On the Tonle Sap

LAND/WATER/RAIN - On the Tonle Sap from Kalyanee Mam on Vimeo.

I met Sari exactly two years ago, in October 2008. He was only fourteen then, but he had a keen spirit and a vicious curiosity that connected me to him immediately. He led us to his village mosque, pulled out a Koran and began reciting verses in a lyrical and hypnotic voice. There was still something gentle and innocent about him.

When I saw Sari again, I noticed something had changed. He had grown older, more mature, and perhaps more alive to his own unique individuality.

When we arrived in Kaoh Manou village Pou Sali took us to where Sari was fishing with his little sister, Um Mey, only twelve years old. The school will start again for Um Mey the next day and this will be her last chance, after helping the family fish all summer, to help out.

Sari looked like a tall bamboo reed from the distance, his eyes squinting in the sun beneath his flapping checkered hat. Sari directed the boat, while his little sister, covered in a white, cotton hat, paddled. Their boat was small, barely big enough to fit the engine. Sari apologized profusely for it’s small size, which, in Pou Sali’s eyes, could not be considered a serious fishing boat.

But the sister and brother pair still worked and smiled, diligently casting the net into the lake, section by section, each section weighted down by empty cans of insect spray that helped to buoy and locate the nets. The nets were left to sit for about an hour and then pulled in again, section by section, to remove any fish caught. Um Mey’s hands were nimble and precise as they pulled the nets and wove them back on to the boat. The hands, long and skillful, did not seem to belong to a small, twelve-years-old girl but to an older, more experienced young woman.

Sari and his sister had been fishing since early morning, before dawn, and had caught nothing. Some days are like this, especially when the current on the lake is strong. The official fishing season, which would start on the first of October, had also not yet begun, so they were restricted to less plentiful areas.

In between casting and pulling, Sari and his sister would find shade to sit in and wait. We docked the boat on the trunk of a pralea tree. Sari began to climb up to the branches and his sister climbed up as well, calling after him, the sun glinting through the leaves. They laughed like the children that they are, so different from the mechanical hands that felt so at home in their work on the water. Sari climbed further up the tree and swung to a branch, purposely losing his balance and falling straight into the cool, clear water for the perfect afternoon dip.

We drove the boat to a small fish weighing station set up in the middle of the lake, where Pou Sali’s wife was weighing fish pulled in by the various fishermen they knew and had deals with. Pou Sali and his wife would weigh and buy fish all day, late into the evening. Sometimes, they would even have their meals there, inside a small arched shade they constructed on the sampan. At 2 o’clock in the morning they would take the fish to the local market to sell to large trucks pulling in from the city to pick up the latest catch.

Without me noticing, Sari had slipped away on his small boat. I asked Pou Sali where Sari had gone. He told me in a few minutes I would be able to hear his boat, racing along the lake. This was a new sport that Sari had picked up and that he did whenever there was extra gas left over in the engine. Excuses were made to go somewhere and he would be gone, racing his boat fast and furiously with the local village kids.

Once Sari dropped me off at his house and told me he had to pick up his pants, which were being patched up by the tailor. Sari never came back with the pants. I asked his parents where he had gone. They shook their heads like any parents of a growing adolescent child and told me once Sari started boat racing, it would be a while before he returned. I smiled, understanding the rebelliousness of adolescence and the need to have time and space away from one’s family and especially the obligations that exceeded his age.

I spent the rest of the afternoon filming Sari’s younger brothers and sisters. Sari had five. The youngest was only one year and half. The second youngest attached her body to my leg as I tried to move around the house with the camera. She kept screaming “Si bai! Bai si! Si bai! Bai si!” Eat rice! Rice eat! Eat rice! Rice eat!

Um Mey, the eldest sister, bathed the baby and rocked her on the hammock that hung just close to the window overlooking the river channel where boats crisscrossed the village throughout the day. A boat pulled up to the house selling hot fried rings of dough dipped in brown, caramelized sugar. Sari’s mother handed the kids money to buy a few bags of the cakes, which the children and myself devoured within minutes, our hands and mouths sticky from the hot sugar. Double-fisting the cakes, the children laughed with stuffed faces.

When Sari returned from boat-racing, he spent the rest of the afternoon writing in his notebook. Before I left Cambodia in August, I asked Sari if he could keep a notebook of his story, his family’s story, and the story of the lake. After dropping out of school, he had no other opportunity to read, write, and learn, so he welcomed this task. He told me he even carried his notebook with him when he and his father went fishing in the middle of the lake. Sometimes the winds were so fierce there would be nothing to do but write.

That afternoon, Sari wrote while his brothers and sisters laughed and played, his mother cooked, and his father recited his afternoon prayers in the one-room house that all seven shared.