Back Seat with Fish

I called my father from Chen Lin’s office. Aunt Lil died peacefully in a hospital bed with my father by her side—“Passed away,” I explained to Chen Lin, who nodded sympathetically and made us tea. The trip back to New York was long and doleful. Eugene hugged me at the airport and drove us home to Port Jefferson. My father, brother, Eugene, and I sat around the kitchen table and talked about Lil. Our cat, Twain, jumped on my lap. “He keeps going in her room looking for her,” my father said. My brother, David, had just started college, and I knew this would be hardest on him. David was two years old when our mother died. Lil was really the only mother he knew and loved. There was the wake and funeral. I looked into her casket; Aunt Lil is not a fish, I thought of Faulkner’s bizarre story, Bud’s giant catfish suddenly in my head. Flower fragrance soaked the room. She’s dead, I said to myself. “She’s in heaven,” her friends consoled, and I smiled politely.

There were long dinners and long talks. Birch, Janet, and Caitlin called with kind words of condolence. After an exhausting week, my brother had to get back to school. I looked into his tired blue eyes and said, “Lil was so happy to see you start college.”

“I don’t know if I can do it,” he coughed and looked down at the floor. He had gained some weight and seemed to shift uncomfortably in his clothes.

There was a long pause as he fiddled with his keys. “Fuck it. Yeah. Let’s go,” he brightened as he spoke. Dave drove us out early to Old Field Point and parked in the driveway of his friend. It wasn’t a great tide and some wind came up, but we had the beach to ourselves and threw big plugs, hoping for striped bass or bluefish. Sea ducks skittered low across the sound; fiddler crabs and starfish brightened the pebbly shallows. We reminisced about the old saltwater aquarium, the clams, crabs, starfish, and pet bergal. Lil would come down into the basement, peer into the tank, and ask questions. Maybe drop in a little turkey for everybody.

“They creep out a lot of people,” I said, whipping another plug into the gray water behind the surf.

“Yeah, but Lil had her heaven,” I reminded him, honoring her belief in Jesus and everlasting life. After our mother’s death, Lil testified to a visit from Jesus Christ in our basement while she was doing laundry. Christ appeared next to the dryer and told Lil that her duty was to take care of her sister’s children, that she would be guided and kept strong. Lil was quite serious about this revelation. We teased her a bit and then left it alone, willing to accept that this divine charge may be keeping our family afloat.

“Still,” David said, poking a small rock crab with his rod tip. “I mean…”

“Hey, you’re back?” Art yelled to me as I crossed the Bei Wai campus with my bags. “They were gonna sell all your stuff.”

“A lotta foreign teachers ditch this place. It’s good to see you.” Art shook my hand. “I’m sorry about your mother.”

I walked into my apartment and found it clean, and there was a bright new spinning rod on the folded bedspread. Someone believed in my return. When I answered the door an hour later, it was Jin Lei. “So sorry about your a yi,” she hugged me. “That’s so sad. We missing you.”

The fishing rod was from Jin Lei. She didn’t have a lot of money. And after the emergency trip home, I was pretty broke, too. So I gave her one of the fishing rods I’d brought from home. “This is for you,” I said.

“We think alike,” I said, pulling spools of line and a bag of fishing gear from my suitcase.

But I soon realized there were other likes developing. And there were better gifts for this woman. I pulled one of Aunt Lil’s pocket books from my carry-on, reached into the dark folds, and lifted a gold necklace. “This was Aunt Lil’s favorite,” I said to Jin Lei. “I want you to have it.”

It was a cold winter in Beijing. Chen Lin took me out for dinner, ordering three kinds of fish, counseling that “one should eat the foods they love to overcome grief.”

Light snow accented the gray campus, and I woke with black coal dust lining my mouth and nose. On the way to class I bought delicious sweet potatoes pulled from sidewalk ovens made from old oil drums. The classrooms were cold, students bundled up and laced their fingers around jars of hot tea, but we worked together on English and broke for wonderful lunches of steamed dumplings dipped in a gingery sauce. Back at the apartment, I spread millet over my balcony. Jin Lei came over, and we spent afternoons reading, writing, and looking up to see the growing flocks of sparrows and pigeons—the only birds I ever saw on campus—until they scattered one day under a broad sweeping shadow. Ying! Jin Lei exclaimed. The pale wings of a great hawk flared inches from the window. There was still some wild nature in this hungry old capital.

For the end of December, Jin Lei and I planned a little holiday. With the help of Captain Zhou, I secured two precious train tickets, and we traveled east to Beidaihe and Shanhaiguan, where the Great Wall meets the sea. I sat back in the chilly train car and opened the China Daily, reading about an old Communist Party boss who had been indicted in a sex scandal with a twenty-year-old singer. “Look at this dried out old geezer,” I showed Jin Lei the photo and story. “Can you believe this?”

“All cats eat fish,” she recited a Chinese proverb, cocked her head, and ran her finger down the page to another headline, Virility Tigers Confiscated.

There were no other foreigners in this wintry seaside town. Jin Lei wore her gold chain, and I buttoned up a black wool topcoat I had purchased for Aunt Lil’s funeral. People stared at us and made remarks—“Look at that woman with her rich laowai.” Jin Lei was upset.

“If they only knew how broke I am,” I tried to joke, but quickly recognized that any comparison in material wealth seemed ridiculous and patronizing.

At a little deserted hotel, the clerk refused to give us a shared room because we were not married. I pushed more money across the counter and the Party morals relaxed. We put our bags in our room, and Jin Lei stood by the foggy window and started to cry.

The day was cold and clear. We walked past dark government villas where cadres and their families spent summer vacations. German shepherds barked from behind high fences. We walked along the frozen beach and then found a steamy restaurant and a friendly waitress. My Chinese was good enough to order tea and fried peanuts and chat about the weather. Jin Lei smiled.

Back to the same place for dinner, the seafood was spectacular, including big white slabs of skate sautéed in leeks and ginger. After two days, the staff treated us like family, bringing platters of duck feet, small steamed clams, fried squid, and a cod and seaweed soup that I tipped and slurped like a fat mandarin. The cook poured me a glass of special baijiu infused with lizards. “Good for man,” he said.

On New Year’s Eve 1994, Jin Lei and I drank, feasted, and talked our hearts full. “They sure laugh a lot,” the waitress told the cook, opening the door to a frigid night of stars. We walked home, gazing over gnarled pine trees and ice-glazed rocks into the sea, our mood turning mournful as I thought of Aunt Lil, and Jin Lei remembered a friend who died last spring. We sang Chinese and English versions of “Auld Lang Syne”—“Should old acquaintance be forgot and never thought upon”—while those lonely guard dogs howled. Up in our room, Jin Lei lit candles planted in wobbly seashells. I put music through a speakered Walkman, and our bed drifted out to sea.

In April, Jin Lei moved into my apartment, her thick black hair tied back, her light brown skin glowing as we finished the second trip with her bags up to the sixth floor landing. Doors cracked open, and some people said Ni hao. Jin Lei was friendly and polite, but these same neighbors began to gossip, and one trusted Chinese professor on the first floor told us that people thought Jin Lei was using me for a room and money. On the other side, it was leaked to Miss Li that an older couple on the third floor thought I was prostituting this poor Chinese girl and that I should be arrested. Nearly all the students and faculty lived inside the campus walls, and there was always gossip—“like a fish bowl,” I tried to raise a smile—but this kind of talk was starting to hurt. Then the university dean called me into his office.

“You cannot live with Chinese woman unless you are married.” The dean, a solidly built middle-aged man with jet black hair, was said to have been a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution.

“It’s political,” he interrupted me. “You are a visiting American teacher.”

I consulted seasoned colleagues and confirmed that there was a policy against unmarried cohabitation, but it had not been enforced in years. The tension nearly broke Jin Lei and me, but after a few nights cooking and eating together, talking over tea, and sharing a warm bed, we knew it was worth the risk. After a Friday night of listening to the Butterfly Serenade and drinking a bottle of Guihua, an osmanthus brandy that mellowed our heads and lacquered our stomachs, we decided to get up early and go fishing.

Fishing heals, I thought of Hemingway and Maclean. And though we were a long way from the wilds of Michigan and Montana, Beijing had fishing parks planted with willows and stocked with carp. We packed our gear and jumped on an early bus to the Happy Fish Compound, a dull plat of ponds opposite the east wall of the Summer Palace. They had not yet opened, but a twenty yuan note, about two dollars, convinced the guard to let us walk around. The pools dimpled with rising fish, and I tossed a piece of lint from my pocket that drew a curious nose. At the far end of the compound, an unused pond had sprouted into a marsh where a purple heron waded and stabbed. Still some wildness in this old city, I thought.

At 8:00 the guard yelled across the compound, we checked in, paid our ten-yuan fee, and began fishing. The common carp will eat almost anything—small fish, tadpoles, insects, vegetation, bread, and, conveniently for us, processed fish pellets. The guard, Mr. Qin, a thin man in a worn Mao suit and conical paddy hat—a bit Vietcong-like in my movie-haunted imagination—grew more loquacious and helpful, showing me how to secure a fish pellet onto my hook with a tiny rubber band you might use in orthodontia. He adjusted my quill bobber and directed my cast. Jin Lei translated. I tossed a few feet from the bank and watched. There were swirls all around but no takes. Mr. Qin talked on and on. He puzzled over my reel, and I showed him how the bail opened and closed. I was tempted to mention that the Chinese probably invented the first fishing reels in the fourth century, certainly the oldest writing about fishing reels come from the Middle Kingdom.

Mr. Qin went on to adjust my bobber and gesture another cast to a slightly different spot. Nothing. “They don’t like your stink,” Jin Lei translated.

“You mean ‘smell,’” I corrected and then laughed. “Come on. They’re carp.”

Mr. Qin went to his shed. The clerk yelled at him. Other customers were showing up, but Qin shouted back something with the word “laowai,” perhaps explaining, I’m busy helping this inept foreigner catch a carp. He returned with a jar of star anise and directed me to rinse my hands in the pond, rub in some anise, and rebait. Finger tapping his nose, he reiterated that carp have a good sense of smell and don’t like human odors.

“It must be hard on them,” I muttered, imagining the world’s suffering carp, living in our foulest waters, noses and barbells wrinkling in perpetual disdain for free-pouring humanity. The bobber went down, and I set the hook on a deep-bodied brassy carp. “Fantastic,” I cried. “You were right.” Even in this phony pond, I enjoyed the brief fight and landing. Qin put the fish, li yu, a common carp, in a wire mesh creel basket and set it back in the water. We could keep as many as we wanted. “Pay by the pound,” Qin pointed to the sign.

I set up Jin Lei’s rod, rubbed more anise on my hands, and she caught a cao yu, a grass carp like the one Captain Zhou gave me. The two-pound fish made some good runs before surrendering to the bank. More slender and round-headed, the grass carp is highly valued in Asia and Europe for its flesh and fight. Why were carp so disliked in the US? In his piscatorial paean “Golden Carp,” American poet Antonio Vallone asks: “When did I learn to call them trash? When did I unlearn it?” Carp are typically maligned in the US as an invasive species with dull looks, too many bones, and mud-flavored flesh, but I had enjoyed catching them in Indiana and South Dakota and came to love them in their home waters of East Asia.

Jin Lei and I kept two carp for our dinner and went on hooking and releasing several others. When Qin came back to check on us, I asked about the carp’s lifespan. He said those inmates at Happy Fish Compound might only live two years. They thrive much longer in the wild. “All the catching tires them,” Jin Lei translated. It’s good to remember that even catch-and-release stresses fish, particularly in oxygen-limited confines. “So they are not so happy,” I tried to joke with Mr. Qin, who just squinted and scratched his head under the conical straw hat. I pinched the barb down on our hooks and was even more careful to wet my hands and unhook each fish while it was still in the water, not wishing to rub its nose in humanity any more than necessary. The heron squawked and flew over the wall, and I thought the carp a bit more like us, the crowded millions of Beijing, waking in our little concrete rooms, breathing the pollution, working in our walled compounds, elbowing each other at the market, eating, crapping, sleeping, breeding—for what? Maybe for another hour of life, maybe a day, week, month, or even a few lucky years under the hazy sun.

My comparison ended, however, when we pulled the creel basket, brained the gasping dinner carp, put a string through their gills, paid the clerk, thanked Mr. Qin, and stepped on a crowded homebound bus. Pressed against the backseat, people stared at us and our fishing poles, so I pulled the bloody carp from the plastic bag. An old couple smiled and nodded, some boys laughed, and a teenage girl slipped on her headphones and stared out the window.

Angling is as old as China, and it has a deep connection with the sage’s escape from worldly stress. In the fifth century B.C., a frustrated Confucius is advised by an old fisherman to always be “sincere” and not let “frets over human concerns” distract him from the Great Way. In “Yu Fu,” “The Fisherman,” collected in the second-century’s Songs of the South, the banished scholar Qu Yuan learns from a fisherman that it is best to gracefully retire from public employment when the system is corrupt and troubled. Subsequent centuries are filled with poems, songs, and parables alluding to angling’s virtues and lessons. The Tang dynasty poet and provincial governor Bai Juyi declares:

But when I cast my hook in the stream,

I have no thoughts of fish or men.

Lacking the skill to catch either,

I can only savor the autumn water's light

In Beijing more than eight centuries ago, Jin dynasty emperor Zhangzong, and his eccentric court official, Wang Yu, sequestered themselves as humble fishermen at a place called Diaoyutai, the Royal Fishing Terrace. Successive dynasties used these spring-fed ponds, but over the centuries the park fell in and out of regard. In the early twentieth century, the grounds and waters went wild—starving people speared fish and frogs and were caught and stabbed in turn by guards who were, themselves, constantly under the sword of unpredictable rule. Finally in 1958, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Peoples Republic, Diaoyutai was restored and served as a Communist Party office and retreat for Chairman Mao and his associates, eventually opening up as a state guest house, hosting the likes of Richard Nixon, Queen Elizabeth II, Ronald Reagan, Tony Blair, Boris Yeltsin, Christine Lagarde, and Hillary Clinton. Elaborate pavilioned docks extend over willow-banked ponds, where one might take shelter from the sun and rain or some tense political discussion while enjoying a drink or a long cast into the clear water.

The guest rooms at Diaoyutai are open to the public, but the nightly rates exceeded my monthly salary in 1995. With the mention of a few famous Chinese professor friends at the university and a carton of Marlboro cigarettes, I secured a couple hours inside, and Jin Lei and I strolled down the poplar-shaded lanes and around the lovely ponds amid groves of apricot, lilac, and pear. Jin Lei was always graceful when she walked, sometimes blossoming into impromptu dance and song, and as she sang today a large carp leaped, as they often do, not to feed but perhaps to enjoy the lyrics of living. After witnessing and wondering over disporting fish on the Hao River, the ancient Taoist sage Zhuangzi described the “joy of fishes,” while his skeptical companion asked, “How could you know the joy of the fishes? You’re not a fish.” Zhuangzi replied, “Since you are not me, how could you know that I do not know what makes fish happy?” This goes on for a bit, but Zhuangzi concluded that by standing beside the river he knows the joy of fish through the shared pleasures of vitality and water. A big epistemological leap but one that lands in the right spot. Indeed these waters and fish looked healthy and happy, and seeking further connection, I quickly strung up my fly rod.

Fly fishing has always been more difficult for me, but I recalled those Happy Fish Compound carp rising to the lint from my pocket, and here mosquitoes disappeared in splashes at the pond’s edge. I glanced nervously at a couple blue-uniformed guards across the way and tied on the gray-hackled, black-striped mosquito pattern. Thoughts returned of my first hot night on campus in Beijing when my dirty room had no screens and mosquitoes sucked my tired blood, leaving my face hot and swollen. Things had gotten so much better.

My first cast fell short in a half loop, and I saw the submarine wake of a spooked fish. I re-aerialized the line, felt the even weight back and forward, and laid out a long, straight cast. The fly lay perfectly still on the surface—then a carp gulped it down. I stripped and arced a hook set. A thunderous splash echoed across the park.

This resort-rested carp exploded in a powerful run—nothing like what we experienced at the commercial fish ponds—and an imperial fight commenced. The carp ran right and then way left, clearly a Communist, around a rocky island and under a bridge. I held tight and tried to steer the fish into open water. Another carp leaped, and Jin Lei sang, “The carp jumps over the Dragon Gate,” a popular verse about strong and determined golden carp that make it up the Yellow River’s Longmen Falls and are transformed into noble dragons. The story celebrates ascent in educational, social, or professional status, perhaps even our own rising fortunes as a Sino-American couple in Beijing, certainly our brief splash atop classy Diaoyutai while the curious guards stepped closer to watch.

Jin Lei loved to raise stories from the depths of Chinese history, among them the legend of Jiang Taigong, a philosopher-angler from China’s tumultuous Bronze Age, around 1000 B.C. Jiang, a minor court official disgusted with the brutal and corrupt Shang dynasty, found solace in angling, though he explained that he “would never deign to catch a fish with a crooked hook or deceiving bait.” His living parable of patience and virtue caught the attention of the right people. In the end, Jiang mentored a virtuous prince on how to defeat the Shang and create a new and just government. It is said that shortly before his death at the age of eighty-five, Jiang caught an enormous golden carp using neither hook nor bait.

Jin Lei and I also aspired to a humble, honest life of study, teaching, and fishing. If we were keen on catching dinner, we’d spend a couple hours at a fish park close to campus, but we were most comfortable along public waters like the Nanchang River that flowed right behind the university into the frog-filled Purple Bamboo Park and below the National Library. Unlike the enlightened Jiang Taigong, however, we dangled baited hooks.

Pedaling our bikes two miles to the National Library and trekking around the grounds and through the marble lobby with our fishing rods, we enacted our own dramatic search for meaning. Somewhere in here were the surviving volumes of the massive Yongle Encyclopedia of 1408 with its references to Jiang Taigong and the great fish of China. “May I please see any Yongle Encyclopedia volumes that discuss fish?” I asked the reference librarian in practiced Chinese, presenting her my credentials and letters of reference. “No,” she replied.

Many Westerners live and work in China, learning the language and forging deep relationships with the people and culture. But for many of us laowai there remained that sense of being outside the walls, outside the deep knowledge and understanding that makes someone feel at home in a distant place. To ease my homesickness, a friend sent a box of books that included the Chicano classic, Bless Me, Ultima. I was moved by the story of the boy, Antonio, living in New Mexico and struggling with his identity and religion. Antonio goes fishing and discovers the golden carp, a local legend and god of nature that, for a time, outshines the Catholic traditions of his Mexican family. In all my travels and years living in East Asia, fish and fishing have brought me closest to that inner sense of belonging and receiving something rare and true.

One July morning a couple weeks after my bid for the encyclopedia, Jin Lei and I cycled back to the Nanchang River, started to unpack our gear, and heard a loud splash. Deep rings spread out from the middle of the river. “Dragon?” Jin Lei arched her eyebrows, and we talked again of those unflagging and triumphant golden carp of the Yellow River graduating into dragons. Then we gazed at the river before us. The Nanchang had been diverted, diked, dammed, and overfished for centuries, with runs providing sewerage for huge apartment complexes and the zoo. This old river rivaled the black ooze flowing from the pit of Tartarus, so any swimming survivors definitely deserved dragon status.

We had little expectation of catching a fish and no intention of eating our catch, but the stretch near the library was banked in stone and shaded in willow, pintail ducks paddled by, and there were charming old men who drowsily angled away the hours, bells tied to their rod tips, occasionally bringing in an anemic carp or a scrawny catfish.

I rubbed my hands with anise, baited up our hooks with juicy worms, and we sailed our bobbers onto the river. Hours passed and we were chatting about life. Jin Lei and I had been living together for months without any official challenge from the university, and the gossip seemed to be fading. I enjoyed teaching my classes, but I also wanted to go back to graduate school, finish a doctorate, and get a tenure-track job. Jin Lei’s studies were going well, but she, too, dreamed of graduate school and a better job, possibly in the States.

We drifted to lighter subjects, like the price of tea in China (about twenty yuan for a pound of oolong) when Jin Lei’s bobber vanished.

And when she did, her rod received and transmitted some serious news. The dark pages of the Yongle Encyclopedia needn’t open, for a big-mouthed li yu rolled and splashed a living entry before us. The old men leaned off their chairs, people blinked up from their reading, and a small tai chi group froze facing us as Jin Lei screamed, cranking madly and futilely against the drag until I calmed her down.

We had no landing net, so I coached her to tire out the fish and bring it along the bank. “Take it easy,” I said. “You’re doing great.” Quite a crowd had gathered by the time I reached in and grabbed the carp, easily five pounds, and set it flipping on the grass, the bewormed hook neatly pinned in the corner of its mouth. Some people took pictures, asked questions. The colors of the carp were exceptionally bright, golden even, and one man reckoned it escaped from the zoo. Jin Lei beamed and gave a press conference. I remembered the golden carp of Bless Me, Ultima and how young Antonio learns that he must never harm that sacred fish. I lifted Jin Lei’s carp toward the river for release and was blocked by a throng of angry shouts. “Bu, bu. No, no. What are you doing? That’s delicious.” Jin Lei tried to explain catch-and-release, but two of the other fishermen were clearly upset. The fish had been caught in the people’s river, and the people should eat it. The call was clear, even if the water wasn’t. I held the fish out to the oldest man there, a venerable angler I had seen several times. With a quick, slight bow and a grunt, he took the golden carp. The crowd satisfied, the bereaved old river flowed darkly on through her city.