fiction: short stories
the fish
By Mina Choi
-Read out aloud at M on the Bund: Outloud, April 2009
The fish arrived on the table on a small, chipped oval saucer. It
looked alive except for the strips of scallion and ginger casually tossed
on its body. Everyone gasped as if it were something magnificent. Susan
thought she even heard someone clap. What’s so spectacular about
a plump fish on chipped platter? She couldn’t figure out how this
fish would be enough for the eight people actually attending the banquet.
After her long eleven-hour flight across the Pacific, the last thing
she wanted was to sit and orchestrate fake smiles for her husband’s
Shanghai office staff. The stickiness of the cheap plastic chairs and
the over-starched table clothes annoyed her. She stared at the mound
of food remnants on each of staffer’s plate and the heaps of crumpled
up tissues on the table. All of it made her cringe. She longed for the
crystal-clear flutes filled with champagne that she had savored in the
business class cabin
Her presence was a surprise for her husband’s birthday and surprised
him she did, returning two days earlier than announced. ‘I just
couldn’t bear the thought of missing your birthday. I just told
my sister that she had to have the baby shower without me.’ Her
husband gave her a sheepish smile and told her that his staff has already
invited him out. So here she was, sitting in a restaurant very far removed
from a romantic, candle-lit venue overlooking the Bund that she had
envisioned, drinking cheap beer and toasting every few minutes as various
staff members expressed their gratitude in their halting English and
then in Chinese. After several rotations of ‘ganbei’ raising
their skimpy beer glasses, they all sat down again to dive into the
dozen or so dishes haphazardly arranged on the round table. Her husband
seemed to enjoy this, laughing at the juvenile jokes made by the driver
and tucking into all the food, including the spicy deer meat that was
churning inside Susan’s stomach.
The female office manager, sitting to the left of Susan, kept emphatically
repeating the name of each dish in Chinese. The truth was that Susan
couldn’t care less. She was appalled to see her husband drinking
the snake blood, which made her stomach churn even harder. He obviously
had decided to show off to the staff, and that meant eating every thing.
Susan politely declined the snakeskin and blood. She instead focused
on where they might go after dinner so she could give him a proper celebration
that she had cut her trip short for.
She looked up to find that there was a sudden lull in the dinner, with
everyone looking at her in anticipation. Susan looked up at her husband.
“They want us to start on the fish. They can’t start until we’ve started,” her husband whispered.
Susan nodded and took the most miniscule quantity of the fish for herself.
The female office manager then listed off the great attributes of this
fish, how celebrated it was. Susan nodded blankly, and waited for the
others to start. An awkward pause fell over the group until finally,
the young secretary, Miss Zhang, leaned over and took a huge, fleshy
part of the fish and delicately placed on her husband’s plate.
Only then, Susan realized her mistake: she should have served her husband
first. Miss Zhang then proceeded to serve everyone else, one by one.
By the time she got to her own lone empty plate, there was nothing left
of the fish.
Susan protested, but Miss Zhang then shook her ahead and said in her
chipper English, “This way, I get the best part for myself—the
cheek and the tail.” She put the oval plate directly in front
of her and proceeded to dissect and consume parts of the fish that Susan
previously had thought were not edible. The prickly, white bones of
the fish glistened as Miss Zhang’s dexterous chopsticks bore into
every crevice of the fish remains.
The driver said, “She tricked us” and everybody laughed.
Laughing the hardest and with unconcealed delight was her husband, who
leaned forward, intensely watching Miss Zhang’s elaborate work
on the fish like a child who had just been shown a magic trick. Susan
felt the fleshy meat of the fish lodging deep inside her mouth. But
when she swallowed again, there was nothing left in her throat.