The shore of the Mekong is mud, plants, trash and boats of all sizes, made from metal, wood and anything else that floats. We climb on board a nearly flat-hulled, wooden boat, a water taxi that seats about 20. Our boatswain is a lean, energetic, Tom-girl woman with a smile that leaps off her face into your heart. Her name is Fun and so is she. Knee deep in water, feet deep in mud, with help from other boat drivers, she shoves us off, jumps on and cranks up the engine: unique outboard motors with four-foot long shafts to reach far into the water or to skim the surface in the shallows, sticking out 90-degrees to send us sideways or extending completely forward to push us backwards. (You’d never get through the backwaters of the delta with a Johnson boat and an Evinrude.) Leaning into the wind, one hand and one foot forward for balance, five fingers back on the throttle, five toes wrapped around the rudder, Fun takes control, her boat an extension of her body, played like a musical instrument.

We head off to visit a floating fish factor, one of a hundred a few kilometers down the river. It’s a fish farm underneath, feeding station and  fish cooker on the deck and the only home to the family that owns it. Many businesses are this way. A small stall on the streets of the city, or anywhere in the country, is fruit store or beauty shop or hardware store by day, then sometime during the evening it evolves into the home with the family, with the meals in the shop and beds ssomewhere in the back. On the deck of the factory, there’s a huge engine, similar to the one on our boat. When the waters rise or subside, they move the factory down the river. All of the factories raise the same kind of fish. If the market collapses, so do all these families. Hopefully Wal-Mart won’t move into the neighborhood. At least this neighborhood can just crank up their engines and move out.

Mainly the Delta is rich in rice. Miles and miles of paddies and backwaters. Flat, very flat, textbook flat, like North Dakota flat, but with dark water instead of dark soil. If the water rises here, it rises everywhere. I think of floods in my childhood. When the Red River escapes the banks, it can spread for 50 miles, over highways, through cities, fields and farm houses. A flood in North Dakota is like throwing a bucket of water on the kitchen floor. I can’t imagine the Delta with a few more feet of water…for weeks, for months. The huts anchored on stilts don’t have motors to take them to a safer place.

Next we’re back in the boat to a visit to the knitting “factory”: two looms, one upstairs in the house on stilts, one downstairs on the dirt. The word “factory” is a relative term, often synonymous with “family.” Yesterday we visited an “incense factory”: another hut on sticks in the back with two small factory tables in the dirt in the front. They buy sawdust, add dye, glue and a special herb to keep it burning, then roll it by hand on colored sticks. The sticks are dried next to the road, circles of magenta and yellow that look like flower bouquets from a distance. Guide Chau seems proud to take us to many factories, to show us how industrious they are, to impress us how hard they work. It works.

At all stops, there are kids and women and men selling anything they can get their hands on: a bag of soft, sweet biscuits; a basket of bottled waters; a sack of gum, cigarettes, whatever. Mobile convenience stores with legs. Here in the countryside, they sell, they don’t beg. The beggars are mainly in the tourist areas or close to the ever-present pagodas, temples and shrines. During the Lunar New Year, the pagodas are packed with people, praying, bowing, burning incense, and offering entire cooked pigs, elaborate fruit and flower arrangements. Some goods are left; some blessed and returned. Visit ten pagodas during the two-week celebration for luck and prosperity. The shiny pagodas are like the Vatican and our own massive churches, with their fanciful, opulent statues on display. The cultural mandate is the same: “You have nothing, but give us what you have. We’ll trade you a blessing today and reserve a place for you tomorrow. Sacrifice. We’re selling Forever, your Ultimate Dream. You stay poor; we stay rich. Come back regularly when you have more to give or else.” In the bazillion pagodas, there are about 100 bazillion local idols, regional deities or omniscient gods to laud and magnify. Most are rotund. In America, the people are mainly fat and worship a skinny Jesus. In Asia, the people are mainly skinny and worship a fat Buddha. Do we just want what we aren’t? Is the grass always greener…?

Back on the river, the group splits in two: one boat to Saigon and one boat to Cambodia. We all silently pray we’ll be reunited with our own personal baggage. I stay with the Saigon group which heads back to the mini-bus, down another dirt road to another wooden boat, through more backwaters, the backyards of families living on stilts, close to the water that keeps them alive: moms washing; kids bathing; all ages, sizes and genders moving their wares on boats, bicycles and motorbikes. ( Previous page ) ( Next page )

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