Steamed fish knows nothing. It has to be served unmolested and scantily cooked, that’s how you know that it’s fresh. That’s how you know the cook has skill. They leave the head on. The eyes are boiled white so children can chew them like candy. The cook pours good quality soy sauce over it, properly fermented in the old way, with no sugar or anything else added, not like the soy sauce they make these days with chemicals, salt, and caramel colouring. Proper sauce is made with soy beans, wheat, salt, and water, fermented with a special yeast, then strained and pressed. It’s poured over the fish with a little good quality peanut oil, shredded ginger, and green onions. That’s it—simple, so you can tell the fish was alive just moments before cooking. In fact, a good restaurant still takes the live fish to the table in a pan, and as it flaps and gasps for air, everyone oohs and aahs and says, “Yes, yes, very fresh, ho sun seen!” Sometimes the kids don’t like it, especially the ones who were raised in Canada. What fools. They want their food brought to them already cooked and cut up, don’t show me where it came from, just bring it to me hot and smooth and ready to eat! But if you don’t see where it came from, how can you know you’re not being tricked? That’s what all those packaged, ready-to-eat foods you can buy these days at Wellcome are—neat little tricks for the spoiled and stupid who don’t know any better. In my day, if you couldn’t see it alive and flipping before it was cooked and served, you couldn’t be sure what those sneaky cooks might bring you. Those sneaky, crooky cooks like Tak-Wing’s father, Cheung Chiu-Wai! You never know what a cook like Cheung Chiu-Wai might do in the kitchen with that fresh fish; someone like him might still swap it out for another one, smaller and less fresh. There would be no stopping him from doing that, but the point of showing you beforehand was that it would give you at least half a chance of being able to tell when it came to the table. A gasping fish is a sign of the restaurant’s honesty. That’s why it has to be just barely cooked too. A discerning customer like my father Mah Chin-Pang could tell. He would look sternly at the live fish when it was brought flopping in its pan, and even more sternly at the cooked one to make sure it was the same fish.