Proud of This Stench
Eating Fish in New York City
By Rebecca Kwee
Get out of your Queens, New York, ground-floor, studio apartment, where sunlight, the reluctant philanthropist, streams stingily through your wrought-iron, burglar-bar window.
Walk ten minutes northeast to your nearest Chinese grocery store. Keep your pace allegro ma non troppo—tempo of a lively Beethoven sonata, Bad Romance, or I Will Survive. Traverse continents with each street crossing—past the Kosher bakery, the Peruvian rotisserie chicken store, your favorite Sichuan restaurant. Hold your own against the grime-stained, winter winds.
Your ancestors once, too, navigated tempestuous winds.
Riding the Northeast monsoon from China to the Java Sea, they embarked
upon new lives and new diets, forgetting to return
five moons later, when the winds reversed
from North to South.
You are not as strong as your ancestors.
The winds push you the other way, the way home. You try
your best to move forward.
Squeeze your palms in your coat pockets and avoid all eye contact, until you spot a storefront of piled-up, dried goods. You might be affronted by the jingle of the shopkeeper’s bell, or the pungent pyramids of dried shiitake and dead fish, but do not recoil—you have reached the promised land.
As you browse the seafood aisle, be not tempted by pleasures of the flesh—the fatty, farmed-salmon bellies or the glistening, red snappers.
You are hunting for bones and spines and cheeks.
You are making a soup, from your childhood in Singapore.
Find what you need in an unassuming corner. A $2, saran-wrapped, discard pile of salmon bones, skins, heads, and tails.
Great deal, as always. The cashier nods in approval.
You pay in cash, with the swagger of a Chinese immigrant ordering from the secret Chinese menu at a restaurant. You pray a silent prayer for the tonnes of fish scraps thrown out by Americans each day. You think, for a second, that you have struck gold. This time, unlike the San Francisco Chinese miners centuries before, you will not be called a dirty, foreign plunderer.
Perhaps just a smelly, fish-head eater.
***
As a child, you were known across three generations of your extended family as a fish-eating savant. The legend goes:
One day, as a wee toddler, you had a fish bone lodged in your throat. Your grandma, who was babysitting you, freaked out. But with the uncanny calmness of a bomb-disposal operator, you maneuvered the bone past your pharynx, through your tonsils, and onto the tip of your tongue, ferrying the tiny, treacherous, foreign object to its final resting place—your toddler food tray. This solo feat was not a big enough miracle to convert Wai-Po to Christianity, but it sure was enough to make her believe you were special.
Thereafter, you devoted your childhood to eating fish. You ate fish while your friends ate sweets. You ate fish while your friends drank coke. You ate fish before big tests. You ate Wai-Po’s sliced pomfret and ginger soup over Channel 5 cartoons, removing the bones one at a time as Teletubbies frolicked across the screen. High priestess of umami by the age of eight, you anointed each soup bowl with more fried fish (ikan bilis), drowning each slice of pomfret—or mackerel, or garoupa, depending on Wai-Po’s weekly gambling results—in a pool of diced red chilis and kecap manis.
“This is my body and blood, which is for you,” speaketh the sauce bowl.
Or is it your sea-faring, spice-loving forebears?
“Eat this in remembrance of me.”
Your primary school teacher once asked you to describe yourself. You inscribed onto the universe, “Rebecca enjoys reading, cycling, and drawing. She does not like sweet foodstuffs but loves savory fish.”
And that is how you ended up with no cavities, in the Gifted Programme, and at a Top US University. You ate fish while your siblings didn’t.
Marco Polo concurs. During his five-month stay in Sumatra in 1291,
bypassing the Straits of Malacca, he proclaimed,
“The fish here are the best in the world!”
Not that you needed validation
from some Italian influencer
backpacking across Asia.
This legend was challenged decades later by your Tinder date, a self-made Singaporean entrepreneur, who cited your propensity to succeed within a system but fail miserably outside of it. A dreadful test-taker from a poor family, he now yielded an exponential return on investment for his parents. Meanwhile—you, childless, spouseless, annotating academic articles on fish.
Your family never met this man, so they remain fervent in their belief.
***
At some point in your childhood, you fell in love with boneless fish.
The object of your affection? The Filet-O-Fish from McDonald’s.
Something about its uniformity, its radial symmetry, its symphony of textures (crispy and flaky and soft and gooey), enticed you. To think a slippery, bony fish could now be held and consumed with such ease! To think one could modify one’s nature! Be whatever one wanted to be—and yet, still fish!
You didn’t yet realize the legacy of fish in the United States. Fish was the medium through which marginalized American cultures filtered into the mainstream. During the slavery era, slaves would often only have Saturday afternoons free. Many who finished work early would fish in their free time, leading to Saturday-night, fish-fry cookouts, a tradition that continues in Black America today. The Roman Catholics of America too, abstaining from meat on Fridays, chose to partake in fish instead. In fact, the Filet-O-Fish only exists because Catholics near a local McDonald’s weren’t buying any burgers on Fridays.
Ketchup, the cornerstone of American pantries, originated from the fermented fish sauce of your ancestors in Fujian, China. They called it kôechiap in Hokkien, carrying the precious sauce as they migrated to Vietnam, to Malaysia, to Indonesia, much like your aunties who smuggle sambal belacan on flights to America and Europe (note to airport security: a paste is NOT a liquid). Only when Dutch and British sailors caught wind of the exotic sauce in the 1600s did it make its way to the West, becoming the bastardized tomato version we know today, a fish sauce with no fish.
How could you have known all this—the myriad memories, transcontinental traumas of a fish in the USA—when it was sold to you as a homogeneously-American-pop-culture consumable?
All you knew was that a Filet-O-Fish was effortlessly self-assured, like the Bob Dylan and Katherine Hepburn posters you Blu-Tacked to your walls. A Filet-O-Fish was independent: no ties to the past, nor obligations to the future.
You swam towards the American fast-food dream, and you never looked back.
“And that is how she slowly became corrupted and stopped going to Church, that American education of hers, learning all these selfish American values, I regret sending her there,” your mother complains, praying for a nice Christian man to take you to American Sunday Service.
***
There comes a time in a fish-eater’s life when certain thoughts hit you all at once, in the dead of the night:
1. You peaked too soon as a toddler. Prodigious fish-eating abilities hold scant value on CVs and dating profiles;
2. Fish fillets are the saddest beings on Earth;
a. Removed from their spines, they live Stepford-Wives-esque existences, indistinguishable from one fillet to the next, forgetting from which spines they came. They felt free, once, free to roam the vast universe, until the weight of knowing they were completely alone, dispossessed and disembodied, plunged them into existential depression...
3. Right now, you feel like the loneliest person on Earth, fifteen thousand kilometers from a home you renounced, indistinguishable from one New Yorker to the next, all because you wanted a space to be, to be a free fish.
A memory comes to you. Your family, a round dinner table, a plate of steamed garoupa with soy sauce and scallions. In this ritual, everyone played a role: your grandpa, who had first dibs on the fish meat and fish head; your sister, who pounced on the eyes and cheeks; your dad, who removed the bones; you and your brothers, who savored the white belly meat; and your mom, who chewed the bones.
How comforting it was to know the order of things.
You tell yourself you must recreate this the next day.
***
Gathering the salmon scraps with your bare hands, you assemble them into a pot with handfuls of scallion, ginger, garlic, and peppercorns. Some shiitake mushrooms, shaoxing wine, tofu. You watch your concoction boil.
A familiar fish stink emanates from the pot, overwhelms your kitchen, and expands into your whole studio. It is starting to get overly familiar now. In fact, the stench is absolutely filthy. You can only assume your creation has brazenly removed its socks to reveal dripping wet athlete’s feet.
Ah, shit. It probably stinks so bad because you’ve forgotten to pan-fry the fish before boiling it, per the instructions of a Singaporean cooking blog you found.
Resigned yet unwavering in your desire to feel less alone, you sip a bowl of broth with both hands. It does not taste that foul in your mouth—the ginger and scallions have somewhat nullified the fishiness. It isn’t great, though. The milky, earthy, full-bodied umami you long for is absent. Nevertheless, warmth gushes from your throat to your stomach, the region where you usually feel the acute aches of alienation.
You open your solitary window, patiently awaiting the moment when your studio stops smelling like rotten fish. You wonder if your neighbors think you are dead.
The moment does not come. Ten hours later, your studio still reeks. By this point, you’ve embraced your intruder, having Googled various iterations of “How to remove fish smell in room” and “Why does fish smell so bad?”
You learn that the chemical that causes a fish to stink is the very one that keeps a fish alive. Trimethylamine N-oxide, or TMAO for short, helps marine fish counter the salinity of saltwater, a protein stabilizer that “prevents water pressure from distorting proteins and thus killing the animal” (Source: Wikipedia, where your truths are found). Once a fish dies and bacteria takes hold, TMAO is converted to trimethylamine, unleashing its stench upon the world.
You respect the tireless hustle of a saltwater fish. The stink now reminds you of yourself, and the millions of New Yorkers who move here to build worlds they can breathe deeply in.
Rebecca, remember
your first time at a crowded cacophonous jazz bar
in a West Village basement, where the sweaty sax player
and the E-string of the double bass touched your heart? Remember
when you and six nameless film fans streamed into a cinema
on a Friday afternoon, watching a French New Wave film
of trees being chopped down? Remember
Morning Glory Bakery, when the owner made you her top-secret beef brisket noodles,
recounted why she moved to America
and asked, like your mom did, “Does your poop look normal?”
Those were times you burst
with joy—saltwater fish
finding the sea, finally
for the very first time.
You are proud of this stench within you. It is a mysterious resolve to keep going, gifted to you from your past. It is an amulet, helping you bounce back from constant catcalls, roach-infested apartments, and failures in work, love, and visa applications.
Could you have fallen for the smell of rotting fish?
As you curl into a fetus on your bed, you think it must be so. The stink envelopes you, embraces you—a makeshift womb. You won’t be alone tonight.
Rebecca Kwee is an educator and writer. Born in Singapore and raised in Taiwan, she is now based in Singapore after 20 years abroad. She is currently exploring critical theory, decolonization, ethnobotany, and liminal spaces in her writing. Her art writing has also been published online on Hyperallergic.