Living on boats on the Tonle Sap is not an uncommon site in Phnom Penh.
These poorest of people live a life of subsistance fishing. Its a harsh existance.
When Dung Thanh Men lies back in his hammock on the long, golden afternoons here, it swings gently by itself with the rocking of his home, a fishing boat at the northern tip of Cambodia's great lake.
The rocking may be gentle, but like other scenes of serenity in Cambodia, it belies the turmoil that lies beneath it -- in this case, the energy of more than a ton of fat, silver elephant fish trapped inside a gigantic wooden cage that is the underbelly of Mr. Men's houseboat.
And the comforting sounds of children's voices and sweet smell of cooking fires that drift from other houseboats mask the precariousness of his unmoored life here.
Mr. Men is an ethnic Vietnamese fisherman, one of thousands who have clustered for generations in some 40 floating villages around the edges of the broad, fecund lake, Tonle Sap.
Like other floating things, their lives follow the tides of their environment, both the seasonal rise and ebb of this restless lake and the sharper and more dangerous shifts of Cambodia's violent recent history.
''The people here have no land, only boats,'' said a Cambodian boatman who visited them recently. ''So when the water is up, they are up; when the water is down, they are down. It seems very easy, but their life is very difficult.''
Permanent boat people, they are true citizens neither of Cambodia nor of Vietnam but of the great lake, ready to follow the schools of fish or to flee the violence that can visit at any time from the hostile shore.
''Vietnam is my homeland,'' said Mr. Men, 34, speaking in Vietnamese, although both he and his parents were born in Cambodia and he has seen Vietnam only once, as a child, when a huge flotilla of fishing boats escaped there during an anti-Vietnamese purge. When he does go ashore, a 20-minute boat ride away, he says he is ''going to Cambodia.''
In waterborne villages like this one, just off the lotus swamps and flooded rice fields of the lakeside, the fishermen have created self-enclosed worlds with floating markets, churches, schools, ice plants, slaughterhouses, mechanic shops -- even pool halls, where the players must take the motion of the lake into account before they make their shots.
At dawn on the river that flows south from the lake, small boats with tiny domed shelters drift down the glittering water with their nets for a while, then paddle back up against the current before drifting back.
The afternoons aboard Mr. Men's boat are slow and peaceful, as his wife brews tea at the foot of the family's Buddhist altar and passing fishermen stop by to share news.
But like the others who live here, Mr. Men is prepared in a moment to untether his home and flee farther from the shore, or even down the length of the lake and along the Mekong River to the no man's land along the border with Vietnam.
As many as half a million ethnic Vietnamese live in Cambodia, but with Vietnam a historical enemy and occasional invader, they are widely feared and resented, and are a routine target for the country's political demagogues.
As the Indochina war spread to Cambodia in 1970, the government of Prime Minister Lon Nol began a wave of killings of Vietnamese, causing thousands to flee the country. When the Communist Khmer Rouge ruled from 1975 to 1979, causing the deaths of more than a million people, Vietnamese became targets again.
Seven years ago this village, with some 1,500 people, was the scene of one of Cambodia's worst recent massacres. Out of the dark, boatloads of Khmer Rouge fighters attacked with machetes and rifles, killing 33 people and wounding 19. Most of the victims, many of them children, were killed in a floating video parlor.
More recently, Vietnamese boat people who cluster along the river's edge in Phnom Penh, the capital, have been evicted as part of a political power play. When fighting flares, as it did during a coup in 1997 or in a late-night firefight in Phnom Penh last month, they are the first to flee for safety.
Perhaps there is resentment among Cambodians that a foreign population dominates the great lake at the center of their country. Tonle Sap is the heartbeat of Cambodia, a living, throbbing organ that reshapes itself with the seasons and forms the natural core of the country's agriculture. The river that flows south from it, also called Tonle Sap, reverses its course during every monsoon season, causing the lake to overflow into the surrounding countryside.
If Cambodians fear that their country may someday be swallowed by Vietnam, that fear could find inspiration in the huge cage beneath Mr. Men's houseboat, teeming with the riches of their lake.
Mr. Men is a broker, gathering the catch of his fellow fishermen and selling it on periodic trips south to Phnom Penh for export to Hong Kong, where elephant fish are an expensive delicacy. Elephant fish are hard to find in the restaurants of the nearest city, Siem Reap.
But Mr. Men's long afternoons in his hammock, as he waits for his deliveries, do not seem conducive to introspection or metaphors. His philosophy, as he expressed it, is simple: ''We do what we can to make a living.''
If he has an ambition, it lies with his twin 6-year-old daughters, who are learning to read and write in both Vietnamese and Cambodian. His hope for them, he said, is to go to school, to study hard, to find a job on land.
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