When is a fish not a fish? It’s a fish once it’s hatched from its tiny, glossy egg. It’s a fish when it is swimming in the ocean in a school of other fish. It’s a fish as it darts through the coral reef, or rides a current down to the lip of another continent. It’s fish when it’s entranced by a scrap of flesh dangling in the water, and it remains a fish when it’s hooked through the mouth. It’s still a fish when it’s reeled aboard the fisherman’s boat. It’s a fish when it flaps on a wooden plank in the open air, gasping for water. It’s a fish even if it’s slapped to death with another plank. It remains a fish when the cleaner slices its belly open and drags the guts out, tosses them back into the water for other fish to eat. It remains a fish when a knife is run against the grain of its shiny, protective scales, dislodging them in long strokes from the follicles until its flesh is naked as a human baby’s. It’s still a fish when it’s tossed into a wok with peanut oil, garlic, and shallots, or steamed in plain water, or dipped in batter and deep-fried. It’s fish if it’s eaten raw too, as the Japanese do, dipped in shoyu mixed with wasabi. It’s fish if it’s torn from bone by knives or human teeth, fish as it’s swallowed, fish even as stomach acids go to work digesting it. Only when its fibres are torn down to proteins, when the eating body incorporates into it eating muscle, does it cease being fish and become human.

If you want to know what happened. That’s what happened. How we became ourselves. Finding differences to eat. Eating. Changing. Finding fault in the mirror. Eating again.

CHAPTER 28Typhoon ShelterTHE CHINESE COOPERATIVE COUNCIL

June 30, 1997

The teapot is empty. Neither Great-Aunt Violet nor Ophelia can eat during the telling of this tale, but Ophelia has been nervously sipping tea. “Did Old Mah ever find out? He must have been devastated.”