“Hello? Um, hello?” Someone tapped on a microphone. It was the bride, a pale, creamy little thing with a sweet, limp face who had been squeezed into a lace shift. Her cheeks could have benefited from some blush stick—the Failure might not have made any money, but Charles had manufactured some very effective makeup. “Glenn and I just want to thank everyone for coming tonight, for helping us celebrate our wedding. Um, that’s it, I think. Honey?” She cradled the microphone like an offering and passed it to her brand-new husband, who had short legs and too much muscle, like one of those ugly dogs that gay men were always leading around on studded leashes. Weren’t gay men supposed to like beautiful things? It pained Charles to imagine their matrimonial bed; the groom would probably squeeze his bride into a doughy, complicit ball and just gnaw at her, grunting and drooling all the while.
“Family and friends, we welcome you to our blissful evening.” The dog-groom had worked hard to memorize his human speech. “It means the world to me and Merrily that you were able to travel from near and far to join us in our joy. As you may know, it is a blessing upon your union if strangers are made welcome at your wedding, so we’d like to welcome Uncle Nash’s friend Charles Wang, as well as his wife and children, who are here all the way from California. Thank you, Wangs.”
Charles quickly tucked his cell phone back in his coat pocket—still no call from the bastard lawyer—and raised the frosty glass of champagne that had appeared at his place. Maybe this wedding wasn’t quite as hopeless as it seemed. He stood and bowed slightly, which unleashed a wave of delighted bows from the rest of the guests.
The young bride swigged at her champagne, then surprised everyone by grabbing the microphone again and shouting into it: “Now dig in, y’all!”
Finally. Charles zeroed in on a fat little creature hiding under a bay leaf and plucked it up, cracking the shell in half and sucking out its delicious swill of rich yellow brain mixed with the smoky boiling liquid. Already the red juice from the shell dripped down his hands, but it was worth it—he’d just have to find someone to bleach it out of his cuffs later.
Food should be like this—elemental, honest, a little cruel. It should make no apologies for what it was, and it shouldn’t allow the eater to lie to himself about what he was doing. Charles would rather bite into a pig trotter than a ground-up, unrecognizable hamburger any day. Shellfish were the best. With crabs, you could break off the pointed tips of their tiny legs and use them as tools to dig out the stubborn white meat in the other half of the appendage. Oysters provided their own serving platter. Snails, too. Tiny lamb chops, which had enjoyed a brief vogue at cocktail parties, came with a built-in handle. And terrines, which the Chinese made and ate as enthusiastically as the French, were always satisfying—the meat gelled and held in place by the essence of its own traitorous marrow. In Chinese, there were no separate words for animal meat and human flesh. It was all just rou. Muscle was ji rou, fat was fei rou. Beef and pork? Niou rou and ju rou. Forget about special words like poultry, designed to coddle and protect. Chicken was chicken, and it was all meant to be eaten.
Bodie, one of the skeletal Nash cousins, leaned across the table and gestured in Charles’s face with a sweating bottle of beer. “I can’t believe it—y’all know how to eat crawfish?”
Midsuck, Charles grinned at him. He removed the creature from his mouth and waved it in the air, arms flailing, to make his point. “The only thing with legs Chinese people don’t eat is table and chair!”
That sent Bodie into the sort of belly laugh that would have been more believable on a fat man. “That’s good, man, that’s good. I like it. I like it. Table and chair.” He straightened up. “But I meant West Coasters, man, I’m not a racist.”
“Wait a minute,” said Artie, the one who wasn’t Bodie. “Here’s what I want to know. What about man’s best friend, then?”
“True!” shouted Charles, gleeful. It was one of his favorite topics. Americans and their endless capacity for offense had always perplexed him. “Some Chinese do eat dog! So what? American all eat pig, and pig just as smart as dog! If something is good to eat, why not eat it?” He turned back to Bodie. “Anyways, my kids always say I am racist when I am surprised American people so good at chopsticks, but you say you are surprised I am good at crawdads. You see, Meimei, Didi, Daddy not racist!”
Grace glared at him. “He meant the opposite of that, Dad.”
She had a growing pile of crawdads in front her, his little girl. Andrew, meanwhile, was poking through the pile in search of more potatoes. He watched his son spear a white, mealy chunk of tuber and eat it daintily.
What if Andrew was gay? That was impossible. He was too handsome. Girls had always liked Andrew—even when he was a teenager with braces and a pimple or two, they had called the house at all hours and gathered in eager bunches around the pool during the kids’ birthday parties, their smooth young bodies in bikinis that would have been unthinkable thirty years ago in Taiwan. But there were men like that, Charles knew, gay men whose friends were all beautiful women who were half in love with them.
“Andrew,” said Charles, “did you have girlfriend at school?”
He caught Grace smirking up at her brother. What did that mean? Was his son going to tell him here, over this stinking pile of mudbugs, that he was a gay?
The boy blushed. “Um, sort of . . .”
“How could this kid not have a girlfriend?” asked Bodie. “Look at him! He’s a stud! I bet the ladies are throwing themselves at his feet!”