Ca Chay Fish of the Hau River

Mist lay low on the Hậu River, thick and white, hiding both banks.

It was past midnight. In that whiteness, a small boat had already come out near the main river. In it were a father and son who fished with nets at Đại Ngãi. The father was Năm Viên. The son was named Bảy Quang. They had rowed out from the landing at nightfall. Now the mist had thickened, and it was time to set the lines.

The cá cháy gathered where the waters meet, where the fresh water of the Hậu River mingles with brackish water before the sea. It was the season of the gió chướng wind. River people say the main season runs from the young gió chướng to the old, when the river drops low and salt water pushes in from the sea. The cá cháy is a prized fish of the Hậu River. It came in numbers in only one season each year, around Tết, the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam.

More than 200 years ago, this fish already had its name in a book about the old land of Gia Định. The author was Trịnh Hoài Đức, an official and historian of the Nguyễn dynasty, Vietnam's last royal dynasty. He described the fish as rich and sweet but full of bones, and advised cooking it, never eating it raw. He also knew it was plentiful in Vĩnh Thanh and Định Tường, old lands of the south. The north, he wrote, had none.

Father and son let the line down into the water, stretch by stretch, then sat still and waited. Around them was only mist. They could not see the sky.

Then the river began to stir. Somewhere in the whiteness, the water rippled. Fish mouths rose, gulping air and snapping at tiny things floating on the surface. They sank and rose again, the whole school, wave after wave. People in the trade call this way of feeding hớp sương, đớp bóng, sipping the mist and snapping at shadows. The cá cháy had come.

People along the river still say the cá cháy lives by sipping the mist. They believe it drinks the breath of heaven and earth, and that is why its flesh is so firm, so tender and so clean.

The line still lay quiet. The cá cháy seldom takes bait.

Then came the cast net. Father and son threw it hard. It opened into a circle and sank into the mist. On some mornings, cá cháy came up caught in the mesh, long and slightly flat. Their scales were as big as a thumbnail, silver mixed with an earthy yellow. Out of the water, a cá cháy dies very quickly, and only a fresh fish can be sold.

Bảy Quang tells how the cá cháy swims up the Hậu River from the sea to spawn. The mother carries a pair of large yellow roe sacs. The eggs are oily, so they float, drift downstream and hatch. When the young grow longer than a finger joint, they swim out to sea. Only those who set stake nets, planted in the current to wait, ever see the young fish.

The east began to glow. As the sun rose, the mist thinned and the two banks slowly appeared. River people say the fish could be netted only in the early morning. Once the sun was up, they dove deep, and in the rainy season they would not rise at all.

Daylight meant going home. Năm Viên and his son pulled in the lines and rowed hard for the bank. The boat cut through the thinning mist. It reached the river mouth at Đại Ngãi just in time for the early market.

In those seasons, upriver at Trà Ôn, some riverside kitchens braised cá cháy with sugarcane. The women laid thin slices of sugarcane on the bottom of the pot. For every layer of sugarcane, they added a layer of fish. Then the cook set the pot over a low, gentle flame. Some kept the fire that low for hours, waiting for the bones to soften.

Some families cooked the fish in canh chua, a sour soup, with water celery and tomato. Others saved the middle cut to braise with black pepper. The head and tail went into a sour soup with water lily and water spinach. A saying from Trà Ôn tells how good it was: The cá cháy of Trà Ôn is a wonder. In soup, simmered or braised salty, every dish tastes good.

The catch was that this fine fish had a great many bones. In the old days, young children and anyone not used to picking out bones found the flesh hard to eat. The little ones ate only the roe, with the fish broth poured over rice noodles. In Sóc Trăng, skilled cooks had their own way to remove the bones. They scaled the fish and set two chopsticks at its neck. Then they pulled down hard, in one stroke, to the tail. The bones came away from the flesh.

The roe was prized above all. But it was rich in oil, and eating too much set the belly grumbling. In those days, Bảy Quang taught people to eat the roe with grilled fish scales, so the belly stayed quiet.

Past 80, telling of the misty seasons of long ago, Bảy Quang could still name the fish by size. A small one was a cá cháy so. A bigger one was a cá cháy lứa. The very largest was a cá cháy gộc, or a cá cháy già.

He remembered the fish keeping to the river between Đại Ngãi and Kế Sách. At the farthest, it went up to Trà Ôn. People in Trà Ôn and Cầu Kè remember it too, each recalling the stretch where the waters meet in front of home. The fish grew fewer, and then he gave up the trade. Why, he could not say. Today, some older people say the cá cháy stopped coming long ago. Others say it is still in the Hậu River, only very few, and rarely seen.

Still, on some mornings close to Tết, mist lies low on the Hậu River, thick and white, hiding both banks. The boat of the father and son stopped going out into that mist long ago. No one can say for sure whether, this morning, the Hậu River still hides a school of cá cháy in the mist.