Siamese Fighting Fish by coloured glass
Catching guppies and fighting fish in the hyacinth ponds are one of my most memorable moment in my childhood.
My childhood friends and I will gather together and set off to a nearby ponds a few hundred metres from home. We would bring along “Punki” or sieve with us.
When we reach the pond, we wad down the pond to our knee level, and sometime waist level. We will shoved the sieve under the water hyacinth. The joy was when the sieves were lifted up, the joy the excitement and joy in seeing the fishes jumping up and down was immeasurable. Sometimes, we will scoop up red, turqouise or green fighting fish. At other times, we may scoop up gourami fish, and sometimes snakehead fish.
At the end of the fishing expedition, we will compare our catch.
Back home, we will put our fishes in recycled glass bottles. We will organize competition for a duel of the fighting fish. This impromptu event sometimes attracted many friends from the neighbourhood. The fighting matches will fill the air with excitement.
The prize for the owner who won the competition : he got to keep the opponent’s fighting fish. Sometimes, there were betting on the sidelines but these were rare as most of us were very poor at that time.
1 Response
For me as a kid, setting bird traps (catching birds, searching for birdnests and catching fighting spiders in my kampong days. In my village, they were bushes and open grasslands which were conducive environment for our activities in the early 1960s. Of course, it is now an offence to set bird traps! I remember guppies were plentiful in roadside drains of the past, not now.
Posted on August 15th, 2011 at 11:17 pm
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