美国国家公共电台 NPR Water Spinach Farmers Struggle To Recover After Hurricane Harvey

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And I'm Steve Inskeep with the deeper meaning of water spinach 1. It's a staple 2 food among some Asian-American families - they use them in stir-fries and soups - but it's grown commercially in only a few parts of the United States. And one of those places is Texas, which is still recovering from flooding after Hurricane Harvey. Many farmers in Texas are worried about what happens to their way of life. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang reports.

HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE 3: Water spinach goes by many other names - ong choy in Cantonese, rau muong in Vietnamese. But in this Cambodian-American community tucked down the gravel 4 roads of Rosharon, Texas - about a half-hour south of Houston - a farmer named Paul Boeur says most folks here call it...

PAUL BOEUR: Trakuon.

WANG: Trakuon?

BOEUR: Trakuon.

WANG: That's the Khmer name for this stocky vegetable with arrowhead leaves and hollow stems. You can find water spinach in the produce section of many Asian-owned supermarkets around the country. Here in Texas, they're grown in greenhouses behind the homes of farmers like Sok Sum.

SOK SUM: You know what? This is hard work. When you see stuff at a store, the vegetable, you don't know how hard work over here is.

WANG: For a demonstration 5, Sum grabs a meat cleaver 6 from his kitchen and walks inside one of his three plastic-covered greenhouses, each more than half a football field long. And the soil is a thick bed of water spinach vines with stems sprouting 7 just below his knee.

SUM: I get on my knee - like that.

WANG: He whacks 8 close to the ground with his cleaver until he has enough for a small green bouquet 9 of water spinach. Filling one 25-pound box with these bunches can take about two hours.

SUM: And you write your name on it. And then you're ready to go sell, make money.

WANG: Sum says he and his wife working together can usually make about 300 dollars a week to add to his disability benefits. Water spinach is the main source of income for most families here, but Sum hasn't been farming since Hurricane Harvey and the flooding turned his home into a ramshackle shell. It took about a week before the water receded 10 and he and his neighbors could return to their houses.

SUM: When I opened the door, I was crying.

WANG: You were crying?

SUM: Yeah, I cry 'cause my house gone, even my clothes gone.

WANG: Sum's wife, Sreyaun Pin, says donations from churches and volunteer groups have helped them survive since Harvey.

SREYAUN PIN: Before, I'm very, very sad and struggle. Now it's better, but still need help. Yes, really still need help.

WANG: Pin lived in a tent with her husband and their 10-year-old daughter for weeks waiting for their house to dry out. It's still damp inside and smells moldy 11, but they've moved back in. Now, she says, they and many of their neighbors are worried about the fallen beams and torn plastic sheeting for their water spinach greenhouses.

VUTH YIN: The water kind of moved fast so it's damaged on the bottom, but I don't have time to fix it.

WANG: Vuth Yin lives down the road and says his greenhouses need work too after the flood.

So what is your plan now?

YIN: We have no idea yet.

WANG: Do you have flood insurance?

YIN: No, none. We don't have anything.

WANG: And even after their greenhouses are repaired, it's not clear when they can start selling water spinach again. At least one local supermarket says after Harvey, it stopped selling water spinach from Rosharon because it's worried about possible contamination from floodwaters. Still, Yin says as a former refugee from Cambodia, he's been through a lot of challenges.

YIN: Too much. Too much, you know.

WANG: Everywhere, he says, you have to fight for a piece of life. Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News, Rosharon, Texas.