The smell of fish
greeted you as you entered the Chinese seafood market. An
aquarium of swimming creatures freshly caught, ready for slaughter. The Sunday
night feasts are wadding in joyless water, waiting for the unexpected but
condemned fate. Anticipating limbo and other unnamed compartments of eternal
purgatory. They swim, Tilapia, Bank
Rockfish and Channel Catfish in dank seawater and slowly gasp for air as their
gills move quickly in their crowded watery in closer. Patrons stroll the lengthy fish gallery
peering thru foggy grayish glass as they scrutinize each example of these
watery delicacies. A delicately mascaraed women who seem to have experienced
many years of selections for this Sunday ritual, points with an aged affluent
finger from a light blue sweater from Nordstroms, to select the orange Tilapia
in the corner of the tank.
A large cloth
net descended into the watery cage by a bored looking fishmonger, with a
grayish smock, which draped his meager thin frame. With his wearied stare after
years of scooping lifeless fish, his nicotine stained fingers grasped the net
with automaton precision, capturing the traumatized fish, lurking in the
corner. With the fish struggling to breathe in the soiled net, the fishmonger
took a mallet, which looks like a small wooden oar and whacks the floundering
fish to an unconscious oblivion.
In quick succession, the tilapia is tossed on
a laminated wooden cutting board and lies there, lifeless as a wounded
warrior. With the accuracy of a skilled
craftsman, surgeon, bored merchant with an imaginary cigarette hanging from his
mouth, he filets the farm-raised fish into edible portions. The light blue
sweater women glances at her appetizing portions and is handed the freshly
carved morsels in a pinkish colored plastic bag. With a bored look of
discontent, a woman ambles to the fishmonger and points to the foggy grayish
glass…
