by Sue Perkins
We puttered along narrow canals, framed by willows bowing like leafy supplicants to the water’s edge. On either side, a peppering of houses – some rickety and wooden, others concrete-stiff and painted in bright yellows and pinks. It feels timeless here, but there’s nothing ancient about this place. It’s been fashioned by man through hard labour and the horrors of war. This tranquil spot, where the birds sang and the trees waved in the mist of early morning, this was one of the most bombed places in the world. Just decades earlier, military transport planes rained down death from the skies, leaving vast swathes of forest drenched in the cancerous pall of Agent Orange.
We left the boat and hopped onto mopeds, chugging into the interior. Clusters of farm workers were bent double in the emerald green sheen of the paddy fields, the soft sky silhouetting their broad, conical hats. What a beautiful photo that would make, I thought. I must grab a snap later. I wouldn’t even need a filter, which was great – because I have no idea how filters work. The last time I used one I put it on the sepia setting and everyone ended up looking like they were part of a Victorian post-mortem daguerreotype.
Now, of course, after all these miles, after everything I’ve seen, I can’t imagine ever thinking that. I can’t imagine ever looking at men, women and children labouring in the blistering heat and my first thought being how best to capture it on an iPhone. But that’s the beauty of hindsight.
How pretty poverty looks when you don’t have to live it.
Tuk and Huong had invited me for lunch before I began my probationary period as a rice farmer. The Vietnamese are generous and hospitable hosts, so I was treated to a towering banquet of river fish, prawns and rice. The food was delicious, if a little earthy. Everything seemed to have a slight back-note of dredged river-bed – a kind of Mekong Gravy.
Grandma sat at the head of the table. She didn’t speak, not once – she didn’t need to. That was because Grandma seemed to have developed a very effective non-verbal way of communicating her feelings to the family.
If Grandma was interested in the conversation, she would quietly go about her own business, eating her rice, chopsticks darting back and forth in the bowl. However, if Grandma became bored, she’d lean over, grab a crab’s leg and suck the meat from it with a noise akin to an airlock on a submarine giving way. She’d finish this scene-stealing move by spitting the extraneous shell across the table. Let me tell you, as party pieces go, it was certainly memorable.
Tuk handed me a tumbler of pale yellow liquid. I downed it. I always like to drain a glass before I know what’s in it. It’s a Croydon thing.
He laughed, which worried me, and poured me another.
Huong, it transpired, was a somewhat harder nut to crack. She spent most of the meal staring at me, scrutinizing my every move. We kept on drinking. As I reached over to grab a little chilli sauce, she took my hand, turning it in hers, examining the soft white pads and pink rounded fingernails, before dismissively tossing it aside like an old slipper.
HUONG: Farming – it’s hard work.
ME: Yes. I can imagine. I’m ready for that.
Huong looked me up and down.
HUONG: You can’t do it.
Huong had many great qualities, but it’s fair to say that motivational speaking wasn’t one of them. Put it this way: you wouldn’t want her as group leader on your team-building river-rafting weekend in Lee Valley.
HUONG: You can’t. It’s very hard.
I laughed at her bluntness. She had only just met me, yet she’d sized me up perfectly. I vowed to prove her wrong.
Steve had spent the entire meal, behind camera, waving his arms in the air trying to get my attention. Thirty minutes and approximately two hundred units of ethanol later, I finally glanced in his direction.
STEVE: (whispering over) Sue!
ME: Yes!
STEVE: Ask them about salinization and aquaculture!
ME: What?
STEVE: Salinization and aquaculture!
ME: What?
STEVE: Salt and prawns! Salt and prawns!
ME: Oh, yes. Yes. Of course, Steve. Give me a second.
Damn, I thought. Why didn’t I ask the question about alternative cropping systems before I had the litre of spirits? Schoolgirl error. My head was swimming. Think, Susan. THINK. Come on – you can do it. Ask a proper question, something about climate change and food security.
Tuk poured me another drink.
ME: Cheers!
This was going to be quite the gear change.
ME: So Tuk, Huong …
I felt an acidic burp bubbling up through my oesophagus.
ME: With sea-water levels rising, are you finding you have to invest more in shrimp farming than rice farming?
There was a noise like an air-gun. A shard of crab shell bounced off my glasses. Grandma had just fired another crustacean cannon into the centre of the table.
I loved Grandma. She had excellent taste in dinner-party conversation.
The rice paddy was accessible by boat, a narrow craft that hugged the banks on either side.
Huong beckoned me to join her. The moment I stepped onto the plot, the thick clay pulled at my ankles until I was six inches deep and utterly stuck.
I didn’t know the word for ‘help’, so just stuck with the vocabulary I was familiar with.
ME: Xin Chao! Xin Chao! XIN CHAO!
Huong shot me a withering look – as I would, if a tourist was repeatedly screaming HELLO into my face while I was trying to work.
I strained to lift my left foot, the mud sucking at my skin. Finally I wrestled free and lurched forward. Again the thick goo dragged me down. I heard something that sounded like tittering, but when I looked up Huong appeared blank-faced, staring in my direction.
It’s a good thing that cameras now use a digital format, because it took me around ten minutes to get to Huong. In the old days, that would have been on tape. It would have had physical form, spool upon spool of dyspraxic fumblings that would have cost money – licence-fee payer’s money – to cut away and reassemble in an edit suit. Thankfully now, with modern technology, my Munster-esque lurchings were mere gigabytes of data that could vanish with the touch of a button.
It struck me, as I finally reached Huong, that I had no idea what a rice plant looked like. None whatsoever. I eat rice, on average, twice a week, yet couldn’t have told you how on earth it was harvested. I guess I was about to find out.
ME: Right, Huong, I’m ready to be a farmer!
Three minutes later I was ready to stop being a farmer.
The temperature had settled around the 40-degrees mark, but that wasn’t the kicker. It’s the humidity that fells you. Within moments, every pore of your body brims with moisture. Your bones feel wet and heavy. To harvest the rice plants (think green, green grass with tiny beige tassels at the end), you grab a sheaf with one hand and scythe it with the other, a few inches from the ground. Then, when you have a decent bunch, you tie it with plant twine and leave it to collect later. You are bent double. You are done in. You wheeze with the effort; you feel the blood thumping in your temples.
Tuk and Huong do it for eight hours a day. Every day.
Huong started up with a little more of her high-energy confidence building:
HUONG: No. You are very bad.
Yep, Mrs Feel-Good was at it again.
I plunged and pulled, plunged and pulled my legs until I finally reached the edge of the field, whereupon I clambered up the bank. From there we walked to the dirt-track road where a man was standing next to a turquoise threshing machine, which seemed more rust than metal. It spluttered into life with a black gaseous wheeze and began separating the rice from the stalks. This is the only part of the farming process that is mechanized. The rest of it, it’s all done by hand. All of it. By hand.
Hours of labour between us, and the threshing machine reduced our endeavours to a small bag of grain in a matter of minutes.
I returned to Huong for the final verdict. It was as glowingly
positive as I’d come to expect:
HUONG: I am a farmer. She is not. Absolutely not.
And with that rubber-stamp of approval, I left the paddy field for good.
I would like to take every climate-change denier in the world to Vinh Thuan (and to the Sunderbans, but more of that later). The district is low-lying, and the sea is rising, meaning the paddy fields are becoming salinized and borderline infertile.
Perhaps you’re one of the few for whom the jury is out, who believe we are simply in an anomalous weather period, that the Arctic ice-melt is part of a natural cycle – that the modelling is unreliable, or that there is no real scientific consensus.
Then come here. See how precarious life is. Imagine your food, the mainstay of your diet, comes from a plant that grows a fraction above sea level. A plant that can’t thrive if flooded with seawater. A plant that feeds fifty million people in this region alone, that is threatened by even a centimetre’s swell in the ocean.
We imagine life and death situations to be immediate. Dramatic. A Titanic Hollywood disaster movie with Dolby surround sound and in glorious technicolour.
The lesson here is that life and death can also be monochromatic, slow and unremarkable – right up to the point of no return. Then it’s game over.
We headed back for another seafood banquet.
Grandma had already embarked on her crustacean spitathon – the table littered with pink shells. Huong brought out a plate of prawns but, I’ll be honest, I didn’t enjoy them as much as the ones I’d had for lunch. There was a reason. Steve had collared me on the way back and told me about the intense research he’d done on prawn fisheries in South East Asia.
STEVE: There are twenty prawns in every square metre of water.
ME: Right …
STEVE: And the water is foul, endlessly recycled. It’s basically a Petri dish of chemicals, fertilizer and feed.
ME: OK …
I could hear the sounds of Grandma’s crab shell whizzing through the air. Hell, if I’d had a crab leg to hand, I would have done the same.
STEVE: It’s toxic. Really dangerous. It’s been proven. Those chemicals harm the workers, the environment and possibly the consumers.
I picked at my shellfish all night. On the plus side, I finally got to learn the recipe for that delicious gravy: two parts tetracycline to one part phenicol and fluoroquinolone.
We spent the evening drinking a brand-new liquid, slightly less yellow in colour – but equally hostile on the gullet. I assume it was a distant, boozy cousin of the rice plant. After one shot, it made your tongue go numb, then your jaw. After the second, your eyes stopped working.
Tuk was an extremely magnanimous host. Every couple of minutes he’d head off to the kitchen, walking across the bare, red-earthed floor, and emerge with yet another bucket of shrimp and crab. He’d mix up a quick sauce of tamarind and chillis in a cracked glass cup, pour it over the seafood and cook them on a tiny rack above a dish of hot coals. We drank and ate shrimp, drank and ate shrimp in a loop for a couple of hours until my mouth was sour with river-water and weird booze. Their dog came and begged for scraps. I cuddled him. We chatted and laughed; the lucky ones smoked. God, I miss smoking. God, I miss my dog.
My entire journey was studded with nights like this, where families with nothing to call their own opened their arms and their doors and fed and watered me. The generosity of the have-nots is a constant, shocking source of wonderment – though the term ‘have-nots’ is something of a misnomer, since Tuk and Huong seemed to have more of the things that mattered than I ever will.
Dusk was falling. Outside, a squadron of mosquitoes was amassing, ready for their nocturnal sortie. Everyone was busy applying Deet, Olly positively glistening with the stuff. I seem to remember my mum telling me that it dissolved your watch.fn1 Or your arms. Or both. I can’t remember. Anyway. I declined.
Instead, I opted for something a little more me. A cold-pressed Amazonian tincture, strained through a shaman’s sleeve and only available in the remotest corners of the internet. That was bound to keep the mozzies at bay.
Word had got out that strangers were in town, so the entire neighbourhood popped over that evening to have a good gawp. They were all hammered. One of the older women, in her seventies, took a real shine to me. Yep – I still got it. She started off winking and pinching my boobs. Textbook flirtation. In the end she simply plonked herself on my lap. For nearly an hour. Let me tell you from experience, that’s an awfully long time to have a drunk pensioner sitting on you.
That night, Vicky and I slept in the living room, on Tuk and Huong’s dining table, which we’d decked with mosquito nets.
I thought about the conversation we’d had earlier. I’d asked Tuk what he would like if he could have anything in the world. He’d replied, ‘A tractor.’ I imagined him atop a shiny red, state-of-the-art machine. The ultimate Communist’s wet dream.
I’d asked Huong the same question. She’d answered without hesitation.
HUONG: I want to be you. I want to be rich so that I can do the same as you and travel everywhere.
I was becoming acutely aware of how much stuff I’d brought with me. Some of it was essential, of course – after all, my Western body wasn’t used to this climate or its pathogens. But, increasingly, most of my possessions felt like insulation, part of a pointless safety net. It was all junk, really, but I’d fashioned it with meaning, valorized it with the false narrative of need.
– I have to have that, else I can’t sleep.
– I need that, it’s my favourite.
– I can’t be without it, it’s my lucky …
I was new to sleeping like this but, over time, I developed a pretty neat system for in-house camping. First, I’d hang my net from a lamp or hook on the wall. I’d arrange the end fronds around the mattress and weigh them down with bits and bobs from my suitcase – books, iPad, water bottles. That way, there was no gap through which an airborne incursion could occur. When darkness descended, I’d slip in, reseal the area, switch on my head torch and get out my puzzle book. It felt like being a child again, under the covers, secretly reading after lights out. If I shone the light upwards, out into the room, I’d be able to make out the rolling clouds of bugs hurling themselves against the mesh in a desperate effort to make dinner of me. Most nights my unconscious would rouse me, bothered by an unfamiliar noise – rustling, croaks, buzzes – all indistinguishable in the gloom. You’re safe! I’d remind myself. You’re all tucked in. Nothing can get to you.
Trung wasn’t so lucky. He was stationed outside, sleeping in what could only be described as an outsized dog crate. Each side was covered in netting, with a small door at one end so he could let himself in and out. Once in, he was sealed in a bug-resistant cube, designed to fit snugly around a mattress, that could withstand a night in the open air without him becoming Nature’s very own pincushion.
So far, so good. The problem was, Trung, like the rest of us, was absolutely battered – which made him a little cavalier as regards insect vigilance.
ME: Trung, it’s dusk, mate. You need to set up your bed.
TRUNG: (slurring) Don’t worry! They never get me. Never!
He started erecting the cage. It took a little longer than expected – and there was a lot of falling over and swearing.
TRUNG: See?
He pointed to his bare arms and legs.
TRUNG: No mosquito. They don’t like my smell.
ME: What do you mean?
TRUNG: They only like sweet blood. Like tourists. You have sweet blood!
ME: Do I?
TRUNG: Yeah. Visitors have sweet blood.
I vowed to return home and start work on making my blood more savoury. There was bound to be a naturopathic website I could subscribe to which would specialize in exactly that.
For some reason, and I suspect that reason was alcohol, Trung then took his newly built cage to the ideal spot – directly under the porch light. This meant his bed was now a homing beacon for a
nything and everything airborne within a five-mile radius.
Once inside, Trung settled down to sleep. It was ten minutes before his bladder reached peak capacity. Out he stumbled, desperate for a piss. What he didn’t do, as he left the cage, was close the door. From where I lay, I could see myriad insects colonizing the inside of the netting and the top of his mattress, waiting to pick him off when he returned.
My last image of the night was Trung staggering back inside, zipping the cage shut, and thus imprisoning himself in a black cloud of a billion mega-bugs.
I was under my net, head throbbing. The grog was now starting to work through my system. My kidneys were aching and I, too, was desperate for a piss, but I was too frightened to leave the safety of the table. In the end I resorted to slicing open an empty water bottle with a penknife and weeing in it. I placed the sample at the corner of my mattress and tried to get some shut-eye.
Within minutes, something started clawing at me through the netting. I was so scared I daren’t move, so spent the night stock-still with a hairy dead-weight on my leg. Outside, I could hear Trung snoring, shouting, then slapping himself in a loop. His blood was obviously a little sweeter than he’d thought.
I woke at dawn to find a skinny ginger cat licking its arse on my calf. In the midst of its frantic rimming, it had knocked over the severed water bottle, sending my piss across the mattress. I won’t lie: it was a new personal low.
Trung was already up, and busy cooking.
‘Hello!’ he said cheerily, turning to greet me. His face looked like a Connect 4 board.
Something smelt incredible.
ME: What’s this, Trung? This is amazing!
I couldn’t believe it. I was in the middle of nowhere, and Trung was making chocolate pancakes. CHOCOLATE PANCAKES. There was an open fire with a large iron wok sitting atop it, a thick patina of scorched fat lacquering the insides. There was the sound of eggs cracking against a metal rim, and the rich sweet stink of burnt sugar. Gosh, I thought, he must really love working with us. We must be his favourite crew. Ever.
