious, considering all of the other dangers the crew barely acknowledged. I was much more intimidated by the water snakes, while the crew thought nothing of grabbing the snakes and throwing them back into the lake, often right over my head (funny funny).


From the reward of a typical set, consisting of perhaps 5,000 tiny fish, each minnow was picked over and sorted into bins. The crew for this was usually one especially smiley fisherman named Soon, his two sons who had especially dark skin, my buddy Heap, and myself. These fish were sorted both by size and by type, and then bagged and put on ice. When thirsty, the fishermen would sometimes break a chunk off the ice block in the insulated fish tote, dip it in the lake to get off some of the fish slime, and put it in a bowl, where it would quickly melt. Most of the men would drink straight from the murky lukewarm lake, if they drank anything at all. I couldn’t shake the idea that for part of each year this lake is the receptacle for everything the upper Mekong has to offer. Lots of greywater coming from as far up as the Himalaya, through southern China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, ending in Tonle Sap. And the guts of these gentlemen are strong enough to deal with it all.

Perhaps Tonle Sap fishermen are superhuman, because in addition to having iron guts, their lungs seemed to have no problem filtering through a couple of packs of cigarettes each day. Every evening one of the women would dole out portions of cigarettes- 2 packs to every man or boy- and these burned like wildfire at every short break in the day, and pretty much continuously in transit or on the home float. Even the two darker-skinned boys, who I’d been told were 17 and 18 but looked to be 12 or 13 and certainly hadn’t hit puberty yet, were puffing- and also pulling on the net- as hard as any of the men.

After wrapping a round of fish sorting, finishing hauling the final set in the dark, and sorting these as our floating caravan steamed towards our floating home, I sat upright to stretch the back. Four dark silhouettes stood out on the back deck, a shade darker than the sky. In the center of each of these dark outlines was a small orange glow. Pick, pull, or puff- not too different than the Newfoundlanders, yis b’ye.

Upon getting back to the house around 9 or 10pm, I had visions of the monster pot of rice and cauldron of soup opening their lids to our sunbaked faces as soon as we stepped off the boat. Wrong I was. One pile of assorted fish still needed to be re-sorted before bringing fish to market the next morning at 4am, and the least valuable of these fish needed to be minced into fishmeal for the hundreds of pet catfish, whose cage was lashed to the east side of the house, and who needed fattening before they could go to market. Turning minnow scraps into fat catfish with a backyard aquaculture operation. Other families in Chong Kneas have crocodile farms strapped to the side of their houses, where they transform low-value minnows into exotic reptile leather. Tonle Sap minnows, if sifted and sorted properly, might just fuel the world. The midnight dinner of rice and fish was delicious.