A Fishhead Summer
BY PATRICK J. ZHOU
We didn’t know anything about people who summered in the Vineyard except that people went to the Vineyard for the summer and it was the summer and we were people. Summering, as it turned out, required more than Ray-Bans and dining room rehearsals of sitting primly in chairs tucked by imagined waiters. Not that I’d done enough of that anyway. Back then, every distance to me felt imminently closeable, a hope so dewy, I had no measure for its toll until that weekend in July, the evening when my sister and I sprinted down a wet alley near the harbor in Edgartown.
My waspish legs wheeled to keep pace with my sister’s urgent stride. Glassy puddles lapped at the heels of my new Sperry’s as I stumbled through leftover rainwater pooled in rutted patches of cobblestone. We headed back to the restaurant, I thought. She would give that manager a piece of her mind and force him to give us a table, I thought, our lack of reservation be damned. An unstoppable force, she could do whatever needed to be done, get whatever needed to be gotten. Everyone needed a Jiejie and she was ours.
We didn’t stop at the restaurant though. Out of one shadowy corridor, Jiejie and I blitzed right past The Ichthys’s mahoganied and candle-lit vestibule into another murky alley. Dumpsters and dingy backdoors reeled into view under the last wink of the summer sunset. From the dank hidden brick behind luxury storefronts and restaurants with prix fixe menus, an odor wormed into my nostrils. I wanted to barf. The hunger came too but I swallowed it all down. Jiejie would have to tell me not to complain so much and I really liked complaining.
After a few minutes metered by the antsy toes in Jiejie’s ballet flats, a steel door swung open. An open palm stretched back to keep me at bay as Jiejie whisked toward the darker-skinned kid who emerged, fresh cigarette cinched between his two fingers and a damp white dishwasher’s apron splashed across his torso. What she said to him I couldn’t quite make out but, as she pleaded her case, I pieced together the route we’d taken; we’d rounded to the rear of The Ichthys.
The dishwasher boy peered at the two of us, fellow brown kids in need, and nodded and disappeared back inside. Jiejie tapped her toes; she tsked, tsked, tsked; she fidgeted edgily with a toothpick she must have brought back from the rental cottage.
When the kid returned, in his hand was a disposable plastic bag filled with fishheads and fish skeletons, their meatiest bits already fileted for worthier, reservationed diners. Blood and gluey chum slurried at the bottom of the macabre bouquet. “So, this is the best fish on the island,” Jiejie said, curious at the fruit of her labor, held like she expected something different from a bag of guts and bone.
We left behind the young dishwasher, his back against the brick in the gauzy shadows with a carefree flit of cigarette smoke wriggling loose into the sky. Jiejie dangled the sack in front of me and triumphed: “Happy eleventh birthday, little brother.”
—
We used to joke that, despite being raised by the same parents, we were each an only child. Different birth countries and different times—ten years, straddling the millennia—were mostly to blame; that and maybe not enough condom ads in Chinese.
When I was born, my father was no longer a poor graduate student and had not only scored a big job at a defense contractor but had also become a reliable, if not anachronistic, British soldier in local Revolutionary War reenactments. This meant that while Jiejie attended public school, I went to private. She rode the school bus; I carpooled in a BMW. We were both sides of the American Dream, a success measurable by accountants and tax brackets. Mama, Baba, and Jiejie treaded water in their early days out of a squalid one-bedroom near the Chinatown Super 88 while the only home I knew was the four-bedroom colonial in Lexington where I had a solarium with a GameCube and the pool out back Baba would grouse about skimming.
On Saturday mornings when I was three, Jiejie taught me to swim in that pool. “You can’t lose at the start line,” she’d say. With so many years between us, she functioned more as a kind of third parent than a buddy. Whether it was because of her stringy thirteen-year-old strength, or thirteen-year-old parental instincts, she held my torso low enough that I wrenched my neck doggy-paddling to avoid choking down the leafy half-heartedly skimmed pool water.
“I’m drowning,” I’d say, not drowning.
“It will make you stronger,” she’d say, not watching.
She wanted to teach me the hard way, the way she had it, to deploy her sage experience but also to manufacture a struggle she thought I didn’t have. “Before you were born, we lived like this,” she’d say. Like my micro-dosed drownings were an initiation into necessary hardship, a lesson of what I couldn’t inherit. “When I first learned to swim, Baba would drop me into the water. This was the YMCA pool in Oak Square. Not a private personal pool. You should be happy I don’t just drop you for everyone to laugh at you.”
I could swim on my own within months.
—
The fastest way back to our rental was the way we came, through the busy center of town. Jiejie needed to grab a few other items from a little Asian Mart nearby so she sent me back first as my mission. She fiddled with the neck of the fish carcass bag before choking it over to me, like she wasn’t sure if I was up for the job. Whenever I was nervous about one of her tasks, she’d tease me about growing up soft and rich (as if Baba and Mama didn’t pay for her college tuition by the time she enrolled.) This time, she looked like the nervous one. I put on my most serious face and nodded unhappily, like Baba did whenever anyone tried to sell him stuff. It worked. Before she left, she told me to protect our bag, to make sure I brought it back, or it would ruin the plans for my special day.
A salty breeze clapped at my cheek. The gentle crash of harbor waves hummed alongside the tinny rings from bells atop store doors. Cheery vacationers enjoyed the early night out on the town in vests and plaids and pastels, flaneuring among the shops sweet with colognes and perfumes and after-dinner cocktails. To get ready for this evening, I’d put on my birthday gift from my parents so I could look the part, what my sister called the New England WASP starter pack: powder blue Brooks Brothers polo, embroidered Vineyard Vines belt, and J. Crew khakis. The exception being that in these vacationers’ hands were nice trendy purses, waffle cone ice creams, and daintily folded knit sweaters whereas, in mine, was this swirly sack of fish guts.
I held my arm out a foot from my body so I didn’t have to touch the precious. Chum was gross. It looked like it’d feel cold and gummy, the fishbones prickly. Worst of all, the see-through plastic didn’t hide the gray faces pressed up against the film, their fish eyes as large and vacant as fish eyes. It wasn’t every evening that deadness would stare back at me and wish me happy birthday.
No matter how I held the bag, as much as I would twist it, one face would glide back around to look at me with eyes coin-wide, mouth ajar, like it begged to be seen. People sidled past me when I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, some beginning to notice what I had in my hand.
“Don’t look at me like that. You have to be nice to me today.” The face said nothing.
“I can’t take you back to the rest of your body. Somebody probably ate it already.”
A watery blood bubble bounced near his silver disc eyeball. What a phenomenon for this face, for it to be both here and in somebody else, multiple places at once. To get eaten was to have your body die separate deaths. What a bad way to go.
“There’s nowhere else.”
The fish’s eyes weren’t the only ones I needed to avoid. The longer I walked through town, past shops and shoppes of antiques and tchotchkes, I could feel more glares from the Vineyard Summerers. Some had even started to whisper and point not so inconspicuously. Jeers I could hear over the casual chatter, over the silky, leisurely crash of island waves.
My sister did give me one bit of advice before she left: Do not worry about these people. When she handed me the bag, she told me there’s not even a vineyard on Martha’s Vineyard and the land isn’t even Martha’s. Martha didn’t exist. The place isn’t anyone’s anymore. It belonged with Wampanoags, she said, they were people who used to live all over Massachusetts before Europeans came. But they killed them. These people are no more deserving than we are, she said. We’re all invaders. Not all killers. She had a funny way of telling me what she learned in college, and a funny way of protecting me.
“Keep your head down, don’t let them bother you, they’re not anybody. Keep walking,” she said. Her own eyes bulged too with the rare advice that had no tease in it, no secret double-fun meant also for her. This was her helping.
It had been my idea to come here for my birthday after all. I was the one who wanted to eat at The Ichthys. My friend from The Landover School, Jackie Sargent (“One of those Sargents,” he’d say, like I had any idea who the rest of the Sargents were), said his family went every year and I absolutely had to try The Ichthys; their chowder, littlenecks, and branzino were “to die for.” The best seafood in New England. Michelin-Starred. I didn’t even like seafood that much but part of me wanted to go to tell Jackie I went; our family went, like he and his family did.
My family liked good food too but restaurants served more than food. Though my parents now had money to spend, they still lived like they didn’t. (Baba would only turn on the AC when the heat got above eighty-two in the house and Mama still preferred groceries from Market Basket.) Unaccustomed to a tier of fine dining, particularly its protocols, my parents failed not only to meet The Ichthys’s dress code but also to make a reservation months in advance. Walk-ins were no-no’s. So, when we were turned away at the door and got back to our cottage, my parents, frustrated, asked my sister to figure something else out for my birthday dinner. They could order takeout. Anything, whatever. But she should choose. To them, a firstborn daughter had good sense and could make things work. I suppose that’s how Jiejie had long felt, that eldest sisters were burdened to have good sense.
—
Jiejie was no stranger to fun though.
Almost a year ago, in the first week of school, I was accused of eating cats. Our homeroom teacher had asked us about the weirdest food anyone had ever eaten for a friendly icebreaker to start the day. She probably expected responses like their dog’s homework or turducken. Then Jackie (one of those Sargents) said he heard Chinese people ate cats. He insisted. His cousin went to China for study abroad and he said it was at least once a week. I said, “No way, that’s gross.” The moment I got off the school bus though, I asked Mama if we ate cats. She was watching CCTV from the sectional while Baba cooked on the stovetop.
“You don’t eat cats,” she said, the mildest of reassurances.
“But some Chinese probably. It’s a big country,” she said.
“Did you eat cats?”
“Is this what they teach you in that expensive school?” I shook my head and said never mind. “Your grandfather keeps his older chickens as pets. But they eat chicken here like it’s no problem. Pets are made up. If people don’t want to eat them, they’re pets.”
A little later, Jiejie found me reading in my room to tell me dinner was ready. “You know, we ate cats before you were born. We were so poor we had to catch stray ones and cook them. If they had a lot of hair we had to pluck them.” Her voice was the firm, dutiful voice, the “I’m your big sister” voice. “But you, you’re American. You dress like them, you eat like them. You can’t eat what we eat.”
Passing down wisdom and experience felt like a necessary affirmation for the rest of my family. The chief purchase of their struggle was mythmaking. It had to be. Otherwise, the pain would be nothing but a misery that lasted too long. What good was experience if they couldn’t tell someone, “Trust me on this.” If Jiejie didn’t pass any of that onto me, if our parents didn’t, they wouldn’t be ancestors, they’d be ephemera. Like Pogs or Beanie Babies or the West. So, I didn’t push back, especially with Jiejie. Some realer Chineseness coursed through her like the Yangtze while I was watered down with Sprite and McDonald’s Happy Meals. For every book she saw me read in English, every TV show seen or song heard, it was a book or show or song I didn’t digest in Chinese. Every step she saw was one I did not take back toward the homeland she had no intention of returning to anyway.
As we sat down at the dinner table that night, after Baba had placed the dishes in the center, Jiejie pointed to a new dish I hadn’t seen before. Cubes of mystery meat glistened with oily sauce and slivers of scallion. I could have sworn I spotted a patch of fur.
“Baba, heard what you said earlier so he went out, found a cat, and cooked it. So, you can try,” Jiejie whispered. “You heard Mama. It’s what Chinese people do. This is your chance, it’s really tasty.”
“Don’t tease your brother.” Mama stabbed through the air at us with her chopsticks and snappy Mandarin. “And don’t listen to her. It’s chicken. Your sister is silly and jealous. You have everything she wishes she had. Eat.” Jiejie bit her tongue—I could tell by the way her jaw clenched—behind pursed lips and with two fingers held up a reluctant peace sign at the edge of the table, pointing up like rabbit ears. She did it for me, whenever she got caught. She was sorry in her own way. She didn’t mean any harm. We’re still on the same team, those fingers meant.”
“He knew I was kidding.”
Sometimes, the teasing was for Jiejie. Like when she put Sichuan peppercorns in my Grapenuts or Tiger Balm in my Axe hair gel. That morsel of silliness felt necessary to her so most of the time, I could play along. I could laugh my way out of it. Her pranks were never that serious and she needed me on her side.
“Yeah, I did,” I said. “We were joking.”
—
By the time I’d realized there was a small hole in the fishbag, it was too late. A weepy red squiggle of blood trailed behind me on the town’s historic weathered sidewalk brick. Not only that, but as the bag drained, some of the bones shifted around and punctured outlets for more chummy streams. I held it even farther, as much as possible, while hunching my back forward to give it a few more inches, so that the gunk dribbling all over my fingers wouldn’t soak into my new clothes.
With the bag a quarter juiced already, my fishface friend had found air and gasped for new breath. Pinned in his gaped, pathetic mouth: a toothpick.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked in my hasty shuffle. “Why did you do this?”
Nothing. Just more leaking. Just more pleasant summer enjoyers looking at an Asian kid holding out a bag staining their otherwise bloodless walkway; more nice, careless islanders turning toward the ferrous, fishy scent of me, a starter WASP, speed-waddling by.
—
Mama and Baba always compared me to her. Your sister got this award from here. Your sister was valedictorian. Your sister never misbehaved like this. It wasn’t as injurious to me as it felt like it was to her, this burden that prevailed upon her to be excellent and reliable: she was our bridge. Our Golden Gate. Sturdy and strong. Like she would always bear upon her our future, the family promise. “You need to help give this next generation more than we ever had,” Mama had lectured a few months ago in our solarium.
Moments earlier, Baba had surprised me and said we could go as a family on a trip to Martha’s Vineyard. Jiejie, upright on the rattan couch, had typed on her laptop a report for her summer internship at an NGO, Mama had been folding laundry beside her; me, splayed tummy down on the rug playing GameBoy; and Baba had been gnawing on sunflower seeds and spitting out shells while local news blared on the big flatscreen before he made the abrupt early birthday gift announcement.
Jiejie was furious they granted my wish. “But we’re the same generation,” she said. She nearly flipped her computer onto the ceramic tile floor as she got up.
“You’re going too, we’re going together, it’s a family gift.” Baba didn’t reassure her, the rate at which he plowed through that bag of sunflower seeds, unchanged. The rate at which Jiejie had long accumulated grievances, also unchanged.
“But we’re going because Didi wants to be like those kids who aren’t even his friends. He’s not like them. He doesn’t even like seafood.” She stormed off and locked herself in her bathroom again.
“She’ll be okay,” Mama said. She and Baba resumed what they were doing. A small foot-length shadow ponged back and forth beneath the doorframe of the bathroom, a fevered tapping to go with it, before the shadow finally settled. I went back to my GameBoy. Jiejie was tough, and capable, and was the most grown-up kid I knew. And those Pokemon weren’t going to catch themselves.
—
The journey back seemed longer than I remembered and, without Jiejie, more busy with people. A few tried to stop me and ask what I was doing. I’d smile and wave them off. The good news was that even though the bag was leaky, the only damage done so far were a few drips on my shoes and maybe the clingy odor. The rest of my new outfit stayed clean so long as I could dodge the stray streams that spat out in strange directions or caught in a breeze. It became a fun little game. But I’d looked down so frequently to check on my fish, to evade the leaks, I didn’t see the guy in front of me until I was too late to stop.
“Yo, what the fuck.”
I crashed into him and, while the bag didn’t quite explode, it pinched enough in the right places to ooze a dark moist streak into the backseat of his khakis. The two other guys he was with, dressed similarly in gingham plaid, backward caps, and aviator sunglasses, burst into laughter.
“Bro, it looks like you shat your pants with blood.”
“You look like Dracula had diarrhea.” More cackles, more cracks at Bro.
“You fucking messed my whole shit up, kid,” Bro said.
Some gravity kept me there, as if I had to wait until their actions resolved before I could move on. The same shame yanked my head downward and dropped my bag arm to let the fish fall tighter to my body as the friends shifted their attention to me. Juice seeped onto my pant leg and dripped onto the toes of my shoes.
His friends chimed in. “What the fuck is in that bag?”
“What are you gonna do, Bro?”
“It’s just a kid, man.”
“He doesn’t talk much.”
“Don’t say much, do you, kid? Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I peeked up through the part in my hair at my elders. Around Jiejie’s age, Bro had a faint beard and freckles and smelled eerily like her when, in the summers between semesters, she would stumble home alone many nights after curfew (I caught her a few times when I got up to pee.) Bro took off his sunglasses. He knelt level to me, his eyes a color I didn’t remember, but I do remember the deep furrows in his irises, like the far ends of a vast ocean brought near, that distortion of distant objects over water being closer than they really are. The bag of fish still seeped by my side and I was too scared to move as it streamed slowly down my leg. But no matter how stained and wet my clothes got, I couldn’t move until that relentless gaze released.
“Listen, kid, this is a country of laws. You can’t fucking go around and fuck with people’s clothes,” he said. His friends snickered but nodded, matter-of-factly. “But this here is also a country of freedom. So, I’m going to give you a choice. Since you assaulted me, technically, I can deport you. My family knows a few people, I give them a few calls, and you head straight back home, Jackie Chan,” he said. He pointed directly at my waist. “But I’m a nice guy, I’ll be your pal. Instead, you can give me your belt right there. It’s a nice belt and that’s a pretty fair trade if you ask me. Your choice, buddy.”
As my non-bag hand held up my beltless pants, I sped away from Bro and his friends, my precious prize still intact in the other. Since my clothes had already gotten ruined, I could run the rest of the way back and not worry about how the gut juice flowed over me, the slosh in my shoes. It didn’t matter.
Even though I wore what they wore, I couldn’t wear it like they did. There was an endemic quality so known and impenetrable to them they could jeer airily at efforts like mine, a laughter that wanted for little and needed for less. All the while, my bag of faces would dance and twirl, the bag swinging in my hand, mouths wide open—my own quiet chorus for misguided dreamers.
I arrived back at the cottage to this: Mama yelled at Jiejie in the family room a few feet away, for having abandoned me; Jiejie returned fire. Jiejie, Mama, Jiejie, Mama. About her disappointment and about jealousy, about spoiling and not raising me right. They couldn’t even hear me step into the rental, didn’t see the state I was in. No time to register their reactions from when I finally stepped through the doorway to the moment I did what I did.
The bag of fish sailed toward Jiejie and splatted on her chest, a sunburst of guts over her and the couch and rug and TiVo as she pinned the once full sack to her body with shocked hands. Pinks and flecks of flesh landed on her face and in her hair, not to mention darts of fishbone and fishmeat. Some had even sprinkled over Mama, the way she blinked the gunk out of her eye. The bag fell to the ground as skeletons and red and silver faces spilled slowly out onto the hardwood. Stunned and silent, Mama and Jiejie processed what had happened until I explained it for them.
“You always prank me, you’re not a good Jiejie! This is the worst birthday I’ve ever had.” I stomped off back toward the guest bathroom Jiejie and I shared. But before I shut the door behind me, I shouted, “Plus I’m still hungry!”
My formerly-new clothes and shoes lay in a heap on the tile floor as I showered. I half-waited for someone to knock on the bathroom door and tell me everything I’d done wrong. The other half, waiting for the family with a good name I didn’t have. Neither arrived. Nor did the stench fade in the rinse.
There wasn’t any soap in the shower nook so, I crept out of the shower, sopping wet, and fished around in Jiejie’s toiletry kit on the sink to see if she’d brought any. As I sifted through, there wasn’t any soap but I did find a small plastic sandwich bag. In it were white rectangular pills I’d never seen before with X’s on them. No one ever mentioned that Jiejie took medicine of any kind. She never said anything but I’d learn about Xanax later.
Baba called my name and I quickly buried the plastic bag back among Jiejie’s toothbrush and hand creams. “I’m still in the shower,” I called out and, still dripping, rushed back in and scrubbed my body raw until all I could smell was hot water.
A knock on my bedroom door. By then, I’d gotten dressed and corkscrewed into the starchy sheets and duvet. Baba came in and sat on the edge of my bed.
“Jiejie, doesn’t think I’m Chinese enough. She never does.”
“You’re not Chinese,” he said flatly.
This didn’t help. He didn’t notice.
“But she’s not very Chinese anymore. Neither is your mother and me. The place we left behind is not the place it is today anymore. We’re not the people that left.” With a cupped palm, he motioned to himself and out toward the door, like he could stir us all together in the ladle of his fingers. “You and your sister need to stop living like being a kind of people have some secret recipe or ingredients like we could come from places that don’t ever change. It is more mystery than that.” He patted my shoulder. “It’s more like a mysterious cake.” The man had never baked before in his life. He had no idea what cakes were made of.
As he said this, on his face was the same wide-as-the-moon grin he’d wear above that red coat with the brass buttons and those pantaloons when fake muskets would send him sprawling gleefully on the bright Spring grass of the Lexington Battle Green. Our concerns had always been foreign to him, not because we were third culture kids, but because we wanted to connect to identities deeper than the four of us when, to him, the four of us and tasty food was all we needed. Somewhere in there was wisdom and experience. He wiped my cheeks with a fat ruddy thumb.
A knock on the door. It was Jiejie, creaking the door open to reveal only her bowed forehead, and loose, wearied wrist at the doorknob. “Dinner is ready,” she whispered.
—
I’d read somewhere that most Chinese people are lactose intolerant and that they get their calcium and Vitamin D from bone broths and bone soups. By the natural evolution of eating and surviving, people on that continent knew they needed strong bones and if it wasn’t through milk, it would be through siphoning marrow. Like most things Chinese, I didn’t know for sure though.
I did know I was lactose intolerant.
It was why, unfortunately for my father, we didn’t plan cake on my birthdays. The special treat had to be something else.
—
In the center of the cottage dinner table, my friend’s familiar eyes, once big and round, cooked down to become beady like small white beans, drifted lost and separated in the broth. Dozens of other fishheads also floated alongside blocks of tofu in the sour soup, steamy and rich with umami and hints of rice vinegar and anise. Above that scent drifted the cooked garlic and ginger and scallion and cilantro, an aroma so strong it set a cairn in memory, of a cottage and a family trip. Of an eleventh birthday summer. Our summer.
“This is what we eat—” Jiejie said. Her face was clean and she’d changed a shirt, her hair slightly damp. She must have showered in the master bathroom. She didn’t mention my throwing the fish at her or my yelling at her. In fact, she served me first, scooping spoonfuls of the yummiest soup I’d ever had. “—the best fish on the island. Happy birthday, Didi.”
She didn’t mention how she cooked this soup by herself, how she wouldn’t have had to do any of this if I didn’t ask them all to come here in the first place. Didn’t mention how much she’d gone through, how much we’d put on those shoulders. How I took her for granted. Our eyes locked then though and I could feel her, not a third parent anymore, but the look of a sister. Two peers, the same. And at this table—the people we knew best and our land would be wherever we sat down to eat together.
So, when I knew she could see, as I slurped down mouthful after mouthful of her soup, I held up two fingers at the edge of the table for her and haven’t stopped since.