Rice Paddy and Crabs in Viet Nam

I visited Viet Nam in the summer of 2008 and jotted down some memories. This was written on June 4th, 2008

The smooth, squishy earth pressed between my toes. Standing in a flooded rice paddy with water just above my ankles, it felt as if my childhood had woken after a long sleep. The air carried the fragrance of live mud, while cool breezes and biting sun rays on my face placed me in a strangely poetic setting.

Perhaps the rice had just been harvested and the paddies left bare for the dry season. I could only guess. What I did know was this: surrounding me was a vast and seemingly endless stretch of water-filled fields shimmering with a million suns.

The breeze always came from one direction. I could tell because every blade of grass leaned the same way, at least where I stood.

My cousin, out herding his family’s goats, came with me into the fields. As the joke went, I was there to milk the goats. There was no milking, of course, and I later learned they were all male anyway.

Much younger than I was, my cousin brimmed with excitement. He rushed me across the paddies whenever he spotted small caves, said to be crabs’ dwellings.

Still adjusting to these old sensations, I stepped carefully, watching the clear water turn murky with each move. The first cave appeared as a small underwater opening in the paddy floor.

My cousin motioned for me to reach in. I had done this as a child, so the movement came back naturally. But my hand was bigger than it had been thirteen years earlier. The cramped feeling, as if my arm might be sucked in or stuck at any moment, made that first contact a bit chilling.

The crab’s sharp, needle-like legs and curving claws scraped against my skin in the soft mud. I slid my hand beneath it and scooped upward. Out came a lump of mud, and above it, the crab wriggling in protest. My arm, buried to the elbow, inched its way out of the muddy tunnel as sharp legs pressed against me. Pebbles scraped my knuckles on the way up.

“Slowly! Slowly! Don’t let it get away!” my cousin shouted as I neared the surface. Water rushed to wash the mud from my palm, revealing a male crab snapping at my fingers. I quickly dropped it into a bucket, where it joined a few others my cousin had already caught.

For another thirty minutes, we repeated the ritual. Each crab had its own personality, each leaving new marks on my hand.

By the end, we had more than twenty crabs, most no larger than a lime. We left them in a bucket, hoping to add more the next day, maybe enough for a pot of bún riêu, the Vietnamese vermicelli soup where crab meat is the star.

One discovery stood out. In one paddy, I stumbled upon floating patches of four-leaf clovers, big green clusters that seemed almost too lucky to be real. I promised myself I would photograph them the next time I returned.