Eat the City(67)
Demand for fish was rising. Just past the turn of the century, newcomers dined on the fish of their homelands as though trying to preserve here on the East River the cultures of the Caspian, the Aegean, the Tyrrhenian, the Adriatic, and the Black Seas. Herring peddlers carried wooden buckets of fish through the streets, yelling, “Hey, best here! Best here! Best here in de verld!” People from far-off places would dig deep into the wagons of the open-air fish markets for the clearest-eyed specimens—perhaps unaware that despite the bounty, by this time, only about 10 percent of these fish came from nearby waters.
“EHH, plenty of time you lose the fish, because every day is fishing day, every day is not catching day,” says Milton Serrattan, a construction worker from Trinidad who is fishing on a strip of grass between the water and the road out in the Rockaways, in Queens, hoping to make his daughter a dinner of kingfish cooked in curry powder and oil. All over the city, immigrants like him are fishing for their suppers.
They stand on Coney Island piers, listening to tinny merengue songs from speaker phones holstered to their belts, watching for the fat crabs they used to catch in the Dominican Republic. They venture out onto rocky ripraps in Queens that remind them of island fishing villages they left off the Korean coast. They gaze into the degraded East River and see not the bits of Styrofoam and sheeny plastic bags, but the idealized South China Sea of their memories, where you could reach in and grab fish with your hands.
Along the East River in Manhattan’s Chinatown, elderly ladies with jade bracelets and umbrellas-cum-parasols patrol the waterfront in their flip-flops. Families peel lychees together, littering the ground with rosy, reptilian skins. A few girls lie on their backs on the benches, looking up into the eyes of their boys. And old men impale fat, grubby pink shrimps on their hooks and cast out toward Brooklyn.
They are from the fishing towns along the coast of Fujian province, where boys would fish most every day with homemade rods and all the village lived off the water. Fung Xiu is six feet, four-inches tall, with white-streaked hair slicked back into a pouf, sad, distant eyes, and a handsome, chiseled face that lights up when he talks, through a translator, of the water.
Xiu has kitted out his bike with a crate to hold fishing supplies: the raw chicken bait, rusted scissors and shears for adjusting the fishing line, a towel for cleaning the fish, and several pairs of pliers for freeing the crabs from the twine. He and a few other Fujian men are filling bait cages with chicken skins and casting their snare traps out with a fishing rod. As soon as the hungry crab extends one of its claws to the bait, it becomes ensnared in loops of fishing line and they pull it in. One man in a cap that reads FISHERS HAVE LONGER RODS speaks no English but holds the line up so the blue claw crab hangs aloft, dancing for passersby with its eight-legged shadow. People wordlessly crowd in, taking pictures with their cell phones as though a sea monster has just come up from the lagoon, until the fisher places the crab on the ground, firmly presses a flip-flop-clad foot onto its back to limit its pincer motion, and carefully removes the wire from its claws. He points to a bandage on his big toe where another crab’s pincers did their work: a mere distraction en route to steamed crabs with sesame oil, soy sauce, scallions, and rice.
Up in the eastern Bronx, by the bridge to City Island, in a weedy, swampy lowland, a man comes out of the bulrushes onto a small beach, three friends emerging one by one after him. He moves with sleek, amphibian fitness into the muddy-bottomed water, dives down with a net, and rises up, spilling silver fish. He shakes the water out of his hair, his smooth brown arms streaked with seaweed. One friend, in a black wifebeater, black nylon pants, and black running shoes, walks waist-high into the water beside him, smoking a cigarette.
Their net is twenty feet long, with poles at either end stretching the five-foot width. The first man holds one end, his friend the other, and they wade in deeper, chest-high, then turn around and walk back, slowly pulling the resistant net with them, gathering in their fish. They step back to the beach and come together as if they were folding a long sheet, bringing the ends of the net close. Trapped in the middle with clumps of seaweed are many dozens of tiny, black-eyed fish. Flopping and leaping, they reflect sun off their silvered scales like so many netted lightning bolts.
On the pebbly dirt beach, all of them—the men and the fish—glisten wet in the light. Steve Sankhi lets the fish flop from the net into a white plastic bucket filled with water from the sea and hundreds more Atlantic silversides. He covers the bucket with a handful of leafy plants so they don’t scorch in the sun. He tells me that this is how they all once fished as kids in Guyana. There, you throw out a piece of bait on a string with something heavy—a huge washer of molded lead—and bring back fish, every time. You dip a net in anywhere you want and come up full.
“I’ve been coming here since I was thirteen years old,” says Steve, now in his forties, and working as a custodian in Long Island City. In the 1980s, he says, the waters suffered from hypoxia, when dissolved oxygen rates dropped so low the little, sensitive silversides they like to catch could not survive. These men became ichthyic experts, following the ebb and flow of various fish over dozens of years—snappers, baby bluefish, full-grown blues, which you can fry with butter or use to make fish soup. Perhaps they were the first to note the return of their favorite sardine-like silversides. “You got to fry them, and they’re real crispy, cause there’s a lot of bones.”
They fish March to October, and after cleaning all the fish, they freeze some of them to fry in the winter during football games. Fishing here is relaxing, they say. “You can see an eagle come down and catch a fish,” says Michael Lockram. They stay all night sometimes, bringing sheets to lay out on the sand and blankets to cover themselves. They build a fire and sit around it, the bright moon and the streetlights reflecting off the water.