6:39 a.m. - 2023-07-05
perch fry
Wrapped that dock out a few mornings ago, and as I was walking around the perimeter tightening hardware etc. a bass was shadowing me, mirroring my progress underwater. Like, aggressively. He wasn't a 5 lb. lunker or anything, nor was he a fingerling. At around 10” he was, if I had to guess, another teenager. And like the water snake, he presented with attitude. As I moved around the dock though, his motivation became apparent--I was startling the water-spiders hanging out under the deck as I worked, and he was snapping 'em up as they bailed and hit the surface. Which was cool w/me. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day and all, but...
My disposition changed when, leaning over to make an adjustment, I dipped my knuckle ever-so-briefly underwater and the f*cker struck at it. And struck successfully, landing hard w/his raspy teenage bass-mouth. I jerked my hand back and let loose w/some choice swears while he sat there, staring up at me. Really dude? My first instinct was to fetch my fishin' rod. Not because I intended to spite-fillet the guy, this wasn't a capitol offense or anything. I just wanted to hook him, reel him up and hold him, dripping breathlessly over the dock for a minute so he could think about what he just did.
But I refrained. It's not my place, is it? To be the stern stepdad of the animal kingdom. 'Cause even though she's my type (fickle, demanding, breathtakingly beautiful), I reckon Mother Nature's single for a reason...
~ ~ ~
I wouldn't have eaten him regardless, that bass. They're not very good. “Tanky” is the word I use; which is to say that they have a hint, a whaff if you will, of “dirty aquarium” about 'em. I'm tempted to blame this on our slow moving streams and hot summers; but as a Son of The South, I'll eat the hell out of some catfish (fried or blackened), and as a Child of The World, I'll eat the hell out of some Yellow River Carp (steamed whole with *special* soy sauce please, or fried w/chilies and ginger thank you) and those are both bottom feeders. So maybe it's their metabolism, the bass?Anyway, what we do catch and eat out here are perch. They're tasty, and so damn prolific that once every three years or so we have a “clean out” fish fry, where family and friends catch as many as they can before we fry 'em all whole (they're approx. hand-sized) in a giant, oil-burnt stock pot designated for such occasions. It makes for a great party, but given that our fish population was decimated during the unprecedented freeze that crippled Texas a few years back, it's a tradition we've put on hold. The last time we did it though...well that was one for the books.
~ ~ ~
My mom was working for a hospital down in The (Rio Grande) Valley at the time, and I think her job-title was like, “Vice President of Patient Throughput” or some such medi-corporate desk-placard nonsense? But basically she was the executive nurse boss; setting policy and protocol for her staff, helping them navigate the protean regulations imposed by our country's ad-hoc gov't/insurance “partnership”, and advocating on their behalf in instances of conflict w/ownership, patients, or doctors (some of whom, believe it or not, have been known to be elitist pricks). And the thing w/my mom is, everybody loves her. Really. Not just family and friends but every bit as-much and especially-so the nurses who work for her. They will walk through walls to impress that lady, and die a little inside if she tightens her lips into a frown of disappointment...only to be born again in the light of her (eventual, inevitable) praise and forgiveness. And her high expectations stem from a sincere affection for, and personal interest in, each one of them. That's her superpower as America's Matriarch™. So when she invited her staff up to the ranch that weekend, it wasn't for some hokey team-building bullshit or whatever. It was because she cared about these people and they deserved a vacation, damn it. Also a fish fry.~ ~ ~
There's a specific professional diaspora that, if you've spent much time in American hospitals, particularly on the West Coast or throughout the Southwest, you may have noticed. And I have no idea why, or what it is culturally that marries this community's collective disposition so neatly to the job; but Filipinos make great nurses. Men and women both, they excel in the field and gravitate towards it. This was certainly (and abundantly) the case where my mom worked. Hence every one of the families who made the trip up, aside from one white lady-nurse w/her husband and daughter, was Filipino. And by “family”, Filipinos mean family; filling every room in every house on both properties. Littles were packed four to a bunkbed, grandpas snored on sofas...bachelor uncles who'd tagged along for the ride slept on air-mattresses by the dining room table. It was mayhem, and they had a blast. Due in no small part to the fishing.Because they were some fishing motherf*ckers, those Filipinos.
The grandfathers would be out at daybreak, chainsmoking, squinting patiently at the ripple where their lines met the water, and the kids and dads would soon join them. The former shouting and running up and down the creek-bank, pointing out prospective, unsuspecting, catches; the latter untangling lines and tying hooks on Zebco Snoopy rods (the perfect rig for perch fishing, btw) so the youth could get to work catching dinner. And get to work they all did, three generations strong...casting and reeling and casting-again all day, filling an ice chest w/fish. This was indeed a “clean out”.
Not that the size of the catch mattered to the grandmothers and moms and aunties crowding the kitchen up in the big house, because each of them was determined to cook enough of their signature party dish to feed 50+ people...taking advantage of the opportunity to do some culinary flexing for each other and, of course, for my mother. It was a whirl of muumuus and mom-jeans and hip-checks and reach overs...of knives and spices and secret recipes, of steam and spattering grease and jokes and gossip in English and Tagalog both and the results were glorious.
In addition to enough perch for everybody, there was, naturally, Chicken Adobo and rice; as well as huge serving trays of Pansit (Filipino lo-mein) and a tray of that weird Jollibee spaghetti for the kids (fried fish and sweet spaghetti? hell yeah, call this meeting of the clean plate club to order!). There were grilled pork skewers and deep-fried bananas, purple cakes colored with purple yams and a sublime oxtail stew made with peanut butter. There were multiple plates of tasty, finely minced ingredients I couldn't readily identify and there was, of course, Lumpia.
~ ~ ~
Moving to Hawaii when I was a kid was a blessing. Because it meant we were leaving my dad's previous assignment; three years in Bumfuck, Alabama, for a Trans-Pacific cultural wonderland. Not only did I get the invaluable experience of being an occasionally-bullied minority in High School (empathy learned, empathy earned); not only was Honolulu's eighties punk scene an eclectic smash of artists, musicians, political free-thinkers, sexual deviants, rude-boys and any other misfit(s) who could push a skateboard--a tight-knit scene w/out the bonehead factionalism that was turning Mainland punk into a violent drag...not only could I spend my days hiking and surfing and spearfishing in God's own stunning playground and my teenage nights wilding w/friends in a lazily-policed Waikiki still-rife w/weird kitsch and other funky vestiges of 50's, 60's, and 70's culture (i.e. a Waikiki that had yet to become a corporate designer shopping mall by the beach); but oh man yes-also and also-especially: the food.Things have changed now in the American South, but back then every small town had exactly one Chinese food restaurant. And they each had, in addition to the same paper Chinese-zodiac place-mats (1969, Year of the Cock hee-hee), the same menu. Which offered up some kind of mutant Cantonese, maybe? (Or whichever province General Tso and his chickens hailed from?) Simple recipes that allowed for maximum corn syrup/salt adhesion to the customer's protein of choice; and that, along a fortune-cookie, was all some of us knew of Asian(ish) cuisine. This would change in Hawaii, and my palate would expand/explode definitively. I could write a lengthy, near pornographic tribute to some Korean BBQ joints in Kalihi or an ode to the simple pleasures of Kailua strip-mall sushi, I could speak to the revivifying joy of tearing into a steaming bun/bon from a beachside Manapua truck, or of knoshing, greasy-fisted and sweaty, on Huli-Huli chicken in the back seat of my parent's car after a soccer game. I could even reflect wistfully on salty bowls of Saimen from fast food spots...but we're here to talk Lumpia. And my first memory is, in this case, distinct.
Because it happened on the first day I caught a wave.
Like, “caught” a wave. Whitewater had pushed me shoreward before...hollerin' like some redneck kook, splashin' towards the beach in Florida and Texas; but this was the first time I'd dug in to the face of one and rode for real. The first time I got a good taste of that power, and it was magic. That the enormity of the Pacific and the gravity of our favorite moon and the physics of liquid had conspired to create this swell? To create this fleeting marvel propelling me, urgently, across its surface? Definitely magic. The tumblers in my 13 yr old brain aligned then, and something was unlocked.
This would become problematic later, because of scheduling conflicts w/like, school-attendance an' shit. But this was my first summer in HI and the future looked bright. I stayed out and rode that break for hours (getting “barreled” for the first time, even) and might still be out there had my mom not waved me in for lunch. Because this was a work picnic for her, a welcome-party thrown by the nurses at the children's hospital where she'd been hired. You can probably see where this is going...some of those nurses were, inevitably, Filipino, and one of 'em brought a tray of Lumpia. And my memory of being that stoked and that famished, and crunching into that first Lumpia is indelibly commingled w/memories of saltwater and sunburn; of reef-rash and teenage hormones and a new-found, exponentially expanding, consciousness.
~ ~ ~
Years later I would live in a small apartment in a ratty L.A. neighborhood sandwiched between Echo Park and Downtown known as “Historic Filipinotown”. And while they'd long been outnumbered by Mexican-American families and Central American immigrants, a small Filipino community persisted; and this community's gastro-social hub was a modest cafeteria called Bahay Kubo. The spot was super local....so like, zero danger of running into another white person (because, unlike two black strangers in the same situation, who'll always seem to find each other and make easy. comfortable small-talk, we anglos tend to avoid eye-contact and sit on opposite sides of the room). I'd drop in for lunch on occasion and later, after Pidge moved in w/me, we would share a couple of meals there. She appreciated the place for the same reasons I did; it was funky, for starters. Card tables and folding chairs arrayed on a concrete floor, a rabbit-eared TV perched atop the fridge blaring soap operas (in Korean? in Tagalog?), and a line of Pinay lunch-ladies shuffling steaming food trays...chatting merrily and casually shooing flies. It was also dirt-cheap. Plus every order came with a complimentary side of “surprise”; because for every plate of Adobo or Pansit or Lumpia, there exist a host of Filipino dishes that can baffle the Western palate. Many of which feature tripe and/or vinegar. Also ears and snouts and curiously-incorporated eggplant or okra or water-spinach? All flavors I love btw, but all conspiring to achieve a result I struggled to appreciate on occasion. But that was part of the fun, to be honest. Another part of the fun, for Pidge, had to be the fact that the lunch-ladies loved her...like, on sight. And literally doted on her as we went through the cafeteria line together. Which was flattering of course, but also symptomatic of something more problematic?Because, owing primarily to her Eastern European heritage, but in-no-small-part due also to the arsenal of sunscreens and cremes and UV shields and solar skin-cautions stockpiled in our bathroom, Pidge was pale. I mean, I don't recall which exact shade of “goth porcelain doll” she was at the time, but it was light. And it was this, her milky visage, that caught the eyes of our Filipina steam-table matrons; I know this because they said so, explicitly. And while they were sincere and well-intended, it was an uncomfortable reminder of the weird SE Asian beauty-standard fixation on skin-tone. Which is f*cked up, if you think about it...'cause it's an aesthetic born of socio-economic disparity, of a class/caste system, no? This idea that a woman toiling in the heat of the paddy fields is inherently less attractive than one who sits, fanning herself in the shade of her porch, while her husband collects taxes from the people toiling in the paddy fields? Complicate that w/years of Euro-imperialist occupation and the historic ubiquity of Western media and yeah, here we are. So the idea that one of these pecan-skinned beauties, with their long straight hair and lithe limbs and that impossibly-cute cheekbone/dimple thing Pinay chicks got going on...the idea that one of these ladies would look in the mirror and think “I'm too brown” is baffling. And when I think back to the hours my mom, like every other white woman from her era, spent laying out by the pool, slathered up with Hawaiian Tropic? Also kind of ironic. Anyway, I'd like to think a younger generation of girls is growing up free from these anachronistic aesthetic archetypes; but a survey of S. Korean Snapchat and Instagram filters bodes otherwise...
~ ~ ~
Anyway, back to the Lumpia that started all this: the fish fry was a smashing success. My favorite memory of that weekend though, came the morning after. When everyone had packed up and was headed back home to The Valley, one of the families had to pull over by the pond and literally fetch their chainsmoking grandpa. Like, they had to pry the pole out of his hand and escort him, over his objections, back to the car. Because the dude Could. Not. Stop. Fishing.Good times.
