Lucy Zhang

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Dead End

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When I was little—too little to understand the implications of taxes on credit card versus cash, I wanted to be a sushi chef. Sushi Joe, the sushi chef and owner of our local American-Chinese restaurant, told me women couldn’t become sushi chefs. “When women touch fish, the fish goes bad,” he said. I believed him and refused to hold a bag of raw fish or handle a fillet on a cutting board for years. I finally touched one when I was twenty-one. The only reasons I bothered with cleaving that glassy-eyed snakehead fish into chunks were: one, my mom couldn’t cut through the bone with her arthritis and my dad was mowing the lawn so we didn’t want to bother him, and two, Sushi Joe had been detained and convicted by the ICE for acting as a Chinese spy. I figured I couldn’t trust the words of a Chinese spy. My parents certainly felt that way, lambasting Sushi Joe for committing stupid crimes and putting a bad look on his fellow Chinese people who worked hard to live proud, fruitful American lives. “Don’t hang out with his daughter, you don’t want to be tainted by that family,” they warned me. Not that I even remembered his daughter’s name. We possibly crossed paths once or twice on a Saturday in Chinese school, but she was several years younger than me—never knew the craze of Heelys, from a generation that felt an infinite distance away. 

I didn’t become a sushi chef, or any kind of chef for that matter. With age came the realization that I didn’t want to work most holidays when restaurants stayed open, nor did I want to stand the whole day. I was already dealing with lower back pain that no amount of knee-to-chest and torso twist stretches could fix. Instead, I found a comfortable job working on simulation software for self-driving cars: nothing immediately customer-facing, no fires in the field, a job sheltered by the cushioned nature of internal tooling never to require on-call duty or cranky customer service. In the office, our cafeteria had a sushi chef serving rolls and nigiri once a week. I made sure to work in-office those days, setting my laptop on a table next to the glass counter so I could watch the chef slice fish and maneuver the bamboo map. He was a short, stout Mexican guy who spoke little English, and at this point, knew my order without me asking. I liked to watch him work. I never spoke much to him before the company eventually cut out our weekly sushi rotations (along with implementing a new round of layoffs) to save costs. Later, while visiting the Middle Eastern produce store, I saw him and a gaggle of five kids arguing over a bag of yellow peaches. He wouldn’t let them buy the peaches, insisting they were out of season, way too expensive, and the kids didn’t even like the sour taste—all in Spanish, of course. I understood a few phrases thanks to my high school-awarded academic certificate of excellence in Spanish. The poor guy ended up caving to their demands and bought a bag of big, plump yellow peaches for $2.79/lb. 

At thirty-three years old, I quit my job. I’d given birth to my first son three years ago, and my ability to walk had never returned to what it was. My vaginal stitches also failed to heal properly, and though only my partner and I could see, I held back the urge to cry after shaving and staring at a mirror. The thought plagued me so much that I couldn’t focus at work without wondering if my handful of female coworkers also possessed as demented and Frankensteinesque of a vagina as me. Especially the one female senior director of educational products who always dressed in dress pants and fancy blouses and heels while everyone else wore swag t-shirts and jeans. I told my partner that I’d saved enough, and he made enough, so I was handing in my two weeks’ notice and starting a new career path on my promotion to Stay At Home Mom. “I like hard-working people, but I just want to be lazy,” I joked to him. “Call it self-care.” 

Without my job, I found the time to make sushi with sushi-grade fish and homemade sushi rice. My unprofessional knife skills and rice shaping were more than enough to generate a tasty outcome, though I was the only one who enjoyed eating them. My son was too young to appreciate sushi flavor profiles, and my husband preferred spicy, strong foods over fresh and subtle ones. No matter. My rolls didn’t need to be perfect or universally appreciated so long as someone was enjoying them. I even made a few rolls for my parents when they visited. They finished everything, and after smacking their lips and resting their chopsticks on the ceramic soy sauce dipping dish, they said, “You should stick with Chinese food. This is an incomplete meal, a mediocre result not worth the money for the ingredients or the risk of raw fish.” 

It wasn’t because of my parents that I stopped making sushi. Rather, it was a matter of convenience: raw fish required driving further to a reputable store; sushi rice required waiting for freshly cooked rice to fully cool. What was the point of assembling everything so neatly when you could just eat the elements haphazardly on a cutting board and from a bowl? Significant labor and cost without much reward. When I got pregnant with our second child, I stopped the raw fish wholesale. But unlike my first pregnancy, I no longer craved it. I no longer even remembered what had compelled me to watch sushi chefs steer their blade in smooth motions, leaving a beautiful, striped finish of a salmon belly.  

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