Salmon Fishing inDong Bei While visiting my second daughter in California last July,she tried to sit me down to watch the movie SalmonFishing in Yemen, a flick starring one of British favorites, EwanMcGregor. We were not successful in theviewing part, but the movie title and story stayed in my mind to checkoutlater. Let me get the reader comfortable with Yemen. In biblical Solomon's Queen of Sheba (Sabeans),Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen folks are in the ball field. Look at the map and the southern tip of theArabian Peninsula at the juncture of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden (thatspills into the Arabian Gulf) across the Horn of Africa, Yemen is on the right(east), while Sabean Africa is on the left (west). Aden was the British Admiralty's old coal portcity, and Yemen's capital Sana'a is north close to Saudi Arabia's border. Imagine Somalia pirates though do not equate the picturewith Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom of the Pirates of the Caribbean. The movie's plot of salmon fishing in Yemen isjust as preposterous as the Black Pearl callingon Port Royal, though the pirates is not inappropriate as Yemen is riddled withmany rebel groups. A tad tactile "feel"of the place, Yemen is bisected by 15 degrees latitude, which puts it in thesame latitude as Saipan, Guam, and Luzon of the Philippines. The image of rebels is helpful. In the movie, they oppose Mohammad thedreamer, a Yemeni who did well in England, build a dam to irrigate downstreamdessert fields and fill it with Salmon to encourage fly-fishing in Yemen. The rebels smell foreign influence in thesport, so they bomb the dam that is an intrusion into tradition with anassassination attempt on the Sheik. Our allusion to similarities of temperature with ourfamiliar tropic isles is deceptive as Yemen's aridity is many times over, evenwith its western highlands. Our Yemenisalmon proponent, in damming a river, is actually retaining the humidity uplandas streams from the highlands evaporate before making it to shore. The humidity on the highlands adequatelysupplies water to streams and rivers but retaining it before it hitssubterranean aquifers is the terrain's challenge. Those unfamiliar with salmon, it is a cold water fish prevalentin the temperate zone, the salmo salar in the Atlantic, the Pacific salmon thatincludes the chinook and the coho. Fishermenare familiar with the other salmonids like the trout and the char. Google the subject if interested. Those acquainted with the Cagayan River of northern Luzonknows of the specie called Ludong thatused to be common in the river of my youth but has been overfished through theyears, also succumbing to the chemical effluents of the Green Revolution thatdecimated native species of marine life. Anyway, the endangered specie Ludongspawns on fresh water where it was born before swimming to the ocean's seawater,and returns upriver to die in the fresh water, akin to the salmon. OK, so we got Yemen and the salmon pat; as to the movie, wewill skip the country-rebel relationship in Yemen's politics, and the UK's PR shenanigansin the Middle East, or the characters' romance that ends in a happy ending. The movie is about injecting something new intowhat is ordinary and natural by transforming the environment. The salmon is unnatural to the Yemen terrainbut the building of the dam allows for a cold fresh body of water that couldpossibly sustain a life from elsewhere into a new environment. The Sheik plays the visionary entrepreneur, a biologistreluctantly joins the project since it defies reason, an opportunistic UKofficial sees in the project a political opening, and a heart-broken assistantwhose beau went missing in a war zone, all suspend the limited wisdom ofscience to allow hope to inject itself into the process, both in the salmon enterpriseas well as in their individual lives. Thesurprise comes in the salmon's ability to defy expectations and move upstream afterrebels bombed the dam hoping the salmons flow downstream to die. The salmons decided to swim their owndestiny! Dong Bei salmon fishing is no problem since the PrimorskyKrai of far eastern Russia (Maritime Province where Vladivostok is located) hassalmon from the Sea of Japan wade upstream the Amur River bordering Russia andChina's Manchuria. The real salmonfishing is about an old life from another dreaming a new life by altering environment. In our case, it is this lao ye ye (old man) who is doing just that! I watch from my solarium the neighborhood street sweeper whokeeps our one-block commons tidy and relatively clean the place just becauseone day, this dude brought out a trash picker and started picking up the trashon the street. Didn't do anythingstrenuous but he saw a salmon swimming upstream, and decided to follow. I noticed a grandma doing the same on theother end of the commons. The salmon in the movie survived. In DongBei, I will, too. How are thesalmons in Saipan doing? j'aime la vie pinoypanda2031@aol.com yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!