From youth I was taught that fresh meant alive
until the moment you buy it My mother
used to pick up chickens at the wet market, slit the throats
herself At four I helped her defeather the fowl,
drain its blood in a vat
My parents barely ate meat until the 1980s
In reeducation camps, they ate ground pork
once a year In America, we don’t buy live chickens,
but my mother always wanted to see the fish
alive, head on before we take it home
Chaff was the best sustenance—the eyes, the head,
the scales At twelve I return for the first time
to Wuhan In the wet market, I touch live snapping
turtles, frogs in vats, smell the musk of open-air
stalls You want your meat squirming and slippery,
not the squids and king conch packed in ice
The butcher slices an eel in half—I squint in disbelief
at the dying I witness—live kill, slit eel
Slit eyes, I’ve been called back home, my sightline a bloodless
gash Wet markets flourish with produce, feeding
a generation Mine, the offspring of those who starved,
like my father, in their mother’s wombs
Now pundits call for their ban, citing barbarian diets—
raccoons, offal, civet cats, bushmeat,
not spinach and wood ear, plums and star apples
At the Berkeley farmer’s market, no one bats
an eye How lovely it must be, to possess a body cleaved of
hunger and horrors, its stench so inherently
clean Nightly I dream of Angel Island’s quarantine
station—my immigrant body scrubbed
raw with carbolic soap, my immigrant belongings fumigated
in sulfur steam The evening I saw death, we ate eel braised
with bitter melon, drowned it in cloudy broth
To this day the memory how I tasted marrow
like an elegy frozen in bone
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The preceding is from the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which features excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future. The latest issue of Freeman’s, a special edition gathered around the theme of power, featuring work by Margaret Atwood, Elif Shafak, Eula Biss, Aleksandar Hemon and Aminatta Forna, among others, is available now.
