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Notes -
Do people not go harvesting shellfish as a commercial operation on Canadian beaches? It's fallen out of favour here now, but in my own town there used to be people going out on the harbour or out to the beaches when the tide went out so they could gather mussels etc. for sale.
The big deal here is salmon fishing, which is a perennial (though again, died down in recent years) tussle between the holder of the fishing rights on the river (who is selling them as part of the package of tourism to overseas fishermen for the whole experience) and the local guys fishing the river (poaching) and selling on the salmon.
Nobody round here is Cambodian (yet) so yeah, I think you can take it they're selling the shellfish on, well unless they're planning a multi-generational get-together of an enormous clam bake 😁
I'm going to go out on the opposite limb here and claim that Western (which is what we are really talking about re: whiteness) success is down to Christianity. A set of moral, ethical and cultural values that were imposed society-wide across a particular region for centuries shaped the mindsets and expectations of the inhabitants around things like the common good (keep the rules about over-fishing, and don't over fish because everyone should get their fair share, and a fair share is due because 'who is my neighbour/love your enemy/we are all children of God' etc.)
Asians and illegal fishing seems to be a predictable pattern anywhere there’s a large Asian diaspora population- commercial fish poaching on the gulf coast is a mostly Vietnamese crime and buying carp fished out of the trinity river(fish from this river is banned for human consumption due to water contamination) is, according to local legend, how Chinese buffets in Dallas get their fish.
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It wasn't always clear. The personal limit was something like 20 clams, and the guy who collected 789 clams was definitely selling them somewhere, but the guy who collected 64 above the limit? He told the officer it was indeed for a family feast but who knows.
64 does sound realistically like "we're having a big family get-together". My childhood to early teens was spent living in the country beside the sea, in an area where both my parents had grown up, and if some official popped up while we were walking on the strand and said "Oi! You can't pick those barnacles, there's a law about that!", we'd have felt "what the hell are you on about, my dad's family did this when he was a kid, when was there a law, besides it's the strand, it's open for everyone, nobody owns it".
I can get why your Cambodian clients would think "well this is some weird-ass Western nonsense" about that. We, ahem, may or may not have been in receipt of some mysteriously acquired salmon that was definitely not poached out of the duke's river from a friend of a friend in my youth 😉
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There is a reason why the UK will send you to jail for 2 years for handling a salmon in suspicious circumstances.
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Molly Malone?
Not that part of the country, but yeah - certainly in my father's time people went picking shellfish on the beaches and shores, and up to my teen years I used to see them doing so even in the town harbour. It was always sort of "poor people food source" and not highly regarded, and with fears about pollution and big producers selling those kinds of items in supermarkets etc. it went out of style.
But your Cambodian friends doing it are not acting weird, they probably think the Canadians are the weird ones for "what do you mean you can't dig for clams?"
That's my best guess. I had a similar experience with dumbfounded Mexicans arrested for DUIs who seemed genuine in their bafflement "what do you mean you can't drink and drive?"
A huge problem with the new "refugee" populations as well.
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Re: drinking and driving, while that has finally become socially unacceptable here in Ireland - though people continue to do it, and now have added 'driving while high/stoned/under the influence of drugs' to the repertoire since now we're a modern, urbanised country - we'd have some local politicians defending it on the basis that (1) rural people don't have access to buses and taxis like town people and (2) it's often the only means for social outing for those guys to go to the pub once a week. Also, claims that such crackdowns would mean small pubs in rural areas would have to shut down.
Some of those chancer politicians' efforts from 2013 and 2019.
Drink driving impacts rural areas, drug driving impacts town/city areas.
Amazing
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