The Perfume River is lined with small houseboats in downtown Hue. I made this photograph from a bridge around dinnertime. This is more than a description of a woman cooking dinner. It is a distillation of life in Southeast Asia. By choosing to abstract the cook by shooting through a cloud of cooking smoke, I try to distill the nature of life on the river, difficult, yet somehow manageable. The image is full of mood and atmosphere – it’s the struggle in the chocking smoke that conveys the most to us.