fresh fish and all that comes with it

My grandma says you can see how fresh a fish is by how shiny its eyes are and how red its flesh is, BUT nowadays you can trust no one because they inject shiny-producing-stuff and rub red coloring on not-so-fresh fish.

Since I have arrived in Taiwan, I have eaten fish everyday, sometimes even twice a day. It’s always so mysterious to me, where it came from, the way it’s laying on it’s side, eyes glowering at me, buried under a heavy heap of shredded ginger and green onions. There are a million different kinds of fish and a million different ways to cook them. Grandma has cooked them all and I cannot recognize them by taste or name except for salmon, of course.

Every time there is fish on the table – except for salmon, my mother asks me if I know how to eat it. I always tell her yes and she always tells me not to talk because I might choke on a bone. Near the end of the meal, she praises me for “knowing” how to eat it. Regardless of my years of fish-eating-knowledge she always gives me hearty portions after she has made sure it is free of all bones. I notice that my grandma does the same for her. I ask my mom why grandma always likes to eat the head of the fish. “It’s not that she likes to,” she tells me, “she is just used it.” In Taiwanese households in the past, the mother always lets her family eat the meatier portions of the fish and for herself, eats the less meaty, scaly fish head.

Today I asked my mom if dad is a good cook. She told me the only time she has ever seen my father cook outside of his restaurant was in San Francisco when they both came to visit me last March. It was a cod, half frozen, and too large for my mom to know what to do with it. He pan-fried it. We had bought it from a smelly Cantonese butcher downstairs, on Mission and Brazil St. Six of us sat around a small table in our tiny apartment kitchen. The air was hot because my mom had cooked 4 dishes along with my father’s fish. My roommate was vegetarian and my father was telling her that it was okay for vegetarians to eat fish.

I was surprised because I assumed that my father, who has opened 5 restaurants, who was a cook, who enjoys food, would naturally like to cook. My mother lowered her bowl of rice and while waving her chopsticks said, “Your father doesn’t really like to cook, he is used to it, he does it for survival. All those restaurants, they were to make money. All the dishes he’s created, what to add to them to make them taste better for Americans - to make money.”

If my father were here, he would have said, “yes, to make money so I can raise you.” And then he would have laughed and said he had done a wonderful job because my big tummy is testament to it. And along with my big tummy is assurance that I am doing what I enjoy, rather than what I have to. For this, I have yet to discover that my father is an excellent cook.