Look at that! private beachfront equity! their own decks! my dad said. A beat. Their own decks! on the beach! You’ve said that five times already, we know they have their own decks, my mom replied.
I tried to go on top of one last time. The wall blocks the view of the ocean, you see that? I parked right over there—or was it there? Hold on, it was— It can’t have been there, cause that says no trespassing. Everywhere says no trespassing.
Oh, you noticed. See, you notice things better than me, cause I didn’t notice, and I just parked there, or somewhere like there. And I went up the stairs— You went up the stairs? Didn’t you see the chains and the signs? I went up the stairs, and I went on the deck, and I saw the ocean, and I saw Manhattan. I took a picture (he likes taking pictures) and went back down. And then I noticed the signs, and the chains. You’re lucky you didn’t get shot. Those houses, the attics are snipers’ nests.
We crossed the concrete bridge that arced impossibly across the gray sky and turned onto the strip, which had a public beach and semi-public parking. You had to pay, but we said Let’s park slightly and go up and have a look at the ocean. And so we did. The sand slid under my feet as I carefully stepped across the patch of sand with an exactly vertical force vector so that no sand would enter my shoes. We reached the stairs (why is the ocean always above you here?) and climbed and looked at the vast ocean.
Since we had thought my dad might be lonely in Jersey, we were spending a slice of summer visiting him. One day, when my dad said Let’s go to the sea and eat lobster, we said Let’s go. I wanted to go too, even though I didn’t particularly like the idea of lobster.
And I remembered how I love the ocean. Not swimming in it, or really doing anything in it, but simply being, or not-being, beside it. The Atlantic is different—younger, tauter, angrier—from the Pacific. It was the color of Athena’s eyes and it stretched forever into the distance. The waves crashed in a salt spray against the black rocks and I pictured in a long-exposure photograph the countless souls who have stood here. An Indigenous warrior armed for battle, watching the approach of the white sails they know spell inescapable doom on the horizon. The gold-and-god colonizer thereborne, wistfully missing home and cursing primogeniture. The terrified slaves, the hopeful immigrants, the rich expats, the famished farmers, the greedy corporations, the exhausted refugees, the bored bourgeois. The ones brought by boats and planes eventually, momentously, to this shore for good or ill.
I soon got bored of the ocean. All subliminal experiences get boring. On the beach in front of the ocean were some people enjoying it. Even though it was evening, and too cold to swim, nevertheless some children were swimming. Some others were playing amorphously with sand, not aspiring to anything more than a mound. A pair of beerbellied men were contemptuously metal-detecting with long sticks, daring the sand to hide something from their electromagnetic gaze. They had big headphones and slouched backwards, and had another long stick with a cup on the end so they wouldn’t have to bend over to dig. One of them stopped and reran his metal-detector over the sand. Aerated the sand a bit. Panned again with the metal-detector in a practiced motion. I imagined the coil in the detector head sending out an electric field and inducing a reciprocal one in the metal. Didn’t have a choice, really, it had to respond, or else lose its identity. He dug some more with the cup on the stick and eventually bent down to put the thing in the pouch. He still looked grumpy for some reason, even though he found a thing to put in the pouch.
Farther on the beach were some people my age walking in the sand. The girls were wearing the kind of sundresses that you wear over a swimsuit, probably from the Vineyard Vines store I saw in the town. The guys wore linen shirts and short shorts. The whole group had blond hair, and blond skin, and were tall and toned. And I hated them. I wasn’t sure why. The pandemic had insulated me from people like them, and anyway there weren’t so many at schools like mine. Maybe I hated like one who hates the manifestation of their own secret evil in others, or like a bitter manqué hates, or like a parvenu hates the nobility, or like the lonely hate the loved. Maybe I hated them just because I hated them and I hated to hate. Maybe I hated them because I wanted to be them though or because I hate them. And maybe I hated them for no reason at all.
I pushed these troubling thoughts away from my mind, because I (patting myself on the back) had no time to hate. I looked behind at the wooden street, the boardwalk. White of the clapboard, and blue of the ocean, and red of the necks. And then I got it: Nicholas Sparks is what it is. I haven’t seen or read The Notebook but saw Safe Haven at the bidding of a girl in high school and I didn’t like it. But I remember the atmosphere of the East Coast oceanside and the culture they depict in movies like that and ads and TV. With the four-inch sa-mon shorts and the rope bracelets and the sunglasses and the Sperrys and the J. Crew and the private beachfront equity and the private beachfront decks. And a profusion of private boats. And the arrant whiteness.
I don’t know why this too bothered me, or even whether it bothered me. But I found myself counting minorities, or the lack of them, like an elite admissions officer. I grew up in a suburb of Cincinnati, without many Asians around outside of our little enclave. (In it, though, there were always South Asians wandering about at dusk and East Asians wondering about these postprandial perambulations.) But even in Ohio there were often at least a few minorities around, and even when there weren’t—the older parts of town, the worse parts of town—it felt transparent and relatively comfortable. But not here; here, the lack felt ominous and discomfiting. New York, that breathtaking mirage, ménage, mélange, was visible right there across the water. And across from it was Newark, which, I’d heard, was where all the rich Koreans went to escape Koreatown, since if they say Newark fast enough and with enough of an accent it sounds like New York.
We got hungry, and we went to the restaurant. We wanted to eat outside— though my mom is vaccinated, and my dad is vaccinated, and in fact everyone in our nuclear family is vaccinated, she still worries—and so we went to the lectern where the hostesses stared glumly at an iPad.
They were the same kind of sun-kissed blond teenagers who were strutting on the beach, boringly beautiful. Like Abercrombie models.
Hi, we’re four. Ok. (A beat.) Yeah so it’s gonna be thirty minutes.
Thirty minutes? Mhm.
We went back to the car, which was also white and young but far more friendly. A good car. (I roll, it said in Latin. You sure do, I said in English.)
Who wants to have a looksee inside? my dad said. And we’ll ask if there’s seating. I’ll go, I have to pee, I said. I’m always having to pee; I drink too much water (4.59 liters a day on average, according to my spreadsheet).
Minha? That’s my brother’s name. He hemmed with that expression on his face, and my mom clocked it immediately. Just to look around? said Minha. He doesn’t understand why we do things for their own sake, like bookstores without buying books, or sidewalks that don’t lead anywhere in particular.
Go by yourself. Look at him, he’s shy, said my mom. What she meant was lazy, in my opinion.
We went in. How weird it is to be inside without a mask still. Especially because these people are the farthest thing from my family. I went to the bathroom and while I was washing my hands I looked up and saw a strange, dark, and grotesque face. Too big in some places, too small in others. I couldn’t shake that impression even after my eyes adjusted to the dimmed lights inside. It repulsed me, like that picture in Dorian Gray’s attic, and I left and tried to forget it.
What’s the wait time here, I asked these indoor hostesses, who somehow looked exactly the same as the ones before but taller. I had walked quickly to the desk, running from something. I hoped they didn’t see what I see, and so I steeled my face.
Thirty minutes, they said in unison. I was confused at this point, for I saw clearly that there were open tables. In fact, there were hardly anything but open tables. I looked around pointedly and then met their eyes with asperity. We have reservations inside, and we’re all booked up, they eventually explained. You can sit at the bar, if you want. We have the full menu there.
We left. I looked on my phone and sure enough the website says inside is reservations, but not only. And it said that you could reserve a table for thirty minutes ago, and for now, and for thirty minutes from now. We waited, because at the decisive moment I can’t discern what is racism and what is run-of-the-mill bad luck.
My parents went to go look at the ocean, but me and my brother stayed in the car. He looked at his phone, on Reddit or something. I read my book. But really I wanted to stay in the tinted car because I didn’t want the people to look at me and make up stories, the way I look at them and make up stories.
After only ten minutes, our buzzer buzzed us and flashed us and almost tried to moon us. So we called our parents and made our way to the deck, weaving through tables full of white people full of white wine, and a hostess glumly sat us. We were on the edge of the deck, which was built over the water—a fact I didn’t realize until I looked over the rail, and saw my foot had been dangling over the ocean the whole time. I thought of a car ad where they show you how all the roads connect to each other, how there’s a continuous piece of asphalt between here and California and Cincinnati, and then I thought of all the ocean beneath my Vans. Certainly these molecules had been around the world and then some. Carefully tied boats knocked on the pier next to us and none of us had the vocabulary to describe what kind of boats they were. Small boat, big boat, yellow boat, brown boat.
Fishing boat? my brother asked. I, being just woke enough to be on the wrong side of the Dunning-Kruger curve, de- or pro- claimed that all the small boats have been rammed and sunk and caught by the big boats which make the big catches. No need for Jesus, I said, they pray to a dragnet. Annoyed, he said, Obviously they’re fishing boats why would anyone ride such a dirty boat otherwise. This was a good bit of reasoning, so like any good philosophy major I maieutically punted. Where do you think they poop on those boats, I asked. I knew that it wasn’t the poop deck, and anyway I don’t think these little boats had a poop deck. I know they pee over the side, cause that’s just logical (but the women too?), but where do they poop. He said, Maybe in one of those buckets. They’ve got to label them then. The blue one’s for fish and the brown one’s for shit.
A waiter came and brought us menus. Where do they get all these tickytacky teens, I thought. This one looked exactly like the girl who sat us except a guy. Tall, and buff, and a jawline he must use a whetstone on. I wondered if they feel like Jaime and Cersei when they sleep together.
So what’ll you guys have to drink.
Water. Water. Water. Water. You don’t want Coke, Minha? asked my dad. He’s good at English; he doesn’t say “cock” unless he’s tired, but he was tired. (I don’t think the guy noticed though.) And he knew my brother is the only one in our family who likes soda.
No, I’m ok. Are you sure? There’s this oddly performative English my parents have when talking in front of Americans. I wondered why they don’t just speak in Korean, but maybe they think it’s rude. Yeah—I’m sure. Water. My brother’s voice takes on an edge when he feels embarrassed by my parents, indignant and incredulous. His shoulders rise a bit, or his head bows, in a mime of breeziness. And he leans back uncomfortably and crosses his arms unnaturally. He does a golfclap nod, and he tries his best to do a condescending smirk. But my brother’s incapable of smirk.
We inspected the menus the waiter dropped on the table. It was three pages folded like a brochure or a kid’s science poster. Everything was expensive, which I gathered not from the numbers next to the dollar signs but from the lack of a .99 next to the numbers, and for that matter, the lack of a dollar sign too. By habit, I mentally calculated the total cost of our dinner. Assume thirty dollars a plate on average. That’s one-twenty. They want a lobster too, but the price isn’t on there. One-twenty plus a lobster.
I remembered Anthony Bourdain’s injunction to eat seafood only on weekends, and never at the beginning of the week, for that’s old seafood. It was Saturday, or maybe Friday, so I wasn’t eating old seafood. And that got me thinking about Anthony Bourdain, who was before my time but whose book I read after his death was in the news.
I wondered whether this was the kind of restaurant he talks about in that book, where people like him work. It was after all expensive, and it was after all near New York. I thought, There’s something magical and distantly glamorous about restaurants that serve the culinary analogue of what my piano teacher called “art music;” restaurants that get reviews in The New Yorker; restaurants with customers who, if you ask them what CIA stands for, will say Culinary Institute of America; restaurants which are either confidently and coolly expensive or condescendingly and fraternizingly inexpensive (which is sure to be noted in the aforementioned New Yorker review). There’s something of the bourgeois and unreachable about them, because the internet hasn’t democratized “fine dining” in the way that it’s digitized and decontextualized art and music and literature. And therefore middle-class immigrants like my dad want—need—to acquire, understand, or at least signal this taste. It fits that the last refuge of the past, the last thing that can’t be consumed on the internet because it’s truly consumed and then gone, is a sense-experience and a bodily act. It distinguishes, stratifies, the bodies and physical tastes of its elite consumers and elicits in readers, of reviews and images, a simultaneous envy and also vicarious sense-experience of what is out of reach; this emergence-reification-culturization of the act and spectacle of consumption is virtually coextensive with the fantasy of power=knowledge, or knowledge=power, in the self-construction of the nouveau riche; the canvas-content of the critic inaccessible to the reader in fact (re/de)forms the reader, that is, of the nourishment-as-projected/alphanumericized, as a provisional lens for the analysis of the eroticization of print culture in its inextricable interstices with capital; what is common to all sense-receptors is conceptualized as an architectonic textured cacophony in multitudinous states of simultaneous analysis which might be parsed as a part emerging from and through the whole asking to be read as ironic perversion of the conceptual frame of history in its role (re)playing (in parodic form) the legitimization of agency in a “civil” society—
Have you chosen yet. Um. No. What’s in the chef’s special? I replied. Today it’s cod and fried crab and stuffies which are like shells stuffed with shrimp and scallop and herbs. I didn’t really know what cod was, I just knew that it was a popular kind of fish on the East Coast, enough that a cape is named after it, and I proudly remembered an article about how they’re catching up all the Asian fish and feeding them to the cod, for there were hardly any left. Hmph. I’ll get that then. I’ll have this shrimp thing, said my brother, pointing to the menu. The scallop, please, said my mom. What lobster do you have today? asked my dad. I didn’t know you had to ask that. We’ve got three and three and a halfs, but no fours or fives. They sell out quickly. Okay, we’ll have a three and a half. Steamed or boiled. Uh—
Steamed, I said, embarrassed by the incompetence of the immigrant. Stuffing or no stuffing. Uh— Stuffing, I said, embarrassed by the incompetence of the immigrant.
We waited for our food. My family soon bored me, so I looked around and noted who had arrived since I’d last surveyed and surveilled. Indiscernible live lyrics, quiet in energy but loud in volume, strained over the seagulls and the lubricated conversation.
At the neighboring table sat a very uncomfortable-looking man, in his mid- twenties. He was very large in a Mafia kind of way, and he was seated kitty- corner with a very large in a Mafia kind of way woman. I imagined they were on a date: he was dressed up, with a thin gold necklace (at least it looked thin on him) and a clean black tee and khaki shorts. There’s something endearing about a huge man whose bashfulness is so huge his huge body can’t hide it.
Under the awning was a party that had just arrived, where three women and a baby sat. One of the women was wearing a simple but long dark dress that fell in natural pleats, and wore transparent pink plastic glasses. Incredibly, these pink plastic glasses weren’t too much, but seemed to be a natural aspect of her outfit. She was beautiful, not in the way of the waiters, but in the way of the City. Moreover, she seemed even more beautiful since she was far away, and she was in a dark light, and my glasses were blurry. She looked vaguely like one of my classmates, so I glanced sidelong at her the whole night, ostensibly trying to decide if she was, but really just looking at her.
They were in Act II, I decided. In Act I, which had taken place in Brooklyn, they had had a mild freak out about how they never went out anymore, and the enterprising one (the mother of the baby) had read reviews for an hour and had decided on this place in Jersey as an adventure. Tensions having to do with freedom and spontaneity were established between Pink Plastic Glasses and the mother and will come to a head at dinner, where they will recognize that their paths, entwined since their undergraduate years at NYU, have simply diverged. Momentum has taken them this far but it’s now spent. The third woman unsuccessfully tries to mediate. Act III will be a collage of texts conspicuous by their absence and a montage of sketches of awkward coffees and lunches, which will peter out into nothingness, which is to say birthday messages dependent on Facebook reminders and perpetual “we gotta catch up!”s when they meet by chance, and by chance they’ll never quite catch up. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
When the food came out, there was too much to fit on our table. My dad pulled another one and our cornucopia overflowed onto it. (I said Shouldn’t you ask someone before messing up their table system. He said It’s fine.) The non-lobster came out first. My plate was last to come, and my brother had already started eating, so I was hungry. I took some food from my dad’s plate.
What was this called again, I asked. Lobster roll. It’s good. It’s the most expensive lobster thing at many Italian restaurants I go to.
Why’s it called a lobster roll. Hm. I don’t know. Maybe they roll the lobster. Maybe the bread is a roll.
That’s ridiculous. It’s like lobster, or what they call lobster, on some kind of sub bread. (I ate.) It’s not even that good. Can’t believe this thing was thirty- five dollars. What’s that.
Scallop, my mom replied. It’s tasteless, I said, using the Korean word which literally means tasteless but really means tastes bad. I switched to English. My brother, try it. Isn’t that tasteless?
Hm. Yeah, that literally tastes like nothing. I wonder when your food’s coming, my mom said.
True to the waiter’s word, there was cod and stuffed clams or shells or something and also crab calamari on my plate. The cod was two pieces, and they were tiny. Ridiculously tiny, in fact. You white fish, I said to my cod, eating the Asian fish isn’t good for your weight. Look at how thin you are. (Poke with a fork, and a slice falls off.) They have buttered you well though. It has seeped through your innermost fractuosities.
I tasted, and it too was tasteless. I had a clever thought and proclaimed (in Korean of course so that they wouldn’t hear me), There is so much salt here, and yet they have forgotten to put it in the food.
We could hear from a distance the rumbling of the lobster cart making its way to us. We ran out of three and a halfs, so here’s a three, the waiter said.
When its august cargo alit on our table, all four of us were momentarily stunned. Even the three-pound lobster was huge. Huge, and red, and shiny in the reflection of the night lights of the pavilion and the water. The black beady eyes, like onyx pinheads—what had they seen? The long whiskers, like weedwhacker wires, full of nerve and verve—what had they felt? The organic, but hard and deadly claws, like Bézier axes—what had they killed? Next to it lay the metal claws of humanufacture by which we would destroy this steamed and stuffed and sullied creature.
My dad started a matter-of-fact explanation about how to eat a lobster. One must, he said, first remove the claws, like this, and then— How old is this lobster, I bumptiously butted. It wasn’t really a question.
What? Lobsters are like, immortal. Oh, really. That’s interesting. And the Westerners catch up all the Asian fish and grind them up and feed them to the lobster and the cod and the Western fish, even though the Asian fish are good. Where is our Asian pride. And look at this lobster. It’s enormous. It’s the biggest lobster I’ve ever seen. I bet it’s like sixty years old. Where is our respect for our elders. Look at how long those whiskers are. Plus I read that they kill them by just boiling them alive, and that that’s illegal in Europe. Cause it’s unconscionable. I’m not gonna eat that.
While I was talking, my parents were carefully cleaning the lobster. They piled up a plate with cleaned lobster meat, and said to my brother, We tried our best to make sure there’s no shell in there. But there might be, so be careful. (Of course there will be, I thought. They’re not wearing their reading glasses and it’s dark. What’s even the point then.) Turning to me, they said quietly, And you don’t have to eat the lobster if you don’t want to.
My dad turned back and I saw a flash of something like sadness like lightning on his face, which was gone just before I could identify it, like a rare and delicate bird. But my parents don’t get sad, especially not my dad. It was simply impossible, and therefore it wasn’t the case.
And inconceivably I felt a pang of something like sadness like thunder in my heart. But there was nothing to be sad about, and anyway it was completely impossible, and therefore it wasn’t the case.
Description
I wanted to capture the feeling when you know that you've hurt your parents in that casual and callous way that we do, but they've sacrificed so much for you and they will sacrifice this too, so they won't tell you that they've been hurt, and still treat you like a kid, even though you now know the difference between good and bad. So they're trying to hide that you've offended them, and you're not buying it, but if you apologize or whatever, then they'll know that you know that you've hurt them and that'll hurt them even more. And I wanted to capture the desperate attempts that my parents make to make me feel like we've succeeded in this country, and the way they know to love is food, and so we eat assimilating food and yet I'm ungrateful, unable to abstract the love from this symbol.