Grandmother, how do you know that the fish are happy?”
“Irreverent polyp-of-a-child, how do you know that I don’t know that the fish are happy?”
“Well, Grandmother, you’re not a fish. You cannot know what fish know.”
“Well, my ignorant gnat-of-a-girl, you are not I, how do you know that I don’t know what fish know.”
One day she fetched me from school and said, “Let’s take a stroll through our honorable Mayor Willie Brown’s mansion. The Gold Mountain News said that he wants all of his citizens to visit his new Japanese water garden.” So we took the No. 25 bus and transferred to a No. 85 bus at the Montgomery station, where she bought me a cold can of Coke from a machine. I knew that it was going to be a special day.
When we got to the mansion, we went straight to the Mayor’s new water garden. There were pink and white lotuses in bloom, assorted duckweed and hyacinth. Catkins and dwarf willows bent over; they looked like they were washing their beautiful hair in the pond. Suddenly, without warning, my grandmother stuck her hand into our honorable Mayor’s fish pond and pulled out a magnificent spotted orange carp. It was at least three feet long and as it thrashed, its brilliant scales shimmered like mirrors. She pulled her smile into a deep frown then pointed to the bronze plaque on the wall that said in both Chinese and English, “A gift to the city of San Francisco from His Majesty the Emperor Hirohito of Japan.”
She then said, “Remember this, my mooncake, Hirohito was a mass murderer and rapist and this pond was built with Chinese blood.” So she swung the fish by the tail and whacked it five times against the stone wall. When it continued to thrash and convulse, she took her trusty cleaver from her giant purse and whacked it five more times with the blunt edge. “This one for Manchuria, this one for Nanking, this for our cousin Lu, this for Auntie Jade…” When it finally stopped thrashing, she wrapped it up in newspaper and stuffed it in her purse; and we walked briskly past the guard station toward the bus stop. The guard was listening to some funky tune in his earphones and didn’t even notice us.
So we took it home on the No. 4 bus to Market Street, where we changed to a No. 65 bus back to the Richmond. On the bus we met her skinny gossipy fussbudget friend, who always wore an ugly hairnet. They started talking in this ancient dialect about Mr. Hong’s whore-mongering son. What a pity that the whole regal bloodline has been tainted by this whore-mongering bastard. The whore-mongering bastard emptied the till of the laundromat and went to Hong Kong to continue his whore-mongering activities. Then they went on about Mrs. Lew’s slut-of-a-dead-girl. That slut-of-a-dead-girl went on to live with several white devils. They said she lived with three of them at one time. One devil lived in the Richmond, one lived in Mill Valley, one in San Jose. That she was always driving and stopping and leaving her grandmother in the back seat to bake in the sun. Then my grandmother turned to me and said, “You better not do that to me when you get older.”
They rattled on like two ancient kettles. There was a mother-beating gangster named Wu. An ox-naped gigolo named Lee. A long-spined good-for-nothing named Fu…“Oh, how ironic that he was named Fu! Ha, ha!” A cockroach-eating numbskull named Ming. A mutton-of-a-loser named Wei. How can Buddha visit such terrible creatures upon us?
I said I had to pee and Grandmother said, “Hush, you should have peed in the green plastic toilets in the Mayor’s house. Did you know that it took him two weeks to install those plastic toilets for his loving citizens?”
When we got home, she wasted no time to clean the fish and steamed it with ginger and onions, and ordered me to climb up the back fire escape and pluck fresh spinach from our communal roof garden. “Pull out the whole root,” she said. “You must leave room for the baby shoots.”
“Tonight is a special celebration,” she said. She presented the magnificent orange carp on a large celadon plate that her own grandmother had given her. She shaped the spinach into curly tidal waves all around the lip of the giant plate. She decorated the fish and capped the spinach waves with bits of candied ginger; they shimmered like diamonds. And look! The fish is wearing a pearly onion necklace! I squealed with joy as I collected the sweet gems and saved them in a little dish for later, when I would relish them as a late snack with fruit and tea.
“So you ungrateful, arrogant drop-plum, tell me that the fish aren’t happy!” This time, I could not formulate an argument, for my mouth was already busy sucking on a fin. The inner fleshy side was especially tasty. “I must tell you, my little trinket, my hungry little glowworm, that I have no doubts, heaven has issued an edict: I know that the fish are capable of sublime happiness.”