Chapter 12: Chapter 12 – I Am Pulled Up into a Tree

Besides selling food, I work for the seafood merchants of small businesses. They often hire kids to mark out the baskets containing the choicest seafood for them to buy, and they pay the kids tiny wages. On the days when fishing boats come back from the ocean into the dock, kids looking for menial work hang around on the quay, to be hired on the spot by the merchants.

From the Cu Chi mountaintop, I identify the boats carrying a large catch of seafood, based on the number of baskets filled with seafood in the boats, when they are still at a distance of about 3 miles. When these boats come near, I jump down into the water and swim over to them.

At each boat, I clamber up its side planking, get into the boat, and mark all the baskets containing the choicest seafood. I mark each basket by dropping an object, which I can later identify as mine, on top of the seafood in the basket.  I repeat the process of marking seafood on each boat.

The merchants, after enjoying their breakfast and coffee in the beach huts, waggle over to the quay to pay for the baskets marked by their hired pickers.

Unusually after marking the basket I have selected, I would Stand with the other dripping kids, wait for my merchant boss to finish loading her boat with the new inventory, and slap 60,000 dongs in my hand (that's about 3 U.S. dollars).

Hoa and Tin have asked me to train them on how to identify baskets containing the choicest seafood and mark them for the seafood merchants.

In my carefree mood inspired by the quiet and peaceful nature, I saunter along Ho Chi Minh Trail with a springy step and with my arms swinging. A thick root running from the Assassin Jungle all the way into the trail, I step up on the root to cross over it. As I stand on the root, the wind blows sand into my eyes, and I toddle on the root and slip off it, landing on my feet on the other side of the root.

The ground vibrates when I land. I'm standing on a spread-out fishnet partly buried under dry leaves and scattered piles of dirt. The flood must have washed the net here, or some fisherman must have discarded it. But how strange is the way the net is laid out on the ground?

What's happening? The net is closing up around me in irregular, jarring movement, dirt clumps falling out between the knots of the net. I fumble in the net and get angry as my limbs keep getting stuck in the tangled cords. I claw at the cords to rip them so that I can get out, and yelp at the stinging pain in my fingers, worrying that I've cut my hands.

AHHH!!! I'm up in the air and pulled into the Assassin Jungle and up a tree.

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