Original Web-link: "Sea
Urchin"
Helpful Questions for this Reading:
1. What is the setting for this narrative essay?
How does the setting affect the narrator, especially
the narrator's perceptions of this place?
2. What does the mother's line, "'Get
something fried,' she tells him, not caring what the
woman might think. 'Get something cooked'" demonstrate
about the family or culture from which the narrator
comes from?
3. What role, if any, does the author's age
have to do with the narrative? What impact does his
age have on the narrative?
4. As a reader, how familiar are we with the
situation that the narrator has depicted? Is the scene
familiar to us or is it strange? How does the familiarity
or strangeness of the scenario affect us as readers.
5. What is the ultimate impact of this narrative
piece? What can you discern from the ambiguous last
sentence, "I sit, my mouth slick with anticipation
and revulsion, not yet knowing why."
"Sea Urchin"
July, 1980. I’m about to turn fifteen and our
family is in Seoul, the first time since we left, twelve
years earlier. I don’t know if it’s different.
My parents can’t really say. They just repeat
the equivalent of “How in the world?” whenever
we venture into another part of the city, or meet one
of their old friends. “Look at that—how
in the world?” “This hot spell, yes, yes—how
in the world?” My younger sister is very quiet
in the astounding heat. We all are. It’s the first
time I notice how I stink. You can’t help smelling
like everything else. And in the heat everything smells
of ferment and rot and rankness. In my grandfather’s
old neighborhood, where the two- and three-room houses
stand barely head-high, the smell is staggering. “What’s
that?” I ask.
My cousin says, “Shit.”
”Shit? What shit?”
”Yours,” he says, laughing. “Mine.”
On the wide streets near the city center, there are
student demonstrations; my cousin says they’re
a response to a massacre of citizens by the military
down south in Kwangju. After the riot troops clear the
avenues, the air is laden with tear gas—”spicy,”
in the idiom. Whenever we’re in a taxi, moving
through there, I open the window and stick out my tongue,
trying to taste the poison, the human repellent. My
mother wonders what’s wrong with me.
I don’t know what’s wrong. Or maybe I do.
I’m bored. Maybe I’m craving a girl. I can’t
help staring at them, the ones clearing dishes in their
parents’ eateries, the uniformed schoolgirls walking
hand in hand, the slim young women who work in the Lotte
department store, smelling of fried kimchi and L’Air
du Temps. They’re all stunning to me, even with
their bad teeth. I let myself drift near them, hoping
for the scantest touch.
But there’s nothing. I’m too obviously
desperate, utterly hopeless. Instead, it seems, I can
eat. I’ve always liked food, but nowI’m
bent on trying everything. As it is, the days are made
up of meals, formal and impromptu, meals between meals
and within meals; the streets are a continuous outdoor
buffet of braised crabs, cold buckwheat noodles, shaved
ice with sweet red beans on top. In Itaewon, the district
near the United States Army base, where you can get
anything you want, culinary or otherwise, we stop at
a seafood stand for dinner. Basically, it’s a
tent diner, a long bar with stools, a camp stove and
fish tank behind the proprietor, an elderly woman with
a low, hoarse voice. The roof is a stretch of blue poly-tarp.
My father is excited; it’s like the old days.
He wants raw fish, but my mother shakes her head. I
can see why: in plastic bins of speckled, bloody ice
sit semi-alive cockles, abalones, eels, conchs, sea
cucumbers, porgies, shrimps. “Get something fried,”
she tells him, not caring what the woman might think.
“Get something cooked.”
A young couple sitting at the end of the bar order live
octopus. The old woman nods and hooks one in the tank.
It’s fairly small, the size of a hand. She lays
it on a board and quickly slices off the head with her
cleaver. She chops the tentacles and gathers them up
onto a plate, dressing them with sesame oil and a spicy
bean sauce. “You have to be careful,” my
father whispers, “or one of the suction cups can
stick inside your throat. You could die.” The
lovers blithely feed each other the sectioned tentacles,
taking sips of soju in between. My mother immediately
orders a scallion-and-seafood pancake for us, then a
spicy cod-head stew; my father murmurs that he still
wants something live, fresh. I point to a bin and say
that’s what I want—those split spiny spheres,
like cracked-open meteorites, their rusty centers layered
with shiny crenellations. I bend down and smell them,
and my eyes almost water from the intense ocean tang.
“They’re sea urchins,” the woman says
to my father. “He won’t like them.”
My mother is telling my father he’s crazy, that
I’ll get sick from food poisoning, but he nods
to the woman, and she picks up a half and cuts out the
soft flesh.
What does it taste like? I’m not sure, because
I’ve never had anything like it. All I know is
that it tastes alive, something alive at the undragged
bottom of the sea; it tastes the way flesh would taste
if flesh were a mineral. And I’m half gagging,
though still chewing; it’s as if I had another
tongue in my mouth, this blind, self-satisfied creature.
That night I throw up, my mother scolding us, my father
chuckling through his concern. The next day, my uncles
joke that they’ll take me out for some more, and
the suggestion is enough to make me retch again.
But a week later I’m better, and I go back by
myself. The woman is there, and so are the sea urchins,
glistening in the hot sun. “I know what you want,”
she says. I sit, my mouth slick with anticipation and
revulsion, not yet knowing why.
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