The Fish

Americans, famously, prefer their meat delivered so transformed that its origins are masked, although not so transformed that they're forced to ask, "What is this? Is it beef?" What they like is muscle tissue, separated from bone and gristle, the fat trimmed, delivered in geometric slices or blocks, or ground and shaped into the familiar. Americans do not like to look their meals in the eye. Is it the shame, the guilt of eating a creature you'd never met before? Are we avoiding the cooked look of rebuke? And why the avoidance of bone — except for ribs, which are mostly bone and the only acceptable instance — and the dislike of feet?

I had thought myself immune to squeamishness in facing my food. For one thing, the Chinese always include the head of a bird as one of the pieces in the chopped roasted poultry jumble they deliver to table. You're stirring about with your chopstick looking for a delectable piece when you happen upon what looks like a section of neck with a dimple. As you quizzically spin it about, the dimple resolves into an ear, and you see the shuteye head of your victim, its mute beak, sorting themselves into significance. It never fails to take the breath out of guests.

I have watched my mother, in the tradition of all Chinese mothers, claim as her right the jellied eye of a cooked fish, seen her greedily sucking out its hard white round center.

But I met my match at a sushi restaurant in Beijing, one of the best I'd ever dined in, in a private room, treated to dinner by associates of a friend. As a harbinger of disaster, the woman across from me, a thickheaded, dumpy, colorless creature with stringy, tangled grayish-yellow hair, had arrived in a black stretch lace top over a hot pink camisole, drowned in my least favorite perfume, the bludgeoner Amarige. As we entered the dining room, waves of it rolled back from her body's every undulation and sent my head snapping back from the invisible blows.

Thus buffeted and weakened, I faced my saddest victim. The first course arrived, ordered by our Nipponophile host, a macho Chinese with blackened teeth who had spent the better part of his professional life in Japan: It was a fish with one fillet cut away and sliced into fresh, translucent sashimi, fanned out across a bed of ice in a deep froth of crisp shaved radish. The rest of the fish was mounted above the meat, with a chopstick stuck in one gill and another in the flesh of the tail, hanging in a U-curve, the mouth and tail arched toward heaven.

It was still alive. Its gills flared and constricted in the alien, stinging air. Its mouth sucked futilely at nothing. Its small fins weakly writhed. The long, lovely ribs of the tailfin flexed, and now and again, in a sudden passion, the body would give a huge shudder from top to bottom as it released more of the life it was clinging to.

How could anyone enjoy eating this thing? The flesh would be as fresh if the fish were dead. You could prove its recent departure, if that were your aim, merely by showing the table the live fish before dispatching it. There was nothing to be gained from this torture but to add the salt of cruelty. Such an idea isn't purely Japanese, of course. One could imagine Roman noblemen, in the richness of their decadence, ordering live creatures to watch them die in slow, beautiful throes in some steadily heating broth, or dining on a leg of a lamb with the amputated victim in bandaged attendance. But we who haven't yet retreated to vegetarianism have learned to accept the slaughter of our food as the way of nature; frequently, though, we insist upon a fiction of the relative painlessness and dignity of the proceedings, and we feel revulsion and horror on finding the true conditions of factory farms and butchery, and might pay a bit extra for cows allowed to graze in pasture and chickens given the run of the yard.

Even so, those of us who eat meat are usually not so rigorous. We'll buy a slice of ham in a breakfast sandwich and never think of the life and death of what's between our teeth. We'll chew on pepperoni pizza free of guilt.

But to enjoy the prolonged and painful death of your dinner? I tell you from experience that it makes the meat no more succulent. I slowly chewed one piece to be polite, tasting freshly of nothing, and the resilient cool flesh transmitted pure horror to every nerve in my mouth. One of our hosts, in Chinese fashion, hustled one last piece to my plate, which I prodded weakly, managing a wan half smile, then gulped it as you would a large pill, washing it down with too much sake, too fast.

In all fairness, fish suffer in fishmarkets. They suffer on the hook. They would, if questioned, confess to preferring to live, and thank you for asking.

But more horrible even than the suffering itself is the expectation that one is supposed to relish it as a seasoning. What kind of a woman do you think I am? I wanted to ask the blank-faced waitress, perhaps while clawing furiously at the hem of her dress. Who are you people?

Would they think me a coward? Is the meal a test of strength? Or is it a test of callousness? Or is it only a display of freshness after all?

---

Further reading: Elizabeth Bishop