Good to Eat
“Exotic,” remarked my father, shiny and new: parent of seventeen minutes, fresh from the clerk’s office. The room smelled like chlorine and stagnant water. A hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Boston’s Chinatown, one of the least impressive eateries in America. We were seated in the back of the restaurant by the tower of dimly lit fish tanks, two steps from the washrooms. I kept my hands in my lap, for the table was greasy.
“Like you. Your homeland’s food.” I was Korean, but how were they supposed to know?
My new mother’s skin glowed white under the tank lighting. The paper lanterns swung overhead, stirred by some invisible draft. They brushed the ends of her straw-like hair. My parents and aunts and uncles, cousins I’d barely met, were packed around the circular table. The tea was too sweet, but they finished the pot. I bit into a spongy egg roll and got a mouthful of salt. Everything was salty— even the water that the waitress topped off every few minutes.
The occupants of the fish tanks stared at me from behind the filthy glass. Silvery tilapia grazed the plastic bottom among piles of debris and effluvia. From bottom to top: cod, dragon tongue, and black bass. Finally, lobsters and crabs, their claws bound by rubber bands.
My mother was pointing with a French-tipped nail, looking for something with bright, swollen eyes, good to eat. I was looking for the floaters, the ones that bobbed along the top of the water, belly-up and baking in the florescent lights like an old shoe.
As I took another swig of my glass I wondered if the fish and I were drinking the same shit. My mother pointed at a lone crab in a tank by itself. Black, bead-like eyes stared at me from within the glossy red shell.
“That one,” My mother said to the waitress, who donned yellow gloves. “I want her.”
When the waitress plunged her hands into the tank and fished it out, its legs flailing as she carried her away, the dinner guests laughed. Minutes later, the waitress returned with a steaming platter.
The family swarmed the plate. They grabbed the crab by its shelled legs and pulled. The innards stretched like taffy, briefly tethered by fraying threads of flesh, before finally splintering. Bleached teeth tore into the mottled shell and the smooth surface cracked under the assault. Afterward, they spit the crimson husk out whole, empty, and broken down to its barest elements.