Priscilla Lee

My mother the hard boned Chinese woman 23 years in this country without bothering to learn its language buys lean pork ribs special order at the Hop Sang in Chinatown and cooks dinner for an extended family of twenty-five during holidays. Seated loosely around the dining table trying to eat quietly I am scrubbed down to skin and bone, her oldest daughter— spineless, a headless snake a woman grandfather says who should have her tendons lifted out slowly by the steel point of a darning needle until she writhes. To my mother I'm useless but dangerous, capable of swallowing the family whole into my pelvis while I sit waiting for the boyfriend white and forbidden to touch our doorbell.

On our dining table, every dish is a dime-store pattern: blue dandelions, red nasturtiums, the entire stack, a small legacy won in a 1959 coin toss by Lealand, the uncle with the long arms and legs, who pitched penny after penny at a parking lot carnival until his pockets were emptied of everything, but lint and luck. My family wouldn't buy Emporium bowls thick like heads of cabbage or soup spoons holding hand-painted water lilies; our plates, chipped and resounding, clatter at every feast. In America, we acquired what was necessary: some English to earn a living, cotton for dull work, enough noodles for a long life. My father and uncles fled China with a black leather trunk, four wool sweaters, and proud photographs of their two-story mansion. They rented on Mason, Alfred's Steakhouse clanging all night below. Great-Uncle's wife donated a lazy susan, mini Bora Bora pitchforks, and wooden bowls, rancid from salad oil—whatever she couldn't unload at her yard sale. Sundays, she invited her nephews to hang coats, change diapers, and serve finger sandwiches, told guests, ignore those farmboys, too stupid to say yes or no. The boys didn't tell her about the jars of jade or the "big house," its pond swimming with yolk-eating carp. They studied calculus and chemistry and worked after school, eighty-five cents an hour, pouring coffee at Mee Heung Bakery and ironing pleats in sweat shops towards a new life: chicken and fresh fish every day, wonton noodle soup and television at midnight, Grace Kelly on weekends.When I get off the boat, America is a beautiful country, my father says as he watches Uncle Lealand, the organoleptic specialist, dish up the leftover black bean lobster for his cats.

In a fish cleaning station near the equator, off the coast of Africa, summer stretches over the barracudas, their long mirrored-chrome bodies heaped like eel fillets, slung jaws gaping, red canine teeth exposed as if they still crave meat and muscle. Even dead, they are a melancholy fish, never satisfied, always wanting to bite off more than they can chew, their curious white eyes in a lidless showdown with an existence beyond the visible. Maybe they are the spawn of the serpent who prowled and tempted Eve, cast into the saltwater. They are terrifying and defiant, their pointed heads hammering towards the light, waiting for the first sign of weakness. The fishermen catch them hovering just beneath the surface. What is it like to die with your eyes wide open in the bright sun?