Tilapia Fish brought back memories...

My childhood days and memories were immediately and vividly brought back to life when I saw these live Tilapia fish in a pail today. My siblings and I grew up eating this type of fish everyday, which we used to fish from the mining pools beside our zinc-roofed wooden house at the outskirt of Taiping Town in West Malaysia.

Today, I saw a few Malay men casting their nets into Sungei Pinang adjacent to Punggol Park and they seemed to have quite a good catch and it was for personal consumption as I was told by one of their children. I managed to take a snap-shot of their catch in the pail with my mobile phone camera. The fishes were still jumping and flipping in the pail. From my experience in eating Tilapia, this fish somehow has a muddy taste, so they would be more palatable if marinated with curry powder or cooked spicy.



Later on at around 3pm, in one of the canals where the water level was ankle high, I saw two Chinese men in their early sixties looked rather comical in the drain, hanging a net across the width of the canal to block the Tilapia fish from getting past.

One of them walked very cautiously in the precarious canal towards the upstream as the floor was covered with a thick growth of algae, trying to drive the Tilapia fish from the upstream towards the dead end.

The captain told me the catch would be donated to the Old Folks Home. If that is true, I should say, charity begins at home, gets carried into the canal and continues right into old age. These two kind souls are surely not newbies to this business. And, I believe that was certainly not their first time because their skin was tanned and glowing, most likely from their days in the canal.