She stands barefoot in the dirt, just beneath the shadow of her family’s stilt house, which leans tiredly on bamboo legs over the cracked, dry edge of Tonle Sap’s shrinking waters. The boards above her are gray with rot, the tin roof patched with flattened cans. A frayed mosquito net flutters in the upper window like a flag of surrender.
She is four—maybe five—with a small frame and sun-darkened skin. Her ribs are faintly visible beneath the rise of her belly, shaped not by fullness but by hunger. She wears no shirt. Her shorts are torn and too big, cinched with string. A plastic bracelet, once pink, clings to her wrist like a faded memory of something softer.
She does not look away when strangers pass.
She does not smile easily.
She simply stands—with eyes deep and steady, wide and knowing, as if she’s already heard too many grown-up silences.
Behind her, the wooden ramp to the house looks rough. A pot hangs from a nail in the beam. The smell of fermented fish sauce clings to the wood, mixed with smoke and river salt. Her mother is inside, coughing. Her father is gone—fishing, drinking, or maybe both.
She watches other children run by on the cracked earth below, laughing in bursts. She doesn’t join. She has one foot pressed into the shade, the other in the light.
The lake is lower this year. Everyone says so. The fish are fewer. The water tastes more of metal than mud. She knows not because someone told her, but because she feels it—in the empty bowls, in the longer silences, in the way grown-ups talk with their eyes lowered now.
But still—she is here.
Still barefoot.
Still shirtless.
Still standing.
Not with shame, but with the quiet strength of someone who’s known hardship as a first language. A child of the stilts and sky, of flood seasons and sunburnt roofs.
Tomorrow she may carry water. Or hold her baby brother. Or wade chest-deep into the lake to check the crab trap. But today, in this sliver of afternoon heat, she simply stands—watching, enduring, alive.