Catfish in the Bathtub
Catfish in the Bathtub Response As you walk in past the brown hazelnut colored door, the aroma of Chinese herbs fill your nose and like every other Asian house, there’s a shoe rack right when you walk in the door. Around dinner time, the meter long table would be filled with food—some looking edible while some makes you want to feed it to the dogs. Sometimes the food would be pig blood and liver made into a soup or chicken feet.
To me, I don’t eat that stuff and if I had a decision you would see me running to the nearest fast food restaurant for something I considered “normal”. But it’s one of my parent’s favorite dishes, so it’s usually made often and thus giving me the feeling of wanting to throw up every time I see it. However, to every else that’s just like me; Americanized, it would probably be gross. I mean who would want to eat pig liver and blood or even chicken feet—where it looked like a legit foot chopped straight off from a chicken just seasoned, cooked, and flavored.
But to top it off, being from a Chinese family also meant that anything that was considered “weird” was not accepted, so since being a left-handed person/writer, have multiply piercings, and so many other things was thought to be weird. For my sister, she started off being a left-handed person, so my mother would slap her hands when she was little to make sure she would write with the proper hand. Of course nowadays, being a left-handed person is normal, but before my parents didn’t believe so.
But now that my parents have been living here in the United States for some time now, they have become more Americanized and have let go of some of their cultural traditions—which, at times I am glad of because now I don’t have to worry about being the straight A student or being perfect at everything. But in the end, despite all these weird traditional food and Chinese culture this is who I am. No matter if it’s having dishes like pig liver and blood for soup or chicken feet on the kitchen table, this is my family’s catfish in the bathtub that I end up living and abiding by.
