In the floating world of Tonlé Sap, where the water kisses every doorstep and the air smells of fish, smoke, and wet wood, a girl no older than nine cradles her baby brother in a plastic basin lined with rags and mosquito netting.
Her name is Sophal, though most just call her “little mother.”
She walks barefoot across the swaying bamboo planks that connect their houseboat to the others—arms curled firmly around Rithy, her two-year-old brother with feverish cheeks and curious eyes. Her balance is precise. Her expression, steady. She has done this walk a thousand times.
Their parents are out fishing.
Her mother nets shrimp with hands calloused raw.
Her father tends to traps deeper in the reeds, hoping the floodwaters will bless them with more than bones and weeds.
So Sophal becomes the caretaker.
She wipes Rithy’s nose with the corner of her sleeve, hums a Khmer lullaby her mother used to sing more often, rocks him gently on her narrow hip as she stirs rice porridge over a charcoal stove.
No school today. Maybe not tomorrow either.
She wanted to go. She loved tracing letters on scrap paper with her finger, copying words like srei (girl), mékong, chhke (dog). But there’s no one else to watch Rithy, and the school boat didn’t come last week—the water too shallow, the motor too old.
In the afternoon heat, she fans her brother with a palm frond. He cries. She shushes him with sugar water and songs. Sometimes, if he’s restless, she sets him in an old tire and floats him gently beside the house, keeping hold of the rope.
Tourist boats pass. Foreigners with cameras point and wave.
She doesn’t wave back.
When he finally sleeps, she sits beside him and watches the sky shift in the lake’s reflection. She dreams—not of toys or sweets, but of slippers that fit, schoolbooks with her name written inside, and a full belly for her brother every night.
She is nine.
But she does not play.
She does not cry.
She works.
She holds.
She endures.
Because in Tonlé Sap, the lake rises and falls, but the weight of care does not float.
And Sophal, the little mother, carries it with quiet grace.