The Fisherman's Wife and the Merchant's Wife

The Fisherman's Wife and the Merchant's Wife

Once upon a time, long ago, there lived a very poor couple. The husband was a hard-working fisherman. Each evening he would set in the river his traps made of bamboo and reeds and then, the next morning, he would collect the fish caught in them. His wife was a very pretty woman but careless and untidy. Their small hut on the river bank was never clean and as she was too lazy to mend their clothes both of them walked around in tatters.

Every morning the couple would go out together to collect the fish caught during the night. The husband would put them in a big basket his wife carried on her back while he gathered in the traps. The basket had a hole in it which the lazy woman never bothered to repair so that as she followed her husband along the river's edge many fish fell out. This meant that although the couple always had enough fish to eat they never had more than a few to sell at the market and so could not earn much money to buy vegetables, rice and clothes.

Another couple lived on the riverside. The husband was a trader who bought and sold cloth and household goods up and down the river. One day the fisherman and his wife passed the merchant's boat, which was tied up at a jetty, and the merchant's wife saw that about half the fisherman's catch fell out of the basket on his wife's back. She felt sorry for the poor fisherman who worked so hard and whose fish were lost because of his wife's carelessness. With only a little effort both of them could be much better off, she thought, so she said to the woman, ‘Why don't you take some reeds and grass and mend the basket? It wouldn't take you long.’          

When her husband heard her speak like this he was very angry. ‘Why do you interfere?’ he said. ‘What they do is none of your business.’ Then he saw that although the fisherman's wife was very untidy she was very, very pretty. ‘If you care so much for that poor man,’ he told his wife, ‘you can go and live with him and I'll take his wife to live with me.’ And the more he looked at the fisherman's wife the prettier she seemed. ‘Shall we exchange wives, fisherman?’ he asked. The poor fisherman didn't know what to say. ‘It doesn't seem right. I have so little. How could I keep a woman who is used to having everything she wants?’ ‘She's so concerned about you she must like you,’ replied the merchant. ‘I am happy to exchange her for your wife.’ And so the fisherman agreed and the merchant's wife went to live with him and the fisherman's wife became the mistress of the trading boat.    

Straight away the merchant's wife mended the fish basket and the next day, for the first time in his life, the fisherman had a big surplus of fish to sell at the market. Every day from then on the couple had plenty of fish to sell and soon they were able to leave the hut by the river and live in a good house.

The woman looked to the future too. She didn’t want her husband to remain a fisherman all his life. She hoped he would find an easier job that brought in more money. Because his previous wife hadn’t fed him well, he wasn’t very fit, so she prepared good food for him and encouraged him to do exercises every morning and go for a run before breakfast to build up his body. At the same time she showed him how to be thrifty. ‘When you run, don’t waste your time,’ she told him. ‘If you see and small pieces of wood lying around pick them up and bring them back to me so that we don’t have to buy wood to cook with.’

Soon the fisherman became strong and could run far into the forest each morning. One day he brought back a piece of sandalwood among the other sticks. Because she had lived so long with the merchant the woman knew this perfumed wood was very valuable and much in demand for making ornaments, fans and boxes. She sent her husband back into the forest to look for sandalwood trees and very soon they stopped earning their living from fishing. Instead, the husband cut down sandalwood that his wife sold to merchants. She was so careful in the house and managed the selling so pleasantly and cleverly that the business expanded and they could hire people to work for them. They became very rich. And because they worked well together they were also very happy.

In the meantime, the pretty, lazy woman, who had gone to live with the merchant cared for nothing but herself. She didn’t clean the boat or help with the business. She didn’t cook or make clothes, she just bought whatever she wanted and ate and slept her life away. When she had a baby she didn’t even bother to wash its nappies but simply threw the dirty ones away and cut new ones from the supply of cloth her husband had on the boat. She was so careless and helped so little that the business went badly and the husband had to sell his boat. Because he was the only one who worked and his new wife didn’t look after the money he earned, they became poorer and ended up as beggars.

One day, as they were begging along the street, they stopped at the home of the ex-fisherman and his wife. The wife recognised her former husband who was now dressed in rags. ‘Why are you so poor?’ she asked. ‘My second wife was no help to me,’ he replied, ashamed, ‘and so I lost my business.’ The woman could not neglect the man who used to be her husband and gave him a good sum of money before sending him and his family on their way. Then the careful, clever wife and her hard-working husband lived happily ever after.

This story was first told to me by my grandmother when I was six or seven years old. Afterwards I heard it many times from my mother and I in turn told it to my younger sisters. I never got tired of hearing it or telling it although it was never told just for amusement. It was meant to teach girls how to behave, to show them what their responsibilities in life would be and how they should carry them out.

The moral of the story is very clear – women must be thrifty and tidy and know how to look after what their husbands earn. The story tells us that women are important, for no matter how hard husbands work, if their wives don’t know how to help them they will never succeed. Husbands earn the money but wives must manage it.

In my own family these values were put into practice over two generations. My grandfather was a goldsmith for the royal palace. He died very young, when my father was just ten. My grandmother kept his business going and even managed to send my father to a French school. That was a great achievement for such an education was expensive. Grandmother worked right up to the time her sons could earn their own livings. She built the house we lived in, in a business district a mile from the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh. It was a wooden house on stilts with the living quarters upstairs and a little shop underneath. She used to carry on a goldsmith’s business from there during her working years but when I was a child it was a pawnshop run by my father’s older sister, another enterprising woman.

My family was very big. Apart from my grandmother and parents, there were ten children – I was the second eldest. My father was a teacher and the only one working to support the thirteen of us so we didn’t have much money to spare. We had to be thrifty, to share and to look after everything in the house, because anything broken could not be easily replaced.

Once, when I was playing chasey with my little sister, I was running and jumping wildly and split thee seam of my long skirt. It was then that my grandmother sat me down and told me for the first time the story of the two wives. ‘You were a very careless little girl,’ she said. ‘You must watch our or you will end up like the lazy wife of the fisherman.’ I heard the story many times after that. If I didn’t hold a plate properly and it seemed I might drop it, my mother or grandmother would never scold me. They’d just say very gently that I was careless, then sit me down and remind me of the story. And I in turn would tell it to my little sister if she left her play dough scattered over the floor or did something else lazy or untidy.

I still remember this story very often. If I make clothes for myself and finish them off carelessly or buy things that aren’t really necessary I think, ‘If mother or grandmother were here, they’d remind me that I’ve been extravagant.’ I can stop myself buying things by remembering the story. I say to myself, ‘You’re spending too much, just like that fisherman’s first wife. If you spend all you earn, where will you go when you need money?’ Back home when you are short of money you have relatives to go to to help you out but here we have no one. There is just the bank and you can only get from here what you’ve put in. you have to be independent in Australia. So you see, the story of the merchant’s wife and the fisherman’s wife still reaches me so much. I thank my grandmother and my mother for telling it to me.