Chapter 11 — Shrimp Street Without Name

After a warning call from her superiors, Hai Yen spent an entire evening rethinking her entire strategy. If someone was actually tracking every search request she sent through official channels, she needed another way to expand the investigation without leaving a trace in the system. She drew a principle for herself from that night: everything that falls within the scope of official audit, she will follow the correct process, be transparent, and can re-check at any time. But everything is a personal investigation, she will not leave any electronic traces that can be traced back to her.

The next morning, she drafted an official audit report, proposing to expand the scope of inspection to all of Ocean's export shipments in the last twelve months related to the cluster of farming areas that once carried the KB code, citing the need to evaluate the systematicity of the newly discovered deviation instead of just considering a single batch. This is a completely legitimate professional request that can hardly be refused without causing suspicion, because any serious certification organization has the right to expand the scope of the audit when detecting signs of systemic abnormalities.

Her supervisor, although still hesitant after the warning call the day before, finally approved the request, with instructions to report progress more frequently than usual. Hai Yen understands that it is both trust and a form of closer supervision for her.

She arranged to meet Kien that afternoon, not at the usual coffee shop but in a hidden corner of the container yard, where few people passed by during lunch breaks. She brought with her a list of twelve Dai Duong shipments that had passed through the port in the past year, all of which were related to clusters of farming areas that partially overlapped with the old area of the Kenh Ba cooperative.

“I need to compare these batches with the log of the ship transporting raw materials from the farming area to the factory,” she said, giving the list to Kien. “If there is a discrepancy between harvest time, transportation time and the time recorded in the traceability records, it will be a sign that the records were created later and do not reflect reality.”

Kien looked through the list and nodded. "The port keeps a log of ships entering and leaving, but it is a ship carrying export goods, and the transportation of raw materials from the farming area to the factory usually uses small boats, not through the main port. I do not have the authority to access that type of log."

“So which part do you have access to?”

"I can compare the date the container ship left the port with the date recorded on the customs documents, to see if it matches the date recorded in the traceability records you have. If the date the ship left the port is earlier than the date the raw materials were recorded to be harvested, that is clear evidence that something is wrong." Kien pulled out his personal workbook and began to note down each container code on Hai Yen's list. "This takes time, because I have to work overtime, I can't use the agency's general system to search a lot at the same time, it will be noticed immediately."

"I understand. Just do it slowly, safety first." Hai Yen looked around the container yard and lowered her voice further. “As for Khai's ship log, do you have any clues?”

Kien's face darkened. "I contacted an old acquaintance, who used to work as a recording clerk for that fleet, and is now retired. He agreed to meet me this weekend and said he would keep a number of copies of old diaries, in case you need to compare them later. He didn't say clearly why he kept it, but his voice seemed like he had been waiting for someone to ask for a long time."

“Do you think he knew anything was wrong beforehand?”

“I'm not sure, but my gut feeling tells me yes. Bookkeepers, if there is nothing wrong with them, rarely arbitrarily keep copies of documents after retirement, unless they feel they need something to protect themselves later.” Kien closed the notebook, his eyes distant. “It's been seven years since I felt closer to the truth than ever before. Both happy and scared.”

“Afraid of what?”

"I'm afraid that when I know the whole truth, I won't have any way to live in peace with it, just like how I've lived in peace with vague doubts for the past seven years." Kien looked at her, his voice was rarely sincere. “Are you afraid of that? I'm afraid that when I know the truth about my father, I won't be able to return to my old life anymore?"

That question made Hai Yen pause. She had asked herself that question countless times during sleepless nights since deciding to take on this audit mission, but she had never heard anyone else ask it so directly.

“Yes,” she admitted, her voice quiet. “But I'm more afraid of not knowing the truth. I have lived for ten years with an unfinished story, a last sentence from my father whose meaning I did not fully understand. I would rather know the truth, no matter how painful it is, than continue to live with the assumptions I made up to comfort myself.”

Kien nodded and didn't say anything more, but his eyes showed that he understood, because he himself had been carrying a similar struggle for the past seven years.

They parted ways when their lunch break was about to end, promising to contact them as soon as they had new information. On the way back to the temporary office, Hai Yen stopped by a small photocopy shop to print a few more copies of documents, and while waiting, she noticed a man in a business shirt standing across the street, seemingly looking at her longer than a normal passerby should have. When she turned her head to look straight back, the man quickly turned away, walked quickly towards a motorbike parked nearby and then left.

Maybe she was just being too sensitive after what had just happened. Maybe it was just a random passerby. But Hai Yen still wrote down the man's identifying characteristics in her notebook — light blue shirt, black pants, average build, baseball cap covering most of his face — a professional habit she had honed over many years as an inspector: recording every detail, no matter how small, because no one knew which of those details would become important later.

That afternoon, sitting alone in her temporary office, she reopened all the records for the twelve shipments that had just requested an expanded audit, and began the tedious but necessary work: comparing each date, each code, each signature, looking for any abnormalities that might repeat the pattern of discrepancies she had discovered in shipment DH-0417. This is a job that requires absolute patience, the type of job that not everyone can do for many hours without getting frustrated, but it is also the type of job that Hai Yen, since the day she entered the profession, has always found a strange peace while doing it — as if amidst the chaos of numbers and letters. writing, she can find an order that the world outside the office never gave her.

She draws up a comparison table on paper, divided into columns: batch code, recorded harvest date, shipping date to the factory, freezing date, export date, and the identification code of the person who gave final technical approval. After nearly three hours of painstaking work, an anomaly began to clearly emerge: of the twelve batches, four batches had an unusually short gap between the recorded harvest date and the freezing date, just a few hours, while industry standard procedures require a minimum of one to two days for transportation, sorting and processing. Those four shipments are all on the list related to the KB code cluster, and all four carry the technical approval identification code TS-04.

She sat silently before this discovery. If the time between harvest and freezing is so absurdly short, the most likely possibility is that the harvest date recorded on the paperwork is not the actual harvest date, but a number filled in later to legalize the records, after the actual raw materials have been brought into the factory from another source without proper process control. This is exactly the type of bias that can be used to hide the mixing of materials from substandard farming areas, or worse, to legitimize the use of banned chemicals without leaving a trace in the official chain of trace.

She took a photo of the entire reconciliation table and saved it on a small portable hard drive that she always carried with her, without synchronizing it to any of the agency's cloud systems, in accordance with her own security principles that she had set for herself the night before. Outside the window, it was already dark, the sound of the neighborhood's loudspeakers echoed the afternoon news, mixed with the sound of traffic passing by on the street. She stretched her shoulders, rubbed her tired eyes from looking at the screen for too long, then closed her laptop, reminding herself that she needed to preserve her strength for the coming days, when the workload of both real and hidden work would certainly be even heavier.