Karen Cheung

Fish

Katrina Leung (b. 10th May 1987) is an artist working at the intersection of new media and performance art. Her preoccupations include folklore, contemporary dystopias, and unstable temporalities. She recently exhibited at Hoffman Pickett Gallery, the Museum of Postmodern Art, and the Anderson Centre of Deconstruction. She is currently working on a short film titled Dissecting Asias.

I hand the file over to the lady sitting on a low stool under the goose neck bridge. You know what to do, I say.

Katrina’s flight is two hours late, and my muscles are already sore by the time I finally greet her at the deserted arrival hall clutching a sign of her name. She does not address this or apologize for the delay, but instead reaches for a hug and thanks me in advance for my help on her research trip. She’s grown out her hair from the blue-streaked bob in her headshot on the file, and her voice is squeakier than it is on the online videos linked on her website. She is sure we’ll be fast friends, and if she does anything insensitive without realising, please, please step in and correct her at any time. She doesn’t have a work in mind yet, it’s more a fact-finding mission, but won’t it be great if the art world pays more attention to this, it may ultimately divert more resources to the island.

Of course we’d be friends, I say as I take her bags, even though I’ve never stayed in touch with anybody I interpreted for. They usually forget about me and the island the moment they leave.

There is no one at the reception counter when we finally arrive at the hotel at a quarter past eleven in the evening. It’s low season, I say, and the hotels are all vacant, understaffed. I don’t mention to her that tourism on the island is non-existent these days. Katrina nods graciously, says it’s no trouble at all, she can wait. I call the number but the line is dead. Katrina paces back and forth along the stretch of the quiet lobby. Half an hour later, she is in tears. She flew twelve hours to get here and just wants to lie down, is that so much to ask, she thought this was a bad idea from the start but the foundation had been so generous with her grant.

At midnight, I flag down a rickshaw and give the driver my address. It’s a two-bed by the harbour and I live with my mother so don’t expect much, but I can take the couch, I say. Katrina cries again, this time from gratitude. I knew I could depend on you, she says.

Nobody remembers exactly when the allergies began. The snack shop auntie on our street claims it was an illness that swept through the island overnight – suddenly, the students who flocked to her open-air stall after school were clutching their bellies and expelling the egg waffles and rice rolls, a smear of light yellow goo across the drains. By the fourth day, she figured it out. Fish was safe, and nothing else. Some were simply immune until they were not.

Mother was less sure about this version of events. She thought it was an infectious disease made from a bioweapon that spread through intimate touch. ‘That’s why they didn’t get me,’ she had said, almost with glee. Mother had not let anybody touch her for years, not even me, not since dad died. Two days later, she brought a spoonful of salted pork congee to her mouth, and spat it back out within seconds. It was not conscious, she said afterwards. Her body had simply ejected the food.

The snack shop auntie culled the menu so the only items left were fishballs and fish skin crisps. Soon, all the restaurants across the island followed suit: charred sea breams, sardines in nước chấm, mullets dressed with anchovy sauce. The century-old diners that could not adapt their menus catered to a dwindling clientele that had yet to succumb to allergies, and inevitably closed down. How do you expect a baker of pineapple buns to keep pace with the times and serve customers who can only tolerate fish? It cannot be done. Now the island is a husk, dark strips of vacant storefronts that scream TO LET.

I’ve always hated the sharp, pungent scent of fish, the saline aftertaste it left on my tongue. When I first caught the allergy, I went three days without food, to experiment with the limits of my body. On the fourth day, I steamed a threadfin with seven heads of ginger and shredded the glistening white meat. I put the bits of fish into a clear bag and ate out of it whenever the hunger hit. It is still the only thing I can stomach.

I could have gone, too. I just didn’t want to leave you here. I had secured a job in the city as a translator for the immigration department, but you couldn’t bear to part with the seaside house your family had lived in for three generations. We can’t just abandon the island, you said. We are water people. How can we live as exiles, when our home is still intact and whole save for this – this thing?

Then, a year later, you met her at a party on the jetty. She told you there was no future on the island and you agreed. You took off for the city together. Weeks ago I watched you on a late night show, where the host introduced you as an exiled author. ‘There is no future on the island,’ you repeated, wearing the pond-green turtleneck I gave you on your birthday five winters ago. ‘I wrote this book to call on politicians to grant islanders residency in the city, so we can build a new home.’

The allergies are non-reversible, but it’s contained to the island for now. Those who left are sure that their future children would be unaffected, but we would not know, not for at least another generation. But still, they can hope. That is what all the exiles are living off – hope.

At first, Mother told Katrina back at the apartment, tourists swarmed the island on the hunt for novelty. They took photographs of restaurant menus, of island residents plucking translucent bones from their lips. They regarded us with breathless curiosity, like we were performers in a freak show. By the third day, they’d invariably grow tired of the fish. They become paranoid that they, too, would contract the allergies, even though in the half-decade since there’s only been one case. It is enough to scare them off. They don’t come back.

The next morning, I’ve secured an interview with Lee, a pork butcher-turned-fisherman, for Katrina. He is in his fifties, with sunburnt skin and wrists so delicate you wouldn’t think he had been wielding a cleaver every day until recently. From afar, the still sea looks like a slab of blue marble. We board a sampan and he casts a net over the water, then pulls it back onboard to reveal dozens of silvery, writhing fish caught between the knotted rope.

Ask him, Katrina says, what he makes of the recent developments. Was it traumatic to have to learn a new skill so late in life?

I turn to Lee but he stares at me hard, already understanding. ‘It will do us a disservice to define us by trauma,’ he says. Around him, the waves beat and bounce under the cold December sun. ‘Tell her we are not broken. Tell her we are still here, living the best we can.’

Three months before you left, we went to a wet market. You were worried about me, said my diet was a clear sign that I had given up. You wanted to show me that despite these circumstances, there were still ways of living with dignity on the island. We drifted past bare aisles until we reached a tank. For dinner, you said, a pomfret smeared with black bean paste.

That was when we noticed the eel swimming in a small square of water. It was sliced cleanly in half, its eyes still open in the murky water, flashing a circle of pink flesh before us through the glass. The other half, the tail, was sitting in a different tank. I dug my nails into your arm. Let’s go, you said.

The next day, you brought me a halibut in a red plastic bag. A quick pan-fry, mask the fishiness with garlic and chilis: this was before our bodies rebelled against even garnishes that were not from the sea. Did you go back to the market? I asked. Is the eel still there?

I did, but I don’t know. I couldn’t bring myself to look at it again, so I went round the back and avoided that section altogether, you said.

The OLD HING KEE signboard above the metal shutters is now eroding under black specks of dust. My dad took us here every Saturday before he passed, I tell Katrina. She rummages through her bag for her recorder, but I shake my head.

We always ordered the same dishes: eggs scrambled with slivers of gooey tomatoes, crab vermicelli in claypot, braised eggplants in minced meat sauce, watercress with fermented bean curd. The couple that ran the diner for forty years were our neighbours. Sometimes, when my parents were at work, I’d sit in their kitchen all afternoon, watching them chop long stems of green onion and marinate meat in large bags. Before the restaurant had closed, I went by every day after work just to sit at a table by the window, even when I could consume nothing but my stupid bag of shredded fish. Whenever someone stopped to inspect the menu, then retreated, the couple would look at each other with a small smile, as if to assure the other it was okay. I was crushed each time, I say. They lasted another winter before packing up and moving to the city like all the rest of them.

10.

Fish School. Blue Tang Dynasty. Let’s Roe. I was so fucking sick of these clever restaurant names. Haven’t we suffered enough?

11.

I visited the lady under the bridge a week after your abandonment. It is an old folk ritual on the island, one of the few that have been passed on. Villain hitting is bad karma. It is akin to putting a curse on your enemies, although dissenters say that of course there is no such thing as magic, it exists for purely cathartic purposes. We’re all forced to live with too many injustices for which there can be no recourse or resolution: the ritual brings closure where there can be none.

First, we lit the candles and incense, and prayed to the water gods. Then I scrawled your name and your birthdate onto a piece of paper. The lady pierced holes onto the paper with the burning end of an incense stick. She slapped the paper violently with the heel of a shoe. I think about the last time I saw you, the night before you would board a ship to the city without saying goodbye. We walked along the pier like we had when we were still children, sneaking out to meet away from the disapproving gaze of our parents. The lights of the distant buildings in the city blinked from afar, rendering it more a mirage and less a real place one could escape to for a different life. You will be fine, you said. We will be fine.

We muttered a final prayer, for good luck. It is done, she said. Then why didn’t I feel any relief?

12.

He couldn’t look at it again, I told Katrina. I suppose we are both like that – it was why we fell in love in the first place, when we had been just teenagers. Neither of us could bear to look at pain, confront it headfirst. Your betrayal had stung, but it also made perfect sense. You could not even tell me until after you had gone, for fear of having to meet my pain.

13.

Katrina shows me a polaroid. It is Mother standing in front of Old Hing Kee in her best white gown, the one she wore to dad’s funeral. In the photograph, Mother’s smiling and holding her fingers up in a victory sign.

Ta-da, Katrina says. In that instant I decide that I hate her.

14.

Lee is dousing the cod in sea salt and drying them on baskets by the cliff under the sun. They used to do this in Portugal and Spain to prevent them from spoiling before the invention of refrigeration, he tells Katrina. I know that, she says.

There is still enough fish, for now, but we never know when we’ll run out, he says. I do this for my children, our children, so they don’t have to worry about starving.

Katrina captures all of this on video with her little handheld camera. You’re so brave, she says.

By evening, we are back at the airport. I will write you, she says, beaming. I won’t forget everything I saw here. I’ll tell the world about you, and Lee, and Old Hing Kee.

Please don’t, I say.

15.

CURATOR: So the video we just played was a spectacular performance from the artist Katrina Leung – an endurance piece where she subsisted on nothing but fish for a month, and then laid under the sun on a cliff for ten days. She mentioned that this was to mimic the process of drying cod, which the residents of the island she visited were doing, in case they ran out of food. We are so honoured to have Katrina here today with us – Katrina, can you tell us more about the work?

KL: Well, I wanted to pay tribute to the people of the island. I was there on a research trip last winter, and I just met so many amazing people. The way that they are just so resilient, despite this insane, insane curse that they have to live with that prevents them from eating anything but fish. It’s like something out of dystopian literature. On the last day, I took a trip to the fish market, and there was just this eel that was cleaved into two, in the tank and still alive, and I couldn’t even look at it at first. But then I just made myself do it, really look the pain in the eye. And that’s what I want this artwork to do: to implore everyone not to forget about the people on the island.

16.

The lady under the goose neck bridge appears to have shrunk, her cheeks sunk in from what I can only assume is malnutrition. She looks up from her stool and blinks once. Haven’t you been here before, she asks. Maybe, I say. I pull out the document that my manager had left on my desk before she had arrived. The girl in the headshot smiles from behind her bob.