My father hates sushi,
and that’s the Chinese tiger in him talking
at the rotating sushi belt restaurant
in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong,
as I grab a slab of sweet corn nigiri,
my dreams of eating corn on everything
since the day I was born, now coming true,
and Dad sticks to his grilled hamachi,
dumplings, and the sake we’re chugging,
wondering why I craze over fatty tuna
belly and scallop and striped bass and sweet
shrimp, because to him, it’s just hunks of raw fish
atop rice, made to look pretty,
not to taste good, but if he only understood
chewing a piece of squid forever,
or tasting the sponginess of tamago egg
just as sweet as it is yellow,
or taking a lesson from The Three Bears:
sashimi that’s not too thick, not too thin,
and behold foie gras sushi,
nigiri with mango cubes—
ahhhh to all the wonders of mackerel,
the beauty of the shrimp head,
the chirashi bowl, like a garden of flowers
from Wonderland, complete
with cucumber centerpiece,
and seaweed salad that looks like mermaid’s hair,
but when the unagi on rice bed comes,
I’m three again, remembering
the times we visited the wet market together,
looking at the eels in the tanks,
me hiding behind him,
my shield, my knight, the tiger that
growled at the water snakes jetting their heads
out the tanks, as I begged to leave, crying,
wanting ice cream instead of this erotica:
eels necking each other,
trying to neck me in, suck on me,
and Dad would grab my hand,
buy me a strawberry cone, a red bean cone
for him—on the walk home, a cone
in one hand, a bag of lychees and cherries
in the other, he’d stop to buy me
the stuffed gorilla with the big nostrils
I pointed at outside the toy shop window.
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