by Henry Hughes
Over the centuries, wild carp were cultivated into several colorful domestic varieties, including goldfish, which swam into fame on the scrolls and vases of the Song dynasty (960–1279). Although carp and goldfish are revered throughout East Asia—the Japanese certainly fancy their ornamental koi and sport a major league baseball team called the Hiroshima Carp—it seems China, with its vast, dusty interior and still-developing refrigerated infrastructure, has held on most tightly to the original durable fish. Carp can be raised in murky, warm water and eaten fresh when the sun is high and the sea is distant. I put the grass carp in the front basket of my bicycle and pedaled back to Building 9, where I met Jin Lei.
“Hen hao! That’s great,” she peeked into the bag. “We cook it.” Jin Lei zipped off to get a few ingredients, returning to the apartment with a bag of vegetables and Miss Li. Then Art showed up, breathing heavily but safely escorting two German women who carried beer and shrimp chips. We had no phone, but people found us, and a Friday afternoon party was born.
It was a cool, sunny September day and we opened all the windows, popped big green bottles of Wuxing beer, crunched shrimp chips, and started cooking. Dime-size scales flew all over the kitchen, and then Jin Lei gutted, gilled, and rinsed the carp, patting it dry with my new bath towel. She asked for a sharp knife, and I honed and handed her my best Japanese steel. The head and tail remained, but she made several vertical cuts through the meaty flanks down to the spine. “Too bone,” she said. We ignited a blue flame under a deep wok of oil, and I remembered Ben Whitehorse’s advice on cooking carp, though I had never tried it. When the fish hit the hot oil, every head in the apartment turned, and I shielded us with a pot lid.
Simultaneously, Li prepared a sweet crimson sauce. The fish emerged crisp and curled, and we glazed it with Li’s sauce. Beers lifted, I made a toast to Fish Fridays in Beijing.
The firm white chunks of carp were delicious and with a dab of the candied glaze, even better. Quickly following the fish, Jin Lei and Li brought out platters of vegetables—glistening eggplant and milky bok choy. The British gentleman I met on the first day, James, arrived with an older Chinese man who presented a bottle wrapped in red paper. “Have you tried the Chinese spirit, baijiu?” the man asked. I recalled the strong liquor of Malaysia but at this moment just said, “Not yet. Thank you. Let’s have some.”
“Gan bei,” the cheers went up again. More people arrived. Neighbors banged on the wall. We hushed then rose again, riding beer and baijiu into the evening.
By eight o’clock people headed home. Jin Lei and I sat on the couch, dazed, exhausted, and happy. My newly painted kitchen was covered in fish scales and sticky grease, and a pile of dishes crowned by a carp skeleton towered like a pagoda over the sink. I started cleaning then gave up, dropping into bed. Jin Lei slept on the couch, but I heard her get up before dawn and sneak away, fearing the moral censure of my Chinese neighbors.
I was sound asleep when a firm knock shook the door. I jumped up and opened it to Chen Lin in a dark suit. He looked serious. “I’m very sorry. You must go home,” he said.
“What?”
“Your Aunt Lillian passed out.”
Auld Lang Syne
I called my father from Chen Lin’s office. Aunt Lil died peacefully in a hospital bed with my father by her side—“Passed away,” I explained to Chen Lin, who nodded sympathetically and made us tea. The trip back to New York was long and doleful. Eugene hugged me at the airport and drove us home to Port Jefferson. My father, brother, Eugene, and I sat around the kitchen table and talked about Lil. Our cat, Twain, jumped on my lap. “He keeps going in her room looking for her,” my father said. My brother, David, had just started college, and I knew this would be hardest on him. David was two years old when our mother died. Lil was really the only mother he knew and loved. There was the wake and funeral. I looked into her casket; Aunt Lil is not a fish, I thought of Faulkner’s bizarre story, Bud’s giant catfish suddenly in my head. Flower fragrance soaked the room. She’s dead, I said to myself. “She’s in heaven,” her friends consoled, and I smiled politely.
There were long dinners and long talks. Birch, Janet, and Caitlin called with kind words of condolence. After an exhausting week, my brother had to get back to school. I looked into his tired blue eyes and said, “Lil was so happy to see you start college.”
“I don’t know if I can do it,” he coughed and looked down at the floor. He had gained some weight and seemed to shift uncomfortably in his clothes.
“What? School? It’s okay. Do what you can. Next term you start fresh.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he said.
“What do you say we go fishing tomorrow?”
“I don’t know. I gotta get back.”
There was a long pause as he fiddled with his keys. “Fuck it. Yeah. Let’s go,” he brightened as he spoke. Dave drove us out early to Old Field Point and parked in the driveway of his friend. It wasn’t a great tide and some wind came up, but we had the beach to ourselves and threw big plugs, hoping for striped bass or bluefish. Sea ducks skittered low across the sound; fiddler crabs and starfish brightened the pebbly shallows. We reminisced about the old saltwater aquarium, the clams, crabs, starfish, and pet bergal. Lil would come down into the basement, peer into the tank, and ask questions. Maybe drop in a little turkey for everybody.
“But the crabs creeped her out,” David said.
“They creep out a lot of people,” I said, whipping another plug into the gray water behind the surf.
“They’re morbid, like worms.”
“Yeah, but Lil had her heaven,” I reminded him, honoring her belief in Jesus and everlasting life. After our mother’s death, Lil testified to a visit from Jesus Christ in our basement while she was doing laundry. Christ appeared next to the dryer and told Lil that her duty was to take care of her sister’s children, that she would be guided and kept strong. Lil was quite serious about this revelation. We teased her a bit and then left it alone, willing to accept that this divine charge may be keeping our family afloat.
“Still,” David said, poking a small rock crab with his rod tip. “I mean…”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Crabs, man. That’s it. Crabs.”
“Hey, you’re back?” Art yelled to me as I crossed the Bei Wai campus with my bags. “They were gonna sell all your stuff.”
“I said I’d be back.”
“A lotta foreign teachers ditch this place. It’s good to see you.” Art shook my hand. “I’m sorry about your mother.”
“My Aunt. Yeah, thanks,” I said. “She was like a mother to me.”
I walked into my apartment and found it clean, and there was a bright new spinning rod on the folded bedspread. Someone believed in my return. When I answered the door an hour later, it was Jin Lei. “So sorry about your a yi,” she hugged me. “That’s so sad. We missing you.”
The fishing rod was from Jin Lei. She didn’t have a lot of money. And after the emergency trip home, I was pretty broke, too. So I gave her one of the fishing rods I’d brought from home. “This is for you,” I said.
She looked puzzled.
“We think alike,” I said, pulling spools of line and a bag of fishing gear from my suitcase.
“Yes, I like you,” Jin Lei smiled.
“I mean, we both like fishing. Now we’ll both have fishing rods.”
But I soon realized there were other likes developing. And there were better gifts for this woman. I pulled one of Aunt Lil’s pocket books from my carry-on, reached into the dark folds, and lifted a gold necklace. “This was Aunt Lil’s favorite,” I said to Jin Lei. “I want you to have it.”
It was a cold winter in Beijing. Chen Lin took me out for dinner, ordering three kinds of fish, counseling that “one should eat the foods they love to overcome grief.”
Light snow accented the gray campus, and I woke with black coal dust lining my mouth and nose. On the way to class I bought delicious sweet potatoes pulled from sidewalk ovens made from old o
il drums. The classrooms were cold, students bundled up and laced their fingers around jars of hot tea, but we worked together on English and broke for wonderful lunches of steamed dumplings dipped in a gingery sauce. Back at the apartment, I spread millet over my balcony. Jin Lei came over, and we spent afternoons reading, writing, and looking up to see the growing flocks of sparrows and pigeons—the only birds I ever saw on campus—until they scattered one day under a broad sweeping shadow. Ying! Jin Lei exclaimed. The pale wings of a great hawk flared inches from the window. There was still some wild nature in this hungry old capital.
For the end of December, Jin Lei and I planned a little holiday. With the help of Captain Zhou, I secured two precious train tickets, and we traveled east to Beidaihe and Shanhaiguan, where the Great Wall meets the sea. I sat back in the chilly train car and opened the China Daily, reading about an old Communist Party boss who had been indicted in a sex scandal with a twenty-year-old singer. “Look at this dried out old geezer,” I showed Jin Lei the photo and story. “Can you believe this?”
“All cats eat fish,” she recited a Chinese proverb, cocked her head, and ran her finger down the page to another headline, Virility Tigers Confiscated.
There were no other foreigners in this wintry seaside town. Jin Lei wore her gold chain, and I buttoned up a black wool topcoat I had purchased for Aunt Lil’s funeral. People stared at us and made remarks—“Look at that woman with her rich laowai.” Jin Lei was upset.
“If they only knew how broke I am,” I tried to joke, but quickly recognized that any comparison in material wealth seemed ridiculous and patronizing.
At a little deserted hotel, the clerk refused to give us a shared room because we were not married. I pushed more money across the counter and the Party morals relaxed. We put our bags in our room, and Jin Lei stood by the foggy window and started to cry.
“It’s okay,” I held her. “Do you want to go back?”
“No,” she said.
The day was cold and clear. We walked past dark government villas where cadres and their families spent summer vacations. German shepherds barked from behind high fences. We walked along the frozen beach and then found a steamy restaurant and a friendly waitress. My Chinese was good enough to order tea and fried peanuts and chat about the weather. Jin Lei smiled.
Back to the same place for dinner, the seafood was spectacular, including big white slabs of skate sautéed in leeks and ginger. After two days, the staff treated us like family, bringing platters of duck feet, small steamed clams, fried squid, and a cod and seaweed soup that I tipped and slurped like a fat mandarin. The cook poured me a glass of special baijiu infused with lizards. “Good for man,” he said.
On New Year’s Eve 1994, Jin Lei and I drank, feasted, and talked our hearts full. “They sure laugh a lot,” the waitress told the cook, opening the door to a frigid night of stars. We walked home, gazing over gnarled pine trees and ice-glazed rocks into the sea, our mood turning mournful as I thought of Aunt Lil, and Jin Lei remembered a friend who died last spring. We sang Chinese and English versions of “Auld Lang Syne”—“Should old acquaintance be forgot and never thought upon”—while those lonely guard dogs howled. Up in our room, Jin Lei lit candles planted in wobbly seashells. I put music through a speakered Walkman, and our bed drifted out to sea.
In April, Jin Lei moved into my apartment, her thick black hair tied back, her light brown skin glowing as we finished the second trip with her bags up to the sixth floor landing. Doors cracked open, and some people said Ni hao. Jin Lei was friendly and polite, but these same neighbors began to gossip, and one trusted Chinese professor on the first floor told us that people thought Jin Lei was using me for a room and money. On the other side, it was leaked to Miss Li that an older couple on the third floor thought I was prostituting this poor Chinese girl and that I should be arrested. Nearly all the students and faculty lived inside the campus walls, and there was always gossip—“like a fish bowl,” I tried to raise a smile—but this kind of talk was starting to hurt. Then the university dean called me into his office.
“You cannot live with Chinese woman unless you are married.” The dean, a solidly built middle-aged man with jet black hair, was said to have been a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution.
“We are consenting adults and …”
“It’s political,” he interrupted me. “You are a visiting American teacher.”
I consulted seasoned colleagues and confirmed that there was a policy against unmarried cohabitation, but it had not been enforced in years. The tension nearly broke Jin Lei and me, but after a few nights cooking and eating together, talking over tea, and sharing a warm bed, we knew it was worth the risk. After a Friday night of listening to the Butterfly Serenade and drinking a bottle of Guihua, an osmanthus brandy that mellowed our heads and lacquered our stomachs, we decided to get up early and go fishing.
Fishing heals, I thought of Hemingway and Maclean. And though we were a long way from the wilds of Michigan and Montana, Beijing had fishing parks planted with willows and stocked with carp. We packed our gear and jumped on an early bus to the Happy Fish Compound, a dull plat of ponds opposite the east wall of the Summer Palace. They had not yet opened, but a twenty yuan note, about two dollars, convinced the guard to let us walk around. The pools dimpled with rising fish, and I tossed a piece of lint from my pocket that drew a curious nose. At the far end of the compound, an unused pond had sprouted into a marsh where a purple heron waded and stabbed. Still some wildness in this old city, I thought.
At 8:00 the guard yelled across the compound, we checked in, paid our ten-yuan fee, and began fishing. The common carp will eat almost anything—small fish, tadpoles, insects, vegetation, bread, and, conveniently for us, processed fish pellets. The guard, Mr. Qin, a thin man in a worn Mao suit and conical paddy hat—a bit Vietcong-like in my movie-haunted imagination—grew more loquacious and helpful, showing me how to secure a fish pellet onto my hook with a tiny rubber band you might use in orthodontia. He adjusted my quill bobber and directed my cast. Jin Lei translated. I tossed a few feet from the bank and watched. There were swirls all around but no takes. Mr. Qin talked on and on. He puzzled over my reel, and I showed him how the bail opened and closed. I was tempted to mention that the Chinese probably invented the first fishing reels in the fourth century, certainly the oldest writing about fishing reels come from the Middle Kingdom.
Mr. Qin went on to adjust my bobber and gesture another cast to a slightly different spot. Nothing. “They don’t like your stink,” Jin Lei translated.
“What?”
“He say carp don’t like your stink.”
“You mean ‘smell,’” I corrected and then laughed. “Come on. They’re carp.”
Mr. Qin went to his shed. The clerk yelled at him. Other customers were showing up, but Qin shouted back something with the word “laowai,” perhaps explaining, I’m busy helping this inept foreigner catch a carp. He returned with a jar of star anise and directed me to rinse my hands in the pond, rub in some anise, and rebait. Finger tapping his nose, he reiterated that carp have a good sense of smell and don’t like human odors.
“It must be hard on them,” I muttered, imagining the world’s suffering carp, living in our foulest waters, noses and barbells wrinkling in perpetual disdain for free-pouring humanity. The bobber went down, and I set the hook on a deep-bodied brassy carp. “Fantastic,” I cried. “You were right.” Even in this phony pond, I enjoyed the brief fight and landing. Qin put the fish, li yu, a common carp, in a wire mesh creel basket and set it back in the water. We could keep as many as we wanted. “Pay by the pound,” Qin pointed to the sign.
I set up Jin Lei’s rod, rubbed more anise on my hands, and she caught a cao yu, a grass carp like the one Captain Zhou gave me. The two-pound fish made some good runs before surrendering to the bank. More slender and round-headed, the grass carp is highly valued in Asia and Europe for its flesh and fight. Why were carp so disliked in the US? In his piscatorial paean “Gold
en Carp,” American poet Antonio Vallone asks: “When did I learn to call them trash? When did I unlearn it?” Carp are typically maligned in the US as an invasive species with dull looks, too many bones, and mud-flavored flesh, but I had enjoyed catching them in Indiana and South Dakota and came to love them in their home waters of East Asia.
Jin Lei and I kept two carp for our dinner and went on hooking and releasing several others. When Qin came back to check on us, I asked about the carp’s lifespan. He said those inmates at Happy Fish Compound might only live two years. They thrive much longer in the wild. “All the catching tires them,” Jin Lei translated. It’s good to remember that even catch-and-release stresses fish, particularly in oxygen-limited confines. “So they are not so happy,” I tried to joke with Mr. Qin, who just squinted and scratched his head under the conical straw hat. I pinched the barb down on our hooks and was even more careful to wet my hands and unhook each fish while it was still in the water, not wishing to rub its nose in humanity any more than necessary. The heron squawked and flew over the wall, and I thought the carp a bit more like us, the crowded millions of Beijing, waking in our little concrete rooms, breathing the pollution, working in our walled compounds, elbowing each other at the market, eating, crapping, sleeping, breeding—for what? Maybe for another hour of life, maybe a day, week, month, or even a few lucky years under the hazy sun.
My comparison ended, however, when we pulled the creel basket, brained the gasping dinner carp, put a string through their gills, paid the clerk, thanked Mr. Qin, and stepped on a crowded homebound bus. Pressed against the backseat, people stared at us and our fishing poles, so I pulled the bloody carp from the plastic bag. An old couple smiled and nodded, some boys laughed, and a teenage girl slipped on her headphones and stared out the window.