catfish from the market [1/100]

Back when we lived in San Jose for a bit when I was around 7 or 8, my mom would sometimes shop at nearby medium-sized Asian markets where they sold fresh fish. I think in that area, they were usually Vietnamese.

Asian markets are a different breed, or at least the one from my memory was. At the back where they sell the fresh fish, it’s loud with the sounds of the ticket machine printing stubs for people to get their allotted time at the counter, the spray of water hose, and the din of the fish butchers and customers yelling at each other over all the noise.

These markets have some tanks for live fish, crabs and lobsters (housed separately) to swim around in a crowded tank until the time of their purchase. They also usually had some large sea snails and turtles or frogs.

Anyway, my mom usually wouldn’t be a patron for the fish in those tanks, I assume because they were larger, whole live pieces and probably more expensive than purchasing the so-called dead fish lying stacked on ice in front of the tank displays. So-called, I say, because there was one time a fish visibly jumped when she prodded it for inspection.

FYI, my mom is a very hands-on and experienced grocery shopper. She likes to inspect her prospective purchases pick the freshest, or biggest, or heaviest (when it’s price per piece, not per lb) to add to the cart. When it comes to fish, the freshness is the most important. So what she’d do is grab one of the plastic bags for selecting and bagging the fish, place her hand in it, and prod the fish to feel how springy it us, inspect the shine of the skin/scales, turn it over and inspect the eyes to see how dead they look (the least dead, the better).

The fish that flapped around for a beat or two when she did this was a catfish. She picked it and one other that did the same, and took them home in their plastic bags. Then when she got home, she filled up a little crab-shaped red plastic play pool we had lying around in the backyard with some water from the garden hose and let it sit for some time to let the chlorine dissipate. (I’m not sure how she kept the fish alive during that time).

When the chlorine had dissipated, she released our two new friends into the crab-shaped pool and we watched them, to our quiet amazement, wriggle a little bit and settle at the bottom of the pool, having apparently survived their ordeal on the fish market.

They actually lived for several months, according to my mom. I know they lived at least a week or two. We didn’t offer much in the way of food for them (I assume my mom would have probably said something about catfish eating mud if we asked) and the crab pool would get quite murky and dirty over time. Besides, the pool was shallow and it gets pretty hot in San Jose during the summer, although we tried to keep the pool under the shade of the avocado tree.

For whatever reason it was, they seemed to get more listless and do less well after some time, and it was at this point my mom fished them out to give them their final blow and serve us fish at dinner that night.

I’m sure my mom would have been happy to keep the catfish for as long as they lived if they could produce baby catfish and end up producing our own little fish farm for us. She’s recounted with some admiration that her own father had something to this effect in her childhood. Alas, it was not to be.