After ten o’clock, clusters of black shadows of varying heights appeared on the distant lake surface. Sparse lights flickered at different points of the shadows like temporarily perched fireflies. Looking carefully, one could see several thin, milky-white smoke columns rising into the sky.

This was another floating village by the great lake.

Far from cities, far from tourists, nearly isolated, home to locals, Vietnamese refugees, Chinese, illegal immigrants, and various fugitives from justice.

Drawing closer, one could see that the stilted houses were just a few scattered buildings along and near the shore. Most “dwellings” were on the water: houses built on long bamboo poles, boats, houses built on wooden rafts, and some simply used ropes to tie together floating plastic and metal drums as foundations, with plastic sheets pulled up on all sides to make a house.

Wherever people lived, plastic ropes were strung outside the “dwellings” to dry various clothes. Some houses had “Beware of Crocodiles” written in red paint outside. Pig cages floated on the water’s surface, with water sounds around the cages and pigs grunting inside.

Yi Sa parked her motorcycle under an abandoned, half-collapsed stilted house farthest from the shore. Tonle Sap Lake’s water level was still rising – park too close to shore, and the bike might be underwater by morning.

She locked her motorcycle, took off her luggage bag, and had just taken a step or two toward the shore when suddenly there was a crashing sound of falling wood behind her.

Yi Sa frowned and turned to ask: “Who’s there?”

This stilted house had long been abandoned, with countless pieces of waste material piled under the empty stilts at the bottom. Behind the newly collapsed pile of debris, a cloud of dust rose, and in the dust stood a dim figure, only the eyes showing brightness.

The person said: “Hello… Chinese?”

While speaking, he struggled across the pile of debris toward her.

It was an old man, around fifty or sixty, wearing a dirty tank top and shorts, blue plastic flip-flops on his feet, clutching a piece of paper in his hand.

This “community” had high mobility – every so often some faces would disappear and new ones would appear.

Probably a recently arrived wanderer.

He wore an ingratiating smile: “I just heard you speaking Chinese. I’m Chinese too, we’re compatriots. My surname is Ma, come from the mainland. I’m looking for someone, my daughter – if you remember seeing her, please keep an eye out.”

As he spoke, he unfolded the paper in his hand – it was a missing person notice, with two sweat-stained fingerprints where he had been gripping it.

Yi Sa was very impatient: “No hands-free.”

She turned to leave, and Old Ma became anxious, running after her while quickly rolling the notice into a thin tube and deftly inserting it into the slightly open zipper of her small luggage bag.

Yi Sa didn’t have free hands, otherwise, in her current bad mood, she would have pulled it out and thrown it away.

Old Ma seemed to know his action was unwelcome, stammering with an apologetic smile: “Look at it when you have time when you have time.”

He didn’t dare follow further.

Yi Sa walked to the water’s edge and patiently waited a while, then whistled toward the distance.

Soon, a Vietnamese man paddled over in a small tin boat. A wooden pole stood at the bow with an electric bulb tied to it, giving off a dim yellow light. Around the bulb was a fat, round halo of light where countless small insects were flying.

A halo of light also casts into the water, likely attracting many light-loving small fish.

Yi Sa handed over a 1000 riel note: “First to the clinic, then home.”

1000 riel was worth about two Chinese yuan. Small boats went back and forth here all day, and normally wouldn’t charge for giving people rides, but she wanted to go to two places and needed the boat to wait in between, so paying was reasonable.

The Vietnamese man helped her put her luggage on the boat.

She sat under the light bulb.

As the Vietnamese man rowed, the shore and stilted houses slowly receded, but the surroundings gradually brightened.

People’s homes always needed lights.

The tin boat weaved between the “dwellings,” with various household garbage floating beside the hull. This was a slum version of Venice – between nearby dwellings there were no bridges. To meet, people had to either call out, swim or take a boat.

The deeper they went into the central area, the denser the human sounds became. Someone was urinating into the lake, someone else dove in headfirst, a child wobbled past with a python on their shoulders, and a man was grabbing a woman’s hair and viciously slapping her face.

The woman screamed, then fought back fiercely.

She also saw some unfamiliar faces, crouching at boat edges staring at her, their gazes vigilant and cold, carrying threatening meanings, with nasolabial folds deep as scars. She bit down on a wooden cigarette holder, lit it with a lighter, and stared back contemptuously.

She was an old resident, with natural superiority.

Suddenly noticing the paper roll stuck in her luggage bag’s zipper, she pulled it out to look. The missing person notice was printed, with only a phone number written in pen at the bottom. The old man was called Ma Yuefei, looking for his daughter Ma You, said to have lost contact a year ago.

The Vietnamese man, seeing her reading carefully, couldn’t help saying: “That old man’s been here several days, hands these out to everyone he sees. I got one too.”

Yi Sa was about to say something when the tin boat turned a corner.

A two-story boat house appeared before them. The second-floor door was open, with couplets written in black ink on red paper pasted on either side. Whether to save paper or because anything would do abroad, there were only eight characters total.

“Good fortune in all seasons, smooth sailing always.”

The horizontal scroll read “Safe comings and goings.”

Under the doorframe hung a gourd, a copper one, representing “fortune and prosperity” and also “practicing medicine to help the world.”

Yi Sa looked down into the boat, trying to find a small stone.

In this area, only a few people knew that inside that gourd were several copper pills – the gourd’s maker had clearly sought authenticity down to the invisible details.

So she used the gourd as a doorbell – throw a small stone to hit it, and it would ring like chimes.

Unfortunately, there were no small stones in the boat, so she had to call out: “Chen Heji!”

Soon, a middle-aged man hurried out from inside.

He wore a cooling front-opening jacket exposing his chest and belly, baggy pants tied at the knees, and his hair flew loose to his neck, but when he lowered his head, the area from his forehead to the crown was shiny and bald.

Chen Heji – which could be broken down to mean “Bald Chen” – was a name he gave himself, subtly pointing out his nature while saving face.

He looked down and waved at Yi Sa, his tone carrying pleasant surprise: “Yi Sa, you’re back?”

The tin boat stopped at the house’s ladder, which went straight up to the second floor.

Yi Sa climbed the ladder, and Chen Tu bent down, waiting until she was almost up before pulling her the rest of the way.

The view was relatively high here, but not high enough to see her water house.

Yi Sa looked around and asked him: “Where’s my Wu Gui?”

Chen Tu smiled: “Come here.”

He led Yi Sa to the edge, where looking down, they could see an iron fence enclosure at the end of the first floorboards, with two heavy, thick Siamese crocodiles lying motionless inside, one large and one small – the large one nearly three meters, the small one over a meter.

Chen Tu said: “Fed them to my Long and Hu.”

After speaking, he laughed, thinking himself quite humorous.

Halfway through his laugh, he stopped.

Yi Sa was looking at him sideways, her eyes naturally narrowed, thin, and long – that gaze reminded one of a snake flicking its tongue.

Chen Tu suddenly remembered that today seemed to be the 19th.

Every month, there were certain days when provoking her was not a smart thing to do.

He quickly explained: “Just kidding, just kidding. Wu Gui is inside, drinking heavily.”

Yi Sa walked inside.

This community “clinic” looked more like a black-market pharmacy warehouse. In the middle was a broken desk with drawers, and against the walls were shelves reaching to the ceiling, each layer filled with plastic drawer boxes containing rubber gloves, medical gauze, syringes, cold medicine, and various other medical supplies, some with Chinese labels, others with assorted foreign text.

Yi Sa never asked how Chen Tu got these things. After all, cats have cat paths, dogs have dog ways – the people here were all eight-armed apes and thousand-legged centipedes, always finding endless ways.

At the foot of the desk was a fish eagle, nearly a meter long, with dense black feathers like overlapping fish scales giving off a metallic cold light. Its beak was golden yellow, flat, and long like a hooked tiger plier, but its eyes were bright green, exactly like two small light bulbs.

The fish eagle, commonly known as a cormorant, was called “Wu Gui” (Black Ghost) in ancient China. Du Fu had a poem saying “Every family raises Wu Gui, every meal eats yellow fish” – the “Wu Gui” in the poem referred to the fish eagle.

In earlier years in China, many people trained fish eagles to catch fish because of the low input and high output: one fish eagle could catch about twenty jin of fresh fish daily, eating less than a tenth of that, so they were very expensive, worth as much as a small calf.

But later this declined, due to advances in fishing technology and because fish eagle fishing was somewhat destructive to the ecology, depleting resources. More and more provinces listed it as “illegal fishing equipment.” Now fish eagles were just performance props in tourist areas – photographers especially liked to capture sunset scenes of fishermen casting nets with fish eagles perched on boat rails, probably finding such scenes very artistic.

The one before her must have been a premium specimen among fish eagles, worthy of the eerie and dominating ancient name “Wu Gui.” In front of it was a crude shallow ceramic bowl, the kind used for ancestral offerings in rural areas, filled with baijiu.

Indeed drinking heavily, truly carefree.

Yi Sa stepped forward and grabbed Wu Gui’s neck to lift it up, but halfway through found it too heavy and put it back down, shaking her arm, saying: “Not bad, hasn’t lost weight.”

Chen Tu took credit: “This ancestor, how dare I neglect it? Worried it wasn’t eating enough, I even bought fish from the Vietnamese to feed it.”

Yi Sa made a sound of acknowledgment and took out two rolls of US dollars, throwing them on the table: “Get the goods.”

Chen Tu said “Right away” and half-knelt down to pull out two large bottles of liquid medicine from under a shelf, gripping one bottleneck in each hand and using all his strength to lift them onto the desk.

The bottles were dark brown, with labels covered in ant-like dense foreign text. Yi Sa couldn’t be bothered to look, asking Chen Tu: “Is it the best?”

Chen Tu patted the bottle caps like patting his life’s masterpiece: “Of course.”

He lowered his voice: “10ml syringe, three shots will take down a Tibetan Mastiff, eight shots will drop a brown bear. For poaching wild elephants like you do, ten shots at most – don’t give more, more will kill them.”

Yi Sa had never said what she wanted this stuff for, but with animal anesthetic in such large quantities, and Southeast Asia not being the African savanna without so many large animals, he could guess with his toes that it was for poaching wild elephants in the jungle.

Though every time he said this, she had never confirmed it.

But she hadn’t denied it either.

This time was the same, she only said: “Give some extras.”

After speaking, without waiting for his agreement, she pulled down a bag from the thick plastic bags hanging by the shelves, opened it, and casually picked through the drawer boxes. Chen Tu didn’t mind – women just liked to take small advantages.

Yi Sa suddenly remembered something: “I just saw a Chinese man on shore.”

Chen Tu said: “He’s been here several days. On the first day, someone brought him to me.”

He was pleased with his reputation among the Chinese community: “Said he was looking for his daughter, left me a stack of missing person notices to hand out to patients.”

“Why did he come looking here?”

“His daughter sent home photos, the background looked like a floating village. He’s been searching around the great lake for half a month, and says ours looks the most similar.”