Fish Bone
My father once asked me, “Do you think white people know that fish have bones?” We were standing in the kitchen, watching the fish steam. Our hands were still scallion-y from the prep, but we wanted to see the glass lid turn cloudy.
“That’s a silly question, baba. Of course they do.”
But now, looking back, I wonder if I was too quick to censure him. Do white people understand the extent to which fish have bones? I mean some fish have like a shit ton of bones—hundreds of these sharp tiny things embedded randomly in their flesh. Do I even understand?
Okay, I have to say: I’m not really talking about bones. Or rather, I have to be more specific. Chinese fish have two types of bones. There’s the regular “bone,” which is gǔ tou (骨头), and then there’s cì (刺). Cì is a sinister little thing that’s out to get you. It’s sharp, a bit evil, and most fucked-up of all, it’s sometimes virtually undetectable. Gǔ tou, by comparison, is a fat, lumbering thing that wouldn’t hurt nobody. Now that I think about it, there’s not even a word for cì in English. So, the real question is, do white people know about cì? Probably not, right?
“Just ask,” my dad said.
Fair enough, but I kept forgetting, for years, to ask, until one day at a party way uptown I found myself jumping up and down with a nice white man. Despite my latest efforts, I had yet to kick my compulsion for jumping music. Plus, I was a plus-one of a plus-one, anonymous in this crowd. So, mouths loose, bodies loose, I had to seize this opportunity.
“QUICK QUESTION!” I yelled, holding his face close. Jackson was his name, maybe.
“YEAH?”
“DO YOU THINK FISH HAVE BONES?”
There was a pause too long. Immediately, I felt a sharp regret. Shit, I should have known. This kind of question was too personal.
Looking at his blank face, I thought about this one time, deep in my childhood, when I told my parents that I had some cì lodged in my throat. My mother went into hysterics, screaming at my dad to take me to the hospital. And my dad, in a moment of passion, poured a huge bowl of black vinegar and told me to drink it in one go. And I did. What was that supposed to do?
When I told him it didn’t work, he told me to swallow a really big bite of rice. My mother screamed, “Are you trying to murder our child?!”
Tears were streaming down my cheeks, of course. I mean, I genuinely thought I was going to die.
Also, another thought: I’ve seen my grandpa a total of four times, and every single time he tells me the same story of how he got hospitalized because of a cì lodged in his throat.
Apparently, “back in the day,” they didn’t have all this sophisticated technology for getting cì out of people’s throats, so in like 1975 or something, they had to use a chestnut to dig it out.
“A chestnut! Do you know what a chestnut is?”
“Yes, yeye. I know what a chestnut is.”
“Your father would have been orphaned!”
Back at the party, Maybe-Jackson puts his mouth against my ear and yells “WHAT?” I pull back to look at him, and images of Filet-O-Fish and battered cod flash in my mind.
“Nevermind. I’m going outside for a smoke.”
I leave the party. It’s too cold outside. I stand in a bodega and call my father.
“You didn’t ask, did you?” he says.
“Give the kid a break.” My mother’s voice is faint in the back. “You’re joking, right, baba? Of course they know. It’s fish. It’s in the water. They go fishing all the time.”
“My co-worker says they put the fish right back in the ocean,” baba says.
My mother takes the phone from my dad, “You know, maybe it’s good they don’t know. All throughout China, emergency rooms are overflowing with people who have cì stuck in their throat. We’re such proud people, but honestly, it’s dangerous. You know, I had to go to the hospital once. I was twenty-two.”
“Twenty-two?” Baba’s voice again. “You were still having cì problems at twenty-two? When I went to the hospital, I was eight.”
“Overflowing?” I say, squatting down to pick up a loose Gatorade rolling around on the bodega floor. “Mama, did you say the hospitals are overflowing?”
“Be serious,” my dad says. “Don’t you understand? People die all the time.”
I tell them that I have to go to sleep now, but really I just want to look at the potato chips in silence.
I’m taking my time, turning them around one by one in my hands—the red Kettle Brand, the black Lay’s, the white Cape Cod—when Maybe-Jackson comes stumbling into the bodega, his friends in tow, too loud, all stumble. I almost raise my hand to give a little wave, but it looks like he’s forgotten me entirely. The aisles are too narrow for the both of us. He shoulders past me and grunts a muddy “sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” I say, and there is a pause, and maybe there’s a glimmer of recognition in his eyes—but no, and he passes.
Renny Gong is a writer in his second year at Columbia University.