by Hannah Chen
Step one: watch an informative documentary. Preferably one with a British narrator.
It’s your last day of eating fish. Forever.
“Not forever,” your mother corrects you. “Just for the next year.”
“Same thing,” you tell her. She ignores you, humming an optimistic tune in her newly aware sense of self, a self that doesn’t want to kill fish for the sake of the orcas in the ocean. Orcas eat fish. Humans eat fish. Humans eat more fish than the orcas. Orcas thus are dying.
“We need to save the orcas,” your mother now repeats.
You stare at the bowl of rice covered in maple-glazed salmon in front of you. The steaming salmon is perfectly pink, perfectly cooked, and it is decorated with ornaments of green scallions that make you wish you could eat this over and over again. You take a bite, and something sharp hits the roof of your mouth: a fish bone. You spit it out onto a napkin.
By the end of dinner, your napkin has soaked both your saliva and dozens of fish bones. You fold the napkin over and crumple it. But your discomfort doesn’t disappear nearly as easily as you can remove the image of bones from your mind. This fish is small, similar to your own five foot two self. Yet, there are so many bones that you can’t even count. Later, you research and find that fish have one hundred and thirty bones just for their skull while humans have twenty-two. There must be so much to protect, you think, so that’s why they have so many bones. But what’s the use now? It’s dead.
The next time you head out to a restaurant, your mom reminds you that you aren’t eating fish anymore. You flip the plastic pages of the menu, plastic that when thrown away lives on a dump truck until dumped into an ocean, where it lives until a perfectly live turtle eats it for dinner. When your iced tea comes, you stir the ice around with your straw. The swirling ice looks like the hundreds of silver fish that gather in circles, attempting to ward off the shark that’s getting ready to eat them. Do fish feel fear right before they die? What do they think when boats infect their waters with black oil, and all they get in return is death?
One year later, your mom orders sushi. You ask her what happened to the no fish rule. She explains that, sometimes, it’s the effort that counts.
Step two: try a food that’s deemed socially unacceptable.
The first time you travel to Taiwan with your family, your distant relatives, whom you’ve never met before, take you from restaurant to restaurant where you try exotic cuisine. When you are served a dish called a thousand-year-old egg, you grapple with how it has existed for a century (it hasn’t) and refuse to touch it. But then soup gets served, and you’re comforted by the fact that you see something vaguely familiar.
Your mouth signals to your brain that the soup is pretty good: salty, a little bit sweet, a gentle addition of scrambled egg inside. You turn to your second or third distant uncle to ask what kind of soup it is, but you can’t interpret what he says–the Mandarin you’ve learned in school is incredibly insufficient for normal use. He only points and gives you a thumbs up. Your mom tells you to be respectful and just eat. But what looks like fish or squid isn’t, and you begin to wonder if what you’re suspecting is true. In your spoon, you gather pieces of unfamiliar meat shaped like a triangle, almost as soft as a fish but with a tougher texture that doesn’t quite break, drowning in brownish liquid. As you take another sip of the soup, you let it linger on your tongue as you attempt to understand what it is you’re eating.
And somehow, you figure it out. It’s shark fin soup.
Putting your spoon down, you nudge your sister, and the two of you feel the original hunger die down in your stomachs. There’s a dead shark inside of you. You think of the moments when you shook your head at the shameful eaters of shark fin soup––careless, inhumane people who were blind to the process of cutting off shark fins and throwing live sharks back into the ocean for their own selfishness.
You take large gulps of steaming Chinese tea, which burns your throat but mostly erases the traces of shark fin soup in your mouth. For the rest of the evening, you avoid all dishes except for the jasmine rice. Your relatives ask if you’ve eaten enough (at least, that’s what you’ve gauged from their hand gestures), and you nod and smile, mouth full of rice and white lies.
Step three: become an exhausted hypocrite.
“We should really eat less meat and fish,” your parents say at dinner. But our dinner table is brimming with the following: bulgogi (Korean stir-fried beef), ssam (lettuce for the meat), rice, kimchi stew (with chunks of tender, fall-off-the-bone pork), and gul-bi (a special Korean fish). “It’s not really good for the human system,” your dad preaches while gnawing on a pork bone. Your mom agrees, mentioning that humans were really meant for a cleaner diet and that eating meat isn’t good for the environment. She says that we need to save the orcas, being the broken record she is. Of course, she fails to remember the plastic bottles we store in the back of the apartment because we refuse to drink regular tap water.
Your sister reminds them that they’ve mentioned this over ten times during the past month. But you remain silent. You pile bulgogi and pork on top of your rice, almost choking after stuffing that large bite into your mouth, but you savor the juicy sauce that fills the space between your gums and teeth. As much as you want to be a better person, the hero who saves cats from trees and rescues the earth from abomination, you recognize that life without the flavor of oily meat and fish means life without joy: complete, utter, nothingness.
Step four: become the fish in the sea.
One Sunday morning, you decide to go swimming. Get your body moving, your mom tells you. So you squeeze into a skin tight bathing suit that also squeezes the oxygen out of your body, and as the elevator slowly approaches the bottom floor, you pray that the water will ripple. Maybe that woman with the pink cap will be there; she would be nice company. But the pool is still. Nobody is swimming. You wonder if you should go back upstairs, but you don’t want to be a coward, even though you are.
Your thighs reach the water. You inhale. Your waist meets the water. You exhale. When your feet touch the ground, the water has reached right below your shoulders. Staring across the fifty-meter pool, you are comforted by a janitor that walks by. You would’ve much preferred to swim if you had a companion, to keep you company, to make the pool less large, to remind you less of a crime documentary you watched about a dead body floating in the water. Maybe if your mom hadn’t shown you movies of sharks when you were younger, you wouldn’t be so afraid. But eventually, you press the goggles onto the outer edge of your eyes and kick from the edge to begin swimming.
You watch for the lines on the bottom of the pool that signify how far along you’re going. When you pass the second line, you are relieved that you’re two thirds of the way there. But as you turn your head, raising your right arm for the next stroke, you see a dark shadow with fins in the corner of your eye, and you begin to kick ferociously. It’s nothing, you try to tell yourself. It’s not really there.
When you reach the other end, your gasping lungs don’t bother you. Even though there’s nothing else in the pool except for you, your body feels exposed and naked––completely unarmed. You focus on the ripples, the waves that go back and forth, teasing you.
For the next lap, you think of a recent New York Times podcast that you’ve listened to, the one about shark attacks at Cape Cod. Humans look like Seals. Sharks eat seals. Sharks will eat humans. You think about the men and women who have gone surfing and have seen a shark fin surface above the water, automatically preparing for death. Chlorine escapes through your goggles and into your eyes, and your shoulders and calves begin to burn and ache, but you refuse to slow down. The shape of a shark lingers behind you, chasing you, and suddenly, you slam your knuckles against the end of the pool. Ripped skin begins to bleed.
With each breath, you gasp like you’ve been drowning in the water and finally surfaced. But you have been drowning––in cowardice. Your fingers begin to prune, forming wrinkles that look like engraved mazes on your skin. You wonder if sharks eat prey that look unappetizing, or if boats capture fish already dead; you wonder if this is how the fish feel when the boats and sharks chase after them.
You decide to never eat fish again.
Step five: be tempted by the insatiable hunger that exists until fulfilled. You take a bite of the meat. All day you regret it. And the cycle repeats again.
Hannah Chen is a 17-year-old currently living in Singapore, who writes to reflect on herself and those around her. She is the published author of Nice to Meet You, a creative nonfiction short story collection.