Boat woman of Hoi An

I confess I don’t know much about the boat women of Hoi An, well to be truthful, I know nothing about them, other than what I observe.

I shift my camera from one arm to the other, protecting a niggling shoulder injury as I watch an elderly women row a group of five people across the river. I’m hot, the sun-block is sliding off my arms, and I am looking foward to sitting down on the balcony one of the riverfront restaurants with an icy cold mango juice. The woman must be at least 70, but it is hard to determine what age she actually is, she looks like she is in her nineties, too old to be rowing boats for a living. She picks up another passenger and several large sacks of rice and rows back.

I wonder if she has been rowing boats across this river all her life, if she has a family to support and what has brought her to this point in her life. When it rains here, for weeks on end, does she still row?

The women seem quite intimidating with their wizened leathery skin and stern expressions. They wait at the river’s edge, tethering their boats by resting one bare brown foot on the concrete dock, as they wait for passengers. They work hard ferrying people across, or along, the river.

They are old and they look tired. They’ve lived through the hardships of war. “We” we bombed these people and now, as elderly women, they are still living in hardship. I feel tired just watching them... and sad.

As I raise my camera to photograph one of the women, she stares back down the lens at me expressionless, she doesn’t care about whether I take her photo or not. Another waves me aside, she doesn’t want her photo taken, and I completely understand why.

I approach another boat woman and raise my camera, she kicks her head back and smiles at me. I take her photo and I thank her. She smiles again.

She is now locked in my bag of memories from Hoi An. I look at the photo and it brings back the smell of the river, the sticky humidity of afternoon and the soft sound of the water lapping against the side of the boat.

And today as I post this photo to share with you, I know she will have been rowing across the river many times, and tomorrow she will do the same, and probably every day until she no longer has the strength to do so.