How do language features help create a setting in the exposition?

The author’s story begins with a desperate and horrific tale of being one of the “boat people” seeking refuge from the consequences of the fall of Saigon and the exit of U.S. troops from Vietnam in the late 1970’s. The story is filled with bad weather, modern pirates, sickness, exposure and a pervasive threat of sinking at any moment:

“The boat was so small that we were jammed into every crevice, corner and spare patch of deck. It was almost impossible to get downstairs into the hold, which was heaving with sweating bodies and the suffocating stench of old fish. Forty people had transformed this tiny fishing boat into a living, seething mass of human desperation floating in the Eastern Sea.”