“Where are you and your fish really from” by Yilin Wang 王艺霖
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Where are you and your fish really from” by Yilin Wang 王艺霖.
Where are you and your fish really from
By Yilin Wang 王艺霖
Be careful about scams, Māmā warned
before I left for China. A “fresh catch”
is often farmed 鱼 trapped
in the Yangtze for a few days before
it’s fished back out and renamed
wild river 鱼. When I order
Water-Boiled Fish 水煮鱼 in Celestial
Women Town, I don’t expect
the waiter to lead me and my white
American friend to a 鱼 tank, point
at one, and ask, is that one
okay?
Slap its slimy scales
against concrete, loud thuds,
flopping 鱼 murdered
in bright daylight. Crimson proof
they’re feeding me freshly-killed 鱼.
Does the 鱼 feel more pain if we
choose it
and watch it bleed?
My friend gasps with horror-movie
terror, her legs still shaky
on foreign soil. I wring
my hands; fifteen years
of Vancouver rain have softened
me into a bruised Banana,
the walls of supermarkets
and my veins all bleached, sterile
white. Another friend had told me
it’s fine to eat animals
if you feel enough
guilt, if you don’t enjoy
their tastes, if you don’t assign
their fates. Buddhists in the past
used to fàng shēng—buy 鱼
from the chopping block,
set it free.
I could visit a roadside fàng shēng stall
that sell 鱼 to sinners seeking
redemption, but would throwing 鱼
into unknown waters
win me 鱼 karma points or bloat
the purse of fish-catchers?
Every day, countless 鱼 are beheaded
on both sides of the Pacific. Our 鱼’s ghost
arrives, whole and naked,
its bulged eyes glaring. Skeletal
head, bony dagger tail, sharp
on both ends. A blood bath
of numb peppercorns and hot
chili sauce. Our bellies bulge
and explode. We raise teacups
to toast the world’s tastiest 鱼鱼鱼.
Copyright © Yilin Wang 王艺霖
First published in Arc Poetry Magazine; originally appeared in Poetry Pause on December 1, 2020.
Yilin Wang 王艺霖 (she/they) is a writer, a poet, and Chinese-English translator. Her writing has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, The Ex-Puritan, The Toronto Star, The Tyee, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She is the editor and translator of The Lantern and Night Moths (Invisible Publishing, 2024). Her translations have also appeared in POETRY, Guernica, Room, Asymptote, Samovar, The Common, LA Review of Books’ “China Channel,” and the anthology The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories (TorDotCom 2022). She has won the Foster Poetry Prize, received an Honorable Mention in the poetry category of Canada’s National Magazine Award, been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, and been a finalist for an Aurora Award. Yilin has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and is a graduate of the 2021 Clarion West Writers Workshop.
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