THANH BINH, Vietnam — I drove out through a watery landscape, the rice paddies shimmering, watermelon being planted in muddy fields. There were ducks on the canals, graves and shrines in the light green rice fields, the dead among the living, not hidden but recalled daily. Women in conical hats pushed bicycles over rickety wooden bridges. The breeze was warm, the viscous coffee sweet. Cafes set with hammocks, some advertising Wi-Fi, offered sugar cane juice pressed through small hand-cranked mills. Everything felt liquid, soft, fluid here in the Mekong Delta, an aqueous microclimate.
Yes, the dead among the living: four decades gone by since the war, the bombs and the napalm — twitchy young Americans at the other side of the world wondering what menace lurked in this lush vegetation. America mired in the mud of an unwinnable war.
Now, if anything, the Vietnamese wonder whether the United States military would protect them against the Chinese, if it ever came to that. The temporary enemy has become a partner of sorts against the eternal enemy. Annual trade between Vietnam and the United States has soared from a mere $220 million in 1994 to $29.6 billion in 2013.
The wars over, the Vietnamese did not want to dwell on them. They wanted to sow seeds of commerce rather than grievance. Asia could offer this lesson to other parts of the world where I have spent too much time. Vengeance and victimhood wither the soul. The life-giving rice growing around the dead is an image fecund with acceptance. Even the mud yields.
At its banks the lazy Mekong seems boundless. Business along the river has boomed. I watched with Huynh Khanh Chau, the vice general director of Asia Commerce Fisheries, as large blue plastic containers of live fish were unloaded from boats into a pipe system that swept them in a watery gush into a nearby factory. The fish are raised on nearby farms; aquaculture has become a big industry in the Mekong.
The name of the small-headed, fat-bodied fish is a matter of some dispute. It is catfish-like. So it has been called Vietnamese catfish. In the United States it is sometimes called “swai.” It has also been dubbed “basa” and in Europe is often referred to as “pangasius.” This has not been a mere lexicographical game. The “catfish wars” between the United States and Vietnam have been bitter.
The U.S. catfish industry initially pressed Congress to prohibit labeling “basa” as catfish. The first antidumping duties against “certain frozen fish fillets from Vietnam” went into effect in 2003. They have not been lifted. More recently, Vietnam has been angered by an attempt to reclassify “basa” as catfish, which could lead to stricter United States Department of Agriculture inspection standards. Where are Joseph Heller and “Catch-22” when you need them?
Huynh has no doubt this is a simple case of American protectionism. When it comes to catfish, Vietnam with its ideal climate and cheap labor is more competitive. Its fish tastes good — or at least just as good. Still, better catfish war than hot war.
His company has had to adjust. It’s exporting more to China, but the Chinese taste is only for large fillets. Europe likes medium-sized fillets. By contrast, the United States, ever the omnivore, “is a great market because it likes large, medium-sized and small fillets!”
Inside, the fish are killed by workers with a single throat-cutting thrust of the knife through the gill. Blood drips down a stainless-steel chute into a pool. The fish are cleaned. Another team of men in brown numbered uniforms does the initial filleting, knives sweeping in practiced incisions through the pale pink flesh to leave, in seconds, a carcass of head and bone. The men pile the fillets in blue trays and add a disc with their number; pay depends on productivity.
Now it is the turn of blue-uniformed women, whose work is more skilled. It is easy to tear the fillet. With precision and speed, they nip, they scrape, they flip, they excise — until every blemish is gone. The factory floor is a sea of young women and quicksilver knife movements. Fillets are then sorted by size and color, before freezing. From live fish to the frozen fillet ready to be boxed and exported to Western or Chinese supermarkets, no more than an hour elapses.
Outside, in a cafe, I met a worker, Nguyen Van Tu, from the adjacent Hung Ca fish factory and exporter. He said he works a 12-hour shift, six days a week, with one-hour lunch break, and two 20-minute pauses. He earns about $220 a month. Next time I eat a frozen fish fillet in New York or blackened catfish in Louisiana I’ll think of his smiling face, his low pay, flashing knives in female hands, fish wars versus shooting wars, the peace of the watery Delta, and those graves in the glistening rice paddies.