The table is lined with newspapers. The air is filled with smoke. There is ink smudged on my right hand and it aches from trying to tell this story. At the center of everything lies a fish.

You are here, so I am too. Let’s begin.

It is because of my grandmother that I know true love. 

My grandmother.

And her fish.

Halmoni wasn’t like other grandmas. My friends had grandmothers who made them

hand-knit scarves woven scratchy, warm wool and heart-shaped cookies that tasted better because the “secret ingredient was love”. And although I spent years of our time together praying Halmoni would be like those grandmas, she never was. Maybe because she never could be, or maybe because she never wanted to be. Maybe it was because she was happy to be who she was.

And who she was, was a chain-smoking, pickled oyster slurping, foul-mouthed Korean woman.

What I remember now and what I failed to notice then, is how many things she had. I’m not talking about stuff, but things. She had a thing for swimming, for backstroke in particular. She had a thing for patting your butt when she was proud of you and a thing for calling you a “piece of shit” when she wasn’t. She had a thing for inviting her friends over just so they could wordlessly eat persimmons together. A thing for falling asleep during mass but still insisting on going, for pilling fleece sweater vests, for binge-watching Korean dramas. And every Friday,

without fail, she had a thing for grilling mackerel.

If you ask me why it was Friday or why it was mackerel, I could not tell you. If I stopped to analyze everything my grandmother did, I would drive myself crazy with how much I didn’t know. All I knew was that come Friday, after I got home from school, she would present me with a plate of grilled fish.

I should probably clarify that Halmoni’s fish wasn’t very special, and it would be a lie to say she made it better than any other Korean out there. The fact is, Korean grilled mackerel is incredibly cheap, very simple, and a reliably delicious dish. Mackerel just is what it is. You don’t need to ornament it with anything special for it to be good. It’s salty and oily and a little sweet. A white fish cooked to golden brown perfection and served with hot rice. But it was special because it was us.

We used to have these epic battles, usually when she asked me about my future. She wanted me to be a pharmacist and to always obey and respect my parents and to marry a nice Korean man. She wanted me to be her, but better. She wanted me to be even better than my mother, who is the best woman I’ve ever known. It all seemed so utterly useless. I was a teenager and queer and convinced I was a writer who had to rebel in order to have something interesting to say.

My voice high and throat like sandpaper, I would scream at her that I did not care about being poor, that I did not care if I had to suffer, words, that at twenty-one, I still do not know the true meaning of. I did not need her to understand me but to believe in me, a much larger request. I needed her to believe in my foolish idea of a little life. One where I was surrounded by books

and wrote the words I wanted, one where I found people who cared enough to read them. A life where I gave my love to anyone I felt was deserving, not just Korean men. I wanted to be happy, but was that not the very thing she wanted for me as well?

When I was sixteen, she spotted the fresh stick and poke of a smiley face sitting on my left hip that my friend drunkenly did with a broken pen and a sewing needle. She tried to smudge it out with her thumb.

It’satattoo.I admitted with pride.

Tattoo?

She burst into tears and then smacked me across the face so hard I saw stars.

I remember that Halmoni was the first person to call me a bitch.

Red in the face and out of frustration, it came out easy as if she had been waiting to say it for my entire life 미친년!

I was not a writer or pharmacist or a rebel but 미친년. The longer it hung stagnant in

the air the more it felt true.

While I rolled my eyes at this drama and rubbed away the pain from my cheek, I was also secretly biting down hard on my lip to keep from crying with her. Blood in my gums, mouthing the words, ‘Dear God, what on earth have I done?’

But on Fridays, we would both silence our resentments, put aside our differences, and share mackerel.

The thing about mackerel is that there are incredibly fine bones along the center of the fish that are nearly impossible to avoid. The bones are sharp and translucent evils that are nearly impossible to see against the fish’s white flesh. Most times, the only way to know if your bite has a bone in it is to just put it in your mouth, let it pierce your gums.

Before each meal, my grandma would put down newspapers. Smoke would still be swirling in the air from the grill as she brought the fish to the table. As soon as she sat down she would immediately begin dissecting it. She would split the fish up into small chunks and from there, individually hand-pick every single bone out with her pruned fingers.

Pluck, pluck, pluck until every single bone had been removed. There was a pile of white flesh before me, boneless and pure.

Eat.She would urge me.

I would consume the fruits of her labor with ease and she would delight in watching. What was left were bones and the underbelly. This part of the fish has a dull flavor and feels slimy on the tongue. It was the part of the fish no one wanted, the part of the fish you would convince yourself to eat because you did not want to be accused of being wasteful. Perhaps when no one was looking, you would wrap it in newspaper and slip it into the garbage, a silent, shameful burial. This is the part that my grandmother would claim as her own. Her mass always had a lot of bones sticking out of it, making it look like the hairball of a grey cat. And she would pick some of the bones out but never all of them because to remove them all just for herself was “too much work.”

If I think very hard about how little I appreciated or even noticed her kindness, I start to

hate myself. But Halmoni didn’t really care if I noticed or not. She just didn’t want me to eat the bones and that was the way it was. This meal, unlike so many other aspects of our relationship, was not a point of resentment. We did this for so many Fridays. She would never say much and I would never say much. We would just sit eating this simple fish together. Me the good parts and her the bad.

Within the first two years after her death, I used to feel her all the time. Every time I looked at the sky or studied my face in the mirror for too long or stepped inside a church. I used to feel her when I looked at my hip, now a series of faded dots, stains of youthful bliss. I would feel her hot hand swiping at my face like lightning and her stinging tears of instant regret falling on my hand as she rubbed my back,

“미안해” I’m sorry.

I’m so very sorry.

But now it’s been five years and with each passing day, she feels further from me. The only time I ever feel her anymore is when I eat this fish. I feel her in the separation of each tiny white spindle, small and deadly. Beyond violence, there is purity patiently awaiting our consumption. I believe she is in this mackerel, there with every cautious bite I take.

And maybe she is even in these words I write too.

I don’t know, maybe not.

Maybe love is sharp-tongued Korean women and slaps for stupidity. Pats on the butt, newspaper-lined dining tables, salty tears of misunderstanding, and hoarse throats after screaming

matches. Perhaps it is in those gritty, hidden places that love is the most true. Maybe—love is a fish.

Olivia Go, originally from Los Angeles, is a 21-year-old rising senior at Smith College. She is an English major and a Digital Art minor. She writes from memory and has recently been interested in portraying the Asian American experience. She loves to read books on public transportation and watch reality TV with her friends.