Life reminds me of sushi sometimes—a little raw, and occasionally, you slurp a glob of wasabi up the wrong tube. And then it’s awkward as you try to sniff it out with a tableful of disappointed 30-somethings, all wearing cheongsams, staring at you, eyes frosted over. There you sit, hoping that you could’ve said something profound and wise beyond your years instead of acting the part of the unsophisticated kid from abroad who clearly doesn’t know how to appreciate
akami. Later, they will whisper about you in hushed tones. “And all that hullabaloo about MSG… that’s what American fast food will do to your manners.”
When I was 12, I visited Hong Kong for the second time. In a sense, it was more like my first time, if I choose not to count a fanny-pack romp around
Ocean Park (which I don’t). My parents and I, the lost tourists that we were, walked through some neighborhood. Victoria’s Harbor? Kowloon? Not quite sure, but whichever one houses all the pornography studios, adult video stores, and strip clubs—Wikipedia, work your magic! It reminded me of stories I had read about Montmartre, but in Cantonese and minus the windmills and Nicole Kidman. As the three mainlanders wandered around looking for anywhere—
anywhere—to sit down and eat, posters of perky young women with their unmentionables pixelated tried to seduce us into dumpy shops that were lined with grime and dust on the outside. I couldn’t see inside the doors covered with dark cardboard, but I imagined the inside to be lined with cheap linoleum. Neon signs buzzed haphazardly above us, clamoring, “Sexi ladys!” After milling around the area for a while and soon realizing that maybe the “friendly stranger” in the hotel lobby didn’t exactly understand what we meant by “family restaurant,” we got back on the metro. My parents bickered for a while as I stared off, making eye contact with a middle-aged selling newspapers. I was about to come up with a reason as to why he was leering, but then my mother interrupted my thoughts. As we zipped down the east rail, she asked me if I was OK, as if under the assumption that I hadn’t been exposed to anything sexual at that point in my adolescence. Yes, mother, I am ALL RIGHT. I’ve grown up with Fox television since I was five. I’ve been sneaking off to my best friend’s house to watch MTV every day after school for the past three years. I’ve been all right since that time you accidentally rented that movie for me where Thora Birch’s best friend tries to seduce her own father in a suburbia full of “dark” secrets. It amazed me how much time Mena Suvari had on her hands to lie around in beds of endless rose petals, but regardless, I had asked for a movie about horses. BLACK Beauty, Mom.
When I was 15, I went back home in July. On days when we were bored, I would walk over to Xing’s house to waste time on Nintendo or on the Internet. They lived near the train rails in town, the one that served as the main relay out of town. On nights, when the train rumbled by with its horn blaring obnoxiously loud, no one would wake up because they had gotten used to it after 20 years. One day after dinner, my aunt, Xing, and I took a walk near the tracks, treating it as our guide back to my grandmother’s house. Along the way, we spotted a speck of a man sitting on the tracks while we were maybe 100 yards away. When we got closer, we saw that he had his pants unzipped and was peeing, quite literally, into the wind. My aunt was horrified. Like a clucking hen with chicks to look after, she quickly gathered the two of us and averted our eyes, pushing us forward and away from this bizarre homeless man. But before she had the chance to shelter us, I caught a glimpse of this apparent public disturbance. What could be described by others as cognitive dispossession appeared to me as sheer triumph. Wielding his manhood below his unsightly muffin-top with determination that could have put Olympic athletes to shame, I felt embarrassed that, hours before, my thumb couldn’t even react fast enough between the A and B buttons to make Mario save Princess Daisy from impending doom. Good God. How long had he been holding it in?
When I was 17, I frequented a sushi shop in my hometown that summer. A conveyor belt in the middle of the bar that fed from the tiny kitchen of the hip new Nippon café sent funny little plates of food around and around for lunch and dinner. The plates were color-coded to match prices on a universal menu hanging around the small stand in the middle of Zhengyang Pedestrian Street. On most occasions, Europeans with their huge backpacks dumped precariously on the floor surrounded us. Sometimes, we saw a few of Jia’s classmates from high school, back for the summer from all over the country. Hip and young, they would stop in the restaurant for a quick sashimi before going to band practice in the dingy book market a bus stop away. On an afternoon in August, we were sitting next to each other at the bar, watching the plates of fish eggs and California rolls glide past us. When the time was right, we would each snatch a plate that looked delicious. I took a blue plate which, according to the menu, cost 12 yuan. Sitting on a chunk of rice and strapped down to it with a strip of salted dried seaweed, the raw, seemingly dead shrimp looked complacent enough.
Too bad it’s dead, I thought at the time. With its seatbelt all buckled, it looked ready for a illustrious, astronomical takeoff… into my stomach. As the chopsticks moved closer and closer to my mouth, a sudden twitch of the antenna stopped me mid-motion. While it’s more likely that it was anger at its own measly 12-yuan worth that sparked the little guy to come back to life, I told no one for a long time of my personal conviction that I, in fact, could resurrect the dead.
When I was 19, I tried to predict what would happen that summer, but per usual, I could only fill in the blank.
