The meat of this fish is tasty but during my grandfather's younger days it was not considered a good or superior fish by many Foochows.
The wong ngak was usually eaten by fishermen who could hooked a few each time they went fishing. Sometimes they would get about 10 in a day of slow fishing. The Malays and Ibans who caught them in those days would string the baong with a straw and sell them for just a few dollars for even perhaps one whole string of 10!!
One day my aunt went fishing with my cousins and she caught a baong quite near the Mee Ann Rice Mill, but unfortunately she was stung by the very active fish when she pulled it up from the river. There was no time to clobber the fish.
My cousins quickly took the fish to the kitchen while one attended to my aunt. In those days, no one would think of going to a clinic to see a doctor and any way, the government hospital was quite far away.
So my aunt gave herself some oil and pressed some blood out. For three days she suffered from fever and cold shivers.
That was the last time she ever actually went fishing with my older cousins for not long after that she went to Kuching to study. She was a good aunt because she was always very caring and she led the nephews in daily activities like fishing, vegetable growing and feeding of chickens and ducks. She made sure that she contributed her time to help out her sisters in law.
The incident of her being stung by a baong was remembered by her nephews. It was a traumatic experience to her and my other aunts.
Luckily according to one of my cousins, after she suffered more than three days, she recovered. To the very young nephews it was really a matter of life and death. Every one was scared that she would die.
Wong Ngak therefore was a fish that frightened many of us.
But it did make a good soup.
(In later years, whenever someone was stung by a wong ngak and fish like ikan sembilan, a boy's urine was an instant cure.)
2 comments:
Fishing for ikan sembilang in the Rejang River in front our house in Sarikei was my favourite pastime when I was a kid. I must have caught hundreds of them during those memorable childhood years of 1950s! Ikan sembilang and ikan baung look quite alike and they both have venomous stingers. But ikan baung is a surface feeder while ikan sembilang is a bottom feeder and its meat is tastier.
When many bloggers have already stopped blogging, it is a pleasure to still be able to read many interesting stories on your blog. Thanks, Chang Yi.
Thank you Ikan Sembilang. I am writing every day to keep any old people's diseases at bay, and to keep an active record of stories from my aunts, cousins (without mentioning names) so that our next generations would at least know what life was like in the 20th century (which seems such a long time ago). Glad you like them.
It is good to meet some kindred spirits along my writing path, which at time, might be extremely lonely.
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