Remember the season of catching snakehead fish?

In August, the rice paddies in my hometown are a lush green, stretching far and wide. The rains begin to fall, making the rice even greener, and the rice fields are flooded with water.

This is also the time when the children in my village go fishing for snakehead fish. Snakehead fish have thick, flavorful meat and can be prepared into many traditional dishes.

When it rained, the rice fields were overflowing with water, flowing from one field to another, and it was also the time when the tilapia swam along the current to feed. The adults taught us children how to make fish traps. We chose a place where the water flowed, dug a hole about two or three handspans deep and two or three handspans wide, the edges of the hole had to be very smooth so the fish could easily slip into the trap, and the mouth of the hole was carved like a frog's mouth so that when the fish fell in, they couldn't escape.

Each of us children would usually make five to ten fish traps, setting them up the evening before and harvesting the fish the next morning. We'd catch a few pounds each night.

Besides the fish traps, every child in the countryside was given a few bamboo fish traps by their fathers or uncles. These traps were round, nearly 1 meter long, with a small opening at the mouth to guide the fish in to eat the food (which was sprouted rice grains).

We always choose rice paddies with plenty of water and a high potential for fish to set our traps. When setting the traps, we dig a wide area of mud, put sprouted rice as bait, and then place the trap on top. The tilapia, attracted by the aroma of the sprouted rice, swim down to eat, and after eating their fill, they surface and get caught in the trap's opening. We set the traps in the morning and empty them in the evening, or in the afternoon, emptying them early the next morning. Each day we harvest several kilograms of fresh tilapia…

Now, there are no more tilapia in the rice fields, but every time I pass through the green rice paddies, full of water after the rain, I feel as if I see schools of tilapia swimming in the fields and I remember the tilapia hunting seasons of the children in the old days.

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