Chapter 16 — Shrimp Street Without Name

Three days after the meeting with Ms. Hong, Ocean's attitude toward Hai Yen changed clearly. The frantic calls inviting cooperation were no longer there, replaced by cold silence: her request to supplement her profile was answered much more slowly, sometimes having to repeat it a second or third time to receive a response, always accompanied by the excuse of being busy or lacking staff to handle it.

She was not surprised by this change, seeing it as an inevitable consequence after she bluntly rejected Ms. Hong's implicit proposal. But what really worried her began Thursday afternoon, when she left the factory floor after a long work session to check additional records.

The black motorbike was parked about fifty meters from the factory gate, the driver wearing a helmet to cover his face. There was nothing special to notice if Hai Yen didn't realize it had appeared in this exact location three times a week, always around the time she left the factory. She deliberately went around a different route instead of the usual one to get back to the inn, and that motorbike, after keeping a sufficient distance to avoid being seen too clearly, still quietly followed.

Her heart beat faster, but she tried to stay calm, recalling the basic safety principles she had read in a training course on professional ethics for inspectors many years ago: do not go straight to your residence when you suspect you are being followed, find a crowded place, record the vehicle's identification characteristics in as much detail as possible. She turned into the crowded market, blending into the flow of afternoon shoppers, going around a few rows of stalls before exiting another way, enough to cut off the view of those watching.

From a hidden corner, she looked back and saw a black motorbike slowing down at the beginning of the market. The driver searched the crowd for a while before turning around and leaving, not finding her anymore. She stood there, her heart still pounding, taking a few deep breaths before continuing to take a more circuitous route than usual to get back to the inn.

Returning to her room, she immediately called Kien and told him the whole incident. His voice sounded clearly worried over the phone.

“Can you write down the license plate number?”

"I didn't have time, the car was too far away and I had to focus on dodging but didn't dare look closely." Hai Yen sighed and sat down on the bed. "But I'm definitely not the first time I've been noticed. Last week I also saw a man standing and looking at me for an unusually long time at the photocopy shop."

“You should report this to your superiors, and I think you should also consider changing your place of residence, at least temporarily,” Kien said, his tone serious. “I don't want to scare you, but if they've gotten to the point of sending people to watch, it means their level of concern has increased significantly compared to a few weeks ago.”

“I will be more careful,” Hai Yen replied. "But I don't want to stop. If I step back now, everything I've done up until now will be meaningless."

They chatted for a while longer, agreeing on a few new safety rules: inform each other every time they move to a sensitive location, use short signals via text message instead of calling when urgent safety alerts are needed, and avoid carrying original copies of important documents with you, instead dividing them into small pieces and storing them in different places.

After the call, although her mind was still disturbed by the feeling of being watched, Hai Yen decided not to let fear take over the entire afternoon. dark. She took out her father's notebook, opened it to the last pages containing rows of mysterious symbols, determined to try again to find the hidden rule in it, seeing this as a way to regain a sense of control after a day full of insecurity.

She tried a new approach: instead of trying to decode each individual series of numbers, she rearranged the entire series of numbers in the order they appeared in the book, comparing them with nearby dates recorded on the previous and next pages. After nearly two hours of meticulous work, she realized a pattern: each series of numbers seemed to consist of two parts, the first part was a two-letter code corresponding to the abbreviation of a farming household in the cooperative list she had previously, the second part was a number representing the weight in kilograms, and at the end there was always a single letter, either the letter D or the letter B.

She took the list of households raising the Kenh Ba cooperative that she copied from the records at the Central branch, compared each two-letter code, and gradually matched the names of nearly twenty different farming households. But what caught her attention the most was the last letter: most of the lines ended with the letter B, only seven lines, all on the pages near the back of the notebook, ended with the letter D.

Those seven lines, when she compared the accompanying dates, all fell within the last three months before the poisoning batch was discovered. She sat up straight, a hunch telling her that the B could stand for “normal,” and the D could stand for something else — maybe a person's name, maybe a special kind of note her father used to mark shipments he suspected had problems.

If this speculation is correct, the notebook is not just an ordinary production management diary, but a private record, a kind of silent investigative diary that her father had conducted himself in the final months before everything went down — evidence that he had realized that something unusual was happening, and had begun quietly recording each case, perhaps in preparation for something bigger that he had not yet done.

Hai Yen took a photo of all seven lines, compared them with the list of farming households to determine exactly which pond they belonged to, and told herself that this would be the next clue she needed to pursue: to directly meet the farming households whose names were in those seven D lines, if they still lived in this area, to ask if they still remembered anything about those special shipments.

Among the seven names, one name caught her attention immediately: "Bay Correct", the farming household with the pond closest to her mother's house, only about a fifteen-minute walk away. Even though it was dark, Hai Yen still decided not to wait until the next morning, put on a coat and walked there, carrying the notebook that was photographed on her phone.

Mr. Bay Thuy's house is a four-level brick house, the lights in the house are still on even though it is past eight o'clock in the evening. A man in his sixties opened the door, looking at Hai Yen with the questioning look of someone not used to receiving strangers at this hour.

“Who are you looking for?”

"Yes, I am uncle Tien's daughter, the former head of Kenh Ba cooperative. I have something to ask you. I wonder if you still remember my father."

Mr. Bay Correct's face suddenly changed color, his eyes looked at Hai Yen more closely, then he sighed, opened the door wider and invited her in. "Oh my god, uncle Tien's daughter. Go inside, you're standing outside, people are watching."

In house, he told, his voice slow and full of nostalgia, about the years he used to raise shrimp for the cooperative, and about three months before everything collapsed, his pond had an unusual death of shrimp, of unknown cause. He reported it to the cooperative, and Hai Yen's father himself went to the pond and personally took water samples to test, different from the usual process of only sending technical staff to take samples.

"Uncle Tien told me back then that he suspected someone mixed something strange into the water supply to the ponds near the main canal, and it wasn't the farmer's fault." Mr. Bay Correct recalled, his voice lowered. "He told me not to tell anyone, so he could secretly find out more, afraid that if he made a big deal of it without proof, people would accuse him of ruining the cooperative's reputation."

“Do you know what happened after that?”

"No, my child. Less than a month later, the poisoning incident broke out, the cooperative collapsed, Uncle Tien was arrested, and I was busy taking care of my pond. I didn't have the heart to ask any more questions." He shook his head, his eyes distant. "Now that I think about it, I feel so guilty. Maybe if I had boldly spoken out about our pond back then, maybe I could have helped Uncle Tien."

Hai Yen reassured him, thanked him for what he had just shared, then asked permission to leave when it was late at night. On the way back to the boarding house, she felt a stream of complicated emotions welling up in her heart: Mr. Bay Correct's story not only confirmed that her father had proactively investigated an unusual source of pollution, but also showed that he had acted alone, silently, without trusting the cooperative's official process — exactly as she was doing now, ten years later, on her own journey.