Monday, November 03, 2003
Child’s Play
The shop was one of dozens along Clement street, the main commercial artery of new Chinatown, which is not only a major concentration of Chinese - mainland, HK and Taiwan - but also Viets, Koreans, Russian, Irish, and any other refugee from the old world you’d care to mention. I love to walk into these shops and breathe their mysterious herbal scents, handle unnameable produce, marvel at shelves of impenetrable labels… it’s a voyage to exotic worlds, two blocks from my front door; it’s a realm where I’m both native and foreign, where I have friends in some shops and where, at others, my voice is unheard, my face is literally unseen. The multifarious variety spills from the shelves to the storefronts to the faces of the people who mill and churn on sidewalks which are themselves littered with an astonishing array of food, cigarette butts, torn wrappers, and bits of clothing. Clement Street is truly a world unto itself.
I stepped into a fishmonger’s shop, one of several on the main drag. Inside I found the typical eye-popping collection of whole fish, mollusks, shellfish; heads, maws, random bits.... crab and lobster and catfish and bass tanks swam with cloudy water and imprisoned animals, and buckets full of other living things ran the perimeter of the room. The frog tubs were covered with screens, and the turtle bin was very large so as to accommodate the ancient exhausted reptiles waiting in silent stacks, piled high on each other.
A young boy stood at an eel bucket, a pointed stick in his hand. Before him, the eels writhed in a few inches of dirty water, a foot or two long and shiny, black, smoothskinned, smalleyed, seeking space, seeking breath, seeking an escape into dark cold water that they would never find.
The boy - eight years old? ten? - poked at them with his stick, smiling quietly to himself. Poke poke poke. The eels tried to get away but the water was too shallow and crowded and the boy was too quick. Blood began to stain the water as the sharp end of his prong pierced the animals’ leathery skin. Their heads lifted from the water to confront their tormentor, to hiss in ineffectual, helpless anger. He giggled and kept poking.
I reached down and stopped his hand, not in anger, but firmly. “Don’t hurt animals,” I said, perhaps too strongly. His eyes got wide and his skin paled. His mother, who stood next to him in idle conversation with the fishmonger, snatched his hand from mine and glared at me. She threw some angry Chinese words at my feet and left the shop as if I had fouled her doorstep.
I suspect all those eels were dead within the next day or two anyway.
