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By Root 680 0

shrimp on a stick, scary-looking pâté sandwiches, baguettes, fried fish, fruit, sweets, and steamed crabs. Others seem to have just settled down at random, fired up some soup or noodles, and dug in – along with a large group of friends and family. I’m taller, by at least a foot, than anyone for two miles. Walking through the fish market to the water’s edge, I get a lot of stares. A woman smiles and holds up her baby, a healthy-looking kid in a bright knit cap and new clothes. The woman herself is nearly in rags. ‘Hello!’ she says, holding the baby’s hand and showing him how to wave. ‘Bye-bye!’ She asks me, by pointing and gesturing, if she can use my camera to take a picture of her son with me. Sure. Why not? She hastily confers with a group of women from a nearby fish stall. Someone locates a stool and the kid is posed standing on top. I show the woman how to operate the shutter and she frames the photo, a large group of women gathering behind and around her, all trying to look through the viewfinder, all beaming with pride that their best and brightest is having his picture taken next to the freakishly tall and strange-looking American.

Only women work here. The fishmongers, scaling and gutting at long wooden tables by the water’s edge, are all women. The people mending nets, unloading their catch from the colorfully decorated boats (they look like Amish barns), and cooking food at the stalls are all women. Women in thung chais, perfectly round dinghies made of woven bamboo and pitch, paddle their wobbly vessels toward the docks – a difficult balancing act (as I’d soon find out). Where are the men?

I sit down at a table with a large group of fishwives and their kids. The cook smiles and carefully places some cooked fish, some rice noodles, a few fish cakes, chilis, sprouts, peppers, and cilantro in a bowl, then hands me some chopsticks, a dish of black pepper, a wedge of lime, some additional chilis, and nuoc mam and chili sauce. There’s a pot of coffee brewing over coals, and she pours me a cup. As with almost everything I’ve tried in Vietnam, it’s fresh-tasting, vibrant, and delicious. Women keep coming over to the table and introducing their children. What they want, I have no idea. They ask for nothing except to allow their babies and small children to touch my arm, shake my hand, wave, the kids gaping wide-eyed and confused as the women scream with laughter and obvious delight. All these women have been up since way before dawn, many of them out on the water for hours, hauling in fish, loading them into their little round basket boats, unloading on shore. Yet no one looks tired. No one looks beaten down or defeated by their work. New arrivals stand upright in their dangerously pitching basket boats, smiling broadly as they heave pound after pound of dripping fish onto the market floor. The cook asks me if I’d like more coffee and pours me another cup, making sure my can of condensed milk is not empty. Fish blood runs across the wet concrete floor; a basket of squid is dropped a few feet away, then another basket of fish. The channel is filled with incoming fishing vessels, the awkwardly bobbing thung chais. Clouds cling to the mountains surrounding Nha Trang like tufts of white hair. I love it here.

Offshore are the islands of Hon Tre, Hon Tam, and Hon Mieu. Beyond those, farther out to sea, are a few tall rocks, surrounded by rough, dangerous surf, constantly patrolled by gunboats. This is where the salanganes (a variety of swallow) build their nests, high on the perilous snake-infested cliffs. The nests, formed out of the hardened salivary secretions of the swallow, fetch up to four thousand dollars a kilo from Chinese ‘medical’ practitioners and are much sought after throughout the East for bird’s nest soup. Chris and Lydia have already asked if I’d be willing to climb up a cliff, past poisonous snakes, and crawl hundreds of feet over jagged rocks and pounding surf so they can shoot a bird’s nest soup scene. I pointed out that bird’s nest soup is medicine – not really food – and that I have about as much interest