One Fish, Two Fish
My wife is obsessed with eating healthy food and regularly eating fish is followed like a religious ritual in our house, in which she is the unquestionable ruler. Once in a while she buys a big slab of frozen salmon from Sam’s Club. At other times she buys some cheaper species like tilapia. I eat the fish, following her orders. But ever since I came to America, I stopped eating fish with a lot of bones. I hate and dread the feeling of having a fish bone stuck in my throat. Thus she rarely buys any fish meat that is not processed.
I eat whatever my wife feeds me without demur. At Chinese restaurants, however, I almost never eat fish. Usually they serve whole fish, which has bones. But in addition to bones, what I hate is that the fish is a real fish. Eating fish meat and a whole fish gives me very different feelings. A piece of fish meat doesn’t give me the disgusted feeling that a whole fish brings about. I particularly don’t like to look at the eyes of a dead and cooked fish. It is big and sometimes still vividly seems to have life lingering in its gaze.
Unlike many other people, I don’t enjoy fishing. I’ve never explicitly told anyone about my aversion toward fishing. If my friends go on a fishing trip, I tag along but never do any fishing myself. They laugh and get excited when they catch a fish and I help them to unhook the fish, never showing any sign of mercy toward the fish. I cheer and applaud their efforts but in my heart, I am not amused with hooking up a lively creature from the water. A fish’s struggle for its life is a bemusing spectacle to the fishermen, but for me, a sense of a life lost is always aroused from the bottom of my heart.
The joy of fishing is richly described in the literatures around the world. Hunting and fishing predates agriculture for centuries in the progress of human civilization. In English literature, the story that comes to my mind is Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and Sea. The Nobel prize winning short story describes the struggle of an old fisher man and a great marlin. It’s a great story and has been and will be studied for years by readers of English literature. While people enjoy the story, I can be certain that very few people think much about how the marlin felt in that life and death struggle. Hemingway certainly didn’t have any thought about that aspect, nor does any reader.
I don’t blame anyone for not giving value to the lives of fish in their literal work. I myself once wrote a story that was intended to bring a new light on one of the well know stories recorded to have happened about 2500 years ago in China. An assassin killed the king of a state in south eastern China. He hid his weapon in a cooked fish. He was also killed but he achieved his goal, his master became the new king. In my story, the fish took a different role and became more prominent. But I must confess that when I wrote the story, I was using the fish to tell a story of power struggles among humans. The fish was not the main story.
Almost in all stories, whenever a fish is involved, inevitably the fish is always a loser. The fish or fishes are always dead, regardless how their acts or mere presence may have contributed brilliantly to the success of the stories. Just like in The Old Man and Sea, the marlin is an important actor. But it’s just a marlin. It doesn’t have a name, while the old man has a name Santiago. Hemingway gave the marlin some life, some intelligence, and a great desire to remain alive. That desire eventually killed the fish. Almost all fish are killed by the most primordial desire, to live. They want to eat to remain alive. The simple act of eating kills them.
Even if a fish is not in the mood of eating, it can still be killed, though not to be eaten. Technically a whale is not a fish. Whales have lungs and breath air. But for captain Ahab, a great white whale is a sport and a contest. Although Moby Dick, just like all other fish in numerous stories, died in the end. At least in this story the great white whale got even with his human counterpart. The grate white became famous, just as famous as the limping and stubborn captain and it even earned a name in this story. Moreover, I believe far more people know the name of the whale than the captain who hunted for him.
Many years ago I read a book on cod, a very common fish. Just a few dozen years ago, before the time of big mechanized fishing boats and drag nets, cod was caught in great quantities. Cod meat tastes very delicious and is pure white, as white as snow. Back then cod was cheap. Now cod is expensive and the ones sold in stores are very small. Through that book I learned that cod, if not killed, grows for life. It was not unusual that cods of hundreds of pound were caught. Sometimes cods of thousands of pounds, as big as some whales, were caught. I don’t know if Cape Cod was named because of the cod resources in seas out of New England. According to the book, schools of cods that numbered in millions could be seen in that area. Now, cod may not be on the endangered species list, the days of catching cods of even dozens of pounds are over.
The book was not a book about commemorating cod fish. It was a cook book, describing many different ways of cooking and eating cod. To humans, fish are always supposed to be eaten.
