Of Love Lost and Found: A Salty (Fish) Tale

My father’s face wore a look of cautious concern. “Let me just ask you this: Are you sure that he can handle it?”

I knew what this was about. My mother was making my favorite childhood dish — rice steamed with a pungent filet of salted, dried fish and Chinese sausages — and I’d invited my high school boyfriend over for dinner. After three years, my parents had finally gotten used to Shawn, had started to like him, even, but they never dreamed that I’d ask him to join us for hom-ngoy.

I folded my arms defensively across my chest. “Of course he can, Dad. Shawn loves Chinese food.”

“But we’re not talking about Chinese food here,” he protested. “Quite frankly, it stinks.” His head sprang up suddenly, and he looked around with his right hand extended, palm upturned, addressing an invisible audience in the kitchen. “You can’t ask the man to eat that.”

We’d ventured into a racial stereotype long held by my Chinese-American parents: the belief that white people can’t eat our food.

“That’s totally racist.”

“That’s not racist, that’s a fact,” he nodded sagely.

In truth, I could understand how my parents came to this idea. Having grown up in Mississippi and Louisiana respectively, my mother and father had encountered their fair share of Caucasians with unadventurous palates and narrow-minded attitudes toward Chinese culture in general. Living in Louisiana, we were still surrounded by such people, but I had tried to convince them that white people were not genetically predisposed to hating foreign foods. Besides, Shawn was different. Hadn't we just spent three weeks together studying Mandarin in Minnesota (he was much better at it than me)? Didn’t he extol, vociferously and repeatedly, the virtues of vegetarian Buddhist cuisine (I was an incurable carnivore)? Wasn’t he planning to travel to mainland China next summer to visit his Chinese pen pal (she’d even given him a Chinese name, Cheung Wei-han)?

“Look, he can handle it,” I snapped.

My dad shrugged and walked away. We would have to agree to disagree.

Cantonese salty fish has a highly idiosyncratic odor. It’s virtually synonymous with the word “stinky.” Countless stories have been told about neighbors who have called the police because families in a nearby apartment were cooking salty fish. My parents used to joke that I’d have no choice but to marry a Chinese guy because no one else would be able to stand the stench.

“I know that at least one of my daughters is going to marry a Chinese,” my dad would chuckle, drizzling a spoonful of oil over his rice and salty fish.

This comment invariably elicited laughs from the table while I remained uncomfortably silent. Little did they know that Shawn and I had already talked about marriage. We’d have a private ceremony in Greece, on a cliff overlooking the Aegean. I’d wear a simple white cotton shift; he’d cut his hair. All we had to do was wait until we finished university.

It’s not that I was philosophically opposed to marrying a Chinese man. It’s just that there were so few of them in Shreveport. The Yip brothers, Howard and Tommy, were hardly exciting choices. Perhaps for this reason, my parents had reluctantly agreed to send me to UC Berkeley.

“Dad, I really don’t think that salty fish and interracial marriage are mutually exclusive prospects,” I’d say with a sigh.

“Honey, you’re an optimist, but listen to me,” he’d say, waving away my comment and giving me a father-knows-best look. “No gwai-lo is ever going to be able to share his house with the smell of hom-ngoy.”


The funny thing is that I’d never thought of salty fish as stinky. In fact, when I catch a whiff of it cooking, I immediately get hungry and rub my hands together in anticipation.When steamed with plain white rice, the fish infuses the grains with an intoxicating base note of umami. It’s joltingly, mouth-wateringly salty, a thousand times more savory than Parmesan cheese, several factors saltier than anchovies. Unsurprisingly, you don’t need much to make an impact. My mother typically uses a modest rectangle about the size of a business card to feed our family of four.

The most common way to cook salty fish is to steam it with ground pork, slivers of ginger and chilies, perhaps with a few cubes of tofu. My Aunt Dorothy used to make this dish when I visited her, but it had never really grown on me. The flavors were muddled, the texture ambiguous.

I preferred my mom’s plain salty fish. First, she soaked the fish in a couple of changes of cold water to soften the flesh and tone down the salty bite. Then, she nestled the filet between a few links of sweet Chinese sausage, on top of the raw rice, and steamed everything together in the rice cooker. Once it was done, she’d slice up the sausages, plop the salty fish into a metal dish of hot oil, and set it over a candle to keep warm.

When I went away to college, I discovered the classic Cantonese dish of fried rice with salty fish, shredded chicken, and scallions. It was good, a treat I’d order when I went to dinner with Chinese friends, but it never came close to my mom’s salty fish.

As the evening wore on, I started to hear the bubble and hiss of the rice cooker, and the first heady puffs of fish-scented steam came curling out of the pot. I salivated; Shawn began to fidget.

“What’s that smell?” he asked, swiveling to look behind him.

“The salty fish,” I replied, and gave him a reassuring smile.

“The… fish?” he asked, incredulously. “That’s the fish?”

His face was ashen. He stood up and excused himself.

My mother poked her head into the living room. “Where’s Shawn?” she asked.

“Um, bathroom,” I muttered.

Five minutes later, he was back, with a towel covering his nose. “Oh, god,” he gasped. “It’s everywhere. You can’t escape the smell.”

My eyes widened in a mixture of disbelief and fear. “I cannot believe this is happening — I can’t believe that my father was right!” my mind screamed, as my 17-year-old worldview crumbled quietly around me.

“Oh, no,” he was squirming in earnest now, frantically reaching for his jacket and packing his bag. “I’m sorry, but I think I’m gonna be sick.”

After a quick apology to my parents, he rushed out the door. My father remained diplomatically silent, and we refrained from discussing the incident over dinner.

I was stunned. A couple of months later, Shawn and I broke up for the first time. A year after that, our relationship was officially over.


My father and I repeated our little kitchen conference a few years ago, when I brought my Canadian boyfriend JP home to introduce him to my parents. My mother had asked me what we’d wanted to eat, and I replied, “Salty fish.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, full of uncertainty. My dad gave me a look that said, “We’ve been through this before.”

“Mom, trust me,” I said.

A tremor of anxiousness hovered in the air as my mother began to prepare the fish. She looked at me one more time before turning on the rice cooker.

Before long, the familiar aroma began to waft through the kitchen and into the other rooms of the house. JP had been watching TV when he turned to me and asked, “What’s that smell?”

My father leapt from his chair, as if ready to put out a fire. I felt a flutter of incipient nausea.

“What’s that delicious smell?” JP asked again. My dad and I both froze.

“Isn’t it the most delicious thing you’ve ever smelled?” I asked, a smile spreading involuntarily across my face.

“It kind of is,” he replied. He sounded almost surprised at his answer.

JP and I will celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary in April. We devour salty fish with relish whenever we visit my parents in Louisiana, or when we travel to places like Hong Kong. If we could find it in Japan, though, we'd happily make it at home. Who cares what the neighbors think?

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A version of this story originally appeared in the magazine Nomad Editions Real Eats. JP and I recently returned from a long trip to visit his family in Canada and mine in Louisiana, where we feasted on salty fish and Chinese sausages, among (many) other things.