Jessica Sennett
Seafood in Chinatown

Ankle deep in Sunset Park, Brooklyn

One clear summer day, on a bike ride home from Brighton Beach, I noticed wooden bins of seafood along the sidewalk corner. I was immediately thrown into a cloud of pungent aromas and salt-brimmed air. The extended blue tarp roof above the bins left a few fish in broad sunlight, glittering and luminescent. This was an authentic Chinese market. The fishmongers wore large rain boots and plastic, waterproof, body-length aprons; they stood jovially with hands on their hips and bellowed proudly in an Asian language I wasn’t able to discern. Asian customers dug with their hands in the bins to find the best pick, tossing meager-looking crabs to the side of the bins in order to discover their dinner catch.

I continued on my short bike ride to my new home, my mind full of fish scales and lobster tails. It was refreshing to see sea life so unadulterated on the streets of New York. I often reflected on the common American food mentality, one that quarantined cuisine through food and health regulations and sterilized meat and fish shops. The average American food market masked and packaged their lively harvest until it sat blandly plasticized and standardized in the refrigerator case. Federal and state food regulations promoted measures for mass production, where risk of bacterial outbreak has the chance of becoming a widespread epidemic. These preventative rules are enforced upon small storefronts and producers throughout the nation.

As an artisan cheese maker, I have dealt with common misconceptions on raw milk, bacteria, and small-batch production throughout my career. Fermented products, like cheese, have only seen a reemergence in the American palate in the last thirty years. There was much about naturally made cheese that was foreign to mass American food culture; Chinese seafood varieties were similar in that way. Brooklyn’s Chinatown is a place where blood and guts are sold, shamelessly and quickly; where fishmongers sell full fish bodies; and the customer shops with a certain degree of food fearlessness.

I had just moved to Sunset Park, Brooklyn—only a quick bike ride from this seafood wonderland. My landlady, a well-seasoned chef, was sitting on our apartment stoop upon my return. She wore a flowing tunic, her long brown hair amassed on the top of her head and tucked into a wide-brimmed sun hat. Her eyes twinkled in excitement when I described my seafood encounter. She divulged details of the neighborhood’s Chinatown: live eels and shellfish, dried reptiles and mushrooms.

“I can’t remember names of places very well, “ she said, laughing. “But I know there’s this one amazing seafood shop on Eighth Avenue across the street from a yellow awning that says ‘Cell Phones. It’s a small place, but if you go in the back, they’ve got some really interesting stuff there. I like to watch the fishmongers handling the fish. It’s pretty wild. But I’m into that kind of stuff.”

A culinary playground awaited me, all within arm’s reach. I was ready to discover the story behind the seafood, in a neighborhood where immigrants were rarely forced to speak my language, and in a place where illegality was purely a formality of their new country.

In the spring of 2014, a bacterial skin infection sourced back to New York-based Chinatown fish markets was featured in the New York Times. Up to sixty-six people were documented among the outbreak, all having bought seafood at Chinese marketplaces a day or two before the infection from a bacteria called Mycobacterium marinum. The dilemma prompted officials to warn individuals to wear gloves while handling raw, whole fish in order to safeguard against the bacteria entering the skin through open cuts. Symptoms included skin lesions, pain to the hands and arms, and difficulty moving fingers. Despite looking freshly picked from sea waters, what else did regulators and consumers know about the way these fish were caught, handled, distributed, stored, and sold? I certainly was in the dark.

The next Saturday, my boyfriend and I went to a local Dim Sum restaurant, Bamboo Palace, nestled a few blocks south of the teeming seafood corner I had briefly witnessed. My boyfriend and I quickly noticed, with the exception of one other white male, that the entire restaurant was bustling with Chinese culture and community. Women in red robes pushed carts of steaming dumplings and vegetables down the carpeted aisles. Seated families waved them down to pick their next tasty lunch platter. We sat at one of the round communal tables with a Chinese woman and her mother. The woman offered us cups of her black puerh tea that she said had gotten too strong for her liking.

She struck up conversation. “How did you end up finding this place? Because it’s 99% Chinese here.” Granted, we could count the number of non-Asian people in the restaurant on one hand. It wasn’t the Manhattan tourist mecca off Canal Street. But we proudly claimed this 99% Chinese neighborhood as part of our new life in South Brooklyn.

Still curious about the neighborhood seafood, I asked her where she usually shops. She directed us north to visit the numerous fish shops and fresh markets. When I asked her if she knew where the fish came from, she said she had no idea.

The next morning, I returned to peruse these multiple blocks of fresh fish. The selections were dizzying. The cross streets 58th Street and Eighth Avenue had seafood exploding from all four corners. Slowly, I perused and compared the competing businesses with separate storefronts. Wooden buckets of blue crabs dominated all of the entrances. Signs were written in Sharpie on hand-cut pieces of cardboard. Occasionally, an English written word would jump out at me and provide me with a semblance of an explanation of the creature offered. I attempted to make eye contact with any of the various salesmen, but to no avail. I felt invisible.

The first man who spoke to me had already won my business. He stood underneath an awning that read Five Brothers Seafood. “Hello. You want blue crabs? These ones more meaty. You want one dozen? Two dozen?”

“Are they from Maryland?”

“Yes! Maryland! Yes! How much you want?” He grabbed them individually with tongs and threw them into a paper bag. One slipped and landed close to my open toe. I quietly shrieked.

I settled on a dozen for $16. He tied them all inside a plastic bag, and I held them slightly away from my body. After the sale was made, I tried to ask him more questions, but could see he had lost interest.

So I walked across the street to a well-kempt seafood store front with a blue awning, called S&P Seafood. Wooden box displays of fish, crabs, and lobster on ice proudly jutted out of the front entrance. A Chinese man with tall green rain boots, a black t-shirt inscribed with white Chinese characters, and black shaggy short hair smiled gently and nodded when he saw me eyeing the outdoor display. He stood to one side of the wide doorway.

“How are you? You looking for something?”

I smiled back and said, “Well, I just bought blue crabs, but I’m interested in trying something else, too.”

“How about lobster?” He pointed to a large tank on the right wall, filled with the crustaceans inside the store, their claws bound with rubber bands. I couldn’t imagine taking more wiggling creatures home on bicycle via backpack.

“Hmm….Let’s see…” I was trying to keep his attention while staying indecisive, glancing around. I began to ask him about the origins of the fish. He told me it depends.

“Sometimes it’s from Maryland or Maine, but sometimes it from North Korea or Taiwan.”

The open-air wooden bucket pile of live sea conch to the left of the register caught my eye, their shells silver and curvaceous. I stepped inside to get a closer look, and, to my surprise, one conch poked out its meaty, snail-like, orange-hued body. I quickly turned on my foot and shifted direction to walk the long side counter of ice and dead fish.

On the other side of the register against a wall of dry goods lay two green plastic buckets, one filled with live dark green frogs, which floated aimlessly in shallow water, the other filled with large, active turtles. The largest turtle was on top of the rest and moving its head from side to side.

I turned toward the counter, wandering back closer to the entrance. A Latino fishmonger smiled and welcomed me. I pointed to the live sea conch and said, “How do you cook this?”

“I don’t know…” he said. He asked the older Chinese fishmonger to his right, motioning cooking with his hands, “How would you cook this?” The older man shrugged. “Ask him,” the Latino man gestured back to the man in the boots by the door.

The friendly man walked up to me again. “The conch is great sliced thin, sautéed in butter, with some parsley, herbs, and lemon. It is very good.” He seemed inspired by his own description; he talked through the recipe with a dreamy look in his eyes.

I was sold.

“How do I kill it?”

“We can do that for you,” he responded, and within a moment the conch was being passed to the older fishmonger, who smashed its beautiful shell with a mallet and severed it from its home. I was handed an unmoving plastic bag and turned back to the register. This life had a cost of $3.27. I glanced back at the tub of turtles. The largest one had begun to climb on a stack of dry goods, planning its big escape.

I lingered by the door after the transaction, in hope to get more information about the life as a Chinatown fish buyer. I hadn’t yet sated my curiosity. If I moved slow enough, and stared at the fish a bit longer, nestled between ice cubes, maybe I could get the friendly salesman’s attention. He smiled at me and walked back to the front of the store where I stood awkwardly. The question that came from my lips was delivered in a series of stumbles and mutters. I flinched and smiled.

“Ask me whatever you’d like,” he said.

I wanted to come across as an inquisitive customer, not an undercover food cop ready to take the place down because I had read that they gave people outbreaks of skin rashes. I was somewhat paranoid, too, from numerous inquisitions I had received in my own cheese business. I often received unannounced visits from a health department inspector the day before I conducted a house-made cheese supper club at a restaurant in Cobble Hill. I knew that a health inspector had the power to shut your business down on a moment’s notice. The last thing I wanted was to be associated with a culturally insensitive contingent with outdated notions of food safety and the variety of ways in which we as humans curate our meals. Not to mention I despised the idea of being the token white, ethically righteous woman who struts into any shop demanding “organic” and “sustainable” certification.

“How…how do you buy your fish?” I finally said.

He openly went into details, letting me know that their frozen fish came from the New Fulton Fish Market in the Bronx and that the live fish are delivered directly to their store from numerous sources. The frogs are from Taiwan and Maine. The live conches are from North Korea or Maryland, depending on the time of year. The dead eels should be cooked, not eaten fresh. I was starting to grasp that their sourcing was varied, depending on the season, the surplus of the market, and who offered the best prices.

There was silence again for a moment. I asked him about the killing of the turtles. He looked at me quickly, “We break the shell and then we cut…” he trailed off, looked at me again, and chuckled slightly. “Americans aren’t used to these types of things.”

“Fully agreed!” I laughed. “Everything is already dead and cut up. In our country’s supermarkets, we leave the killing out of it.”

He lifted his two hands and nodded, “You just have a package.”

“Yeah…I think it’s healthy to know how to deal with live fish and see how things are killed,” I responded.

We stood there for a few seconds longer to take in the shop’s aquatic wonders and clean white tile floors. My mind was swimming with curiosity. I was unsure as to how many questions I should ask, but I knew I wanted to see through his food-eyes a bit longer.

“Where are you from?” he asked. And then we found out that we both had family in San Francisco.

“There’s a great Chinatown there, in the Richmond District…” I said. He nodded in agreement.

He began to tell me how more Chinese people live here in Sunset Park than on East Broadway in Manhattan. In the past ten years, the neighborhood had grown enormously, and I could see why. Sunset Park was quaint, homey, less expensive, and not overrun by the tourist industry. The food in every store was cheap, fresh, and authentic.

“Chinatown here used to be very small.” He looked out into the street. “There wasn’t much here… only a few stores.” He told me his name was Nick, and I told him I’d be back soon.

I gently placed my sacred newfound belongings in my backpack and made my way to my bicycle. The fate of these creatures’ lingering physical life was now left in my hands.

By the following evening, I had already successfully boiled the crabs and incorporated them into a soup of roasted acorn squash and sweet potato. It was now the conch’s turn. I laid the conch body out on the cutting board. Despite being severed from its shell, it still moved subtly and pulled its body slightly inward. I stopped breathing for a moment. Was this sea snail still alive? Hastily, I picked up my knife and cut it in half, hoping the thick, meaty, snail-like flesh would stop slowly contracting. But it continued to move in its characteristic way. When I sliced my first thin piece, the silvery conch meat sucked onto the blade. For a moment, this undead sea creature seemed full of sensation, reacting and relaxing against cold metal. My adrenaline was high. I kept slicing. As I got closer to the base that had been connected to the shell, a long red stem grew from the interior of the flesh as I pressed against it. Later, I feverishly researched online this alien byproduct, which I discovered is the proboscis, the tubular mouthpart for feeding and sucking.

I have to admit I was slightly horrified during the conch process. Here I was, a former farmstead cheese-making manager who had skinned and gutted freshly killed lambs without remorse, and I was officially unnerved over one small sea snail. I grabbed my rich French butter from the fridge and recounted the dreamy way in which Nick had explained sautéing the thin slices in butter, with lemon and parsley. I hacked off a hunk of butter and threw it into a cast iron skillet and anxiously awaited the melt and simmer so I could lay this lively creature to final rest. It eventually began to resemble calamari, and the butter browned. The conch now smelled meaty like some form of familiar mammal meat. I was able to relax.

After handling crustacean and shellfish over a two-day time frame, I began to seriously reflect on the nature of these sea critters. The blue crabs were a bundle of nerves, the sea conch a bundle of muscle. These living bodies from deep waters were both familiar and foreign, their true sentiments still unknown to the human mind. How were these fish harvested, accumulated, and sold on the market place all within a few days’ time? What were the necessary measures needed to be taken from ocean to plate? And how were the Chinese fishmongers making it happen daily? I needed insight from the seafood industry at large in order to come to any conclusions.

A couple of weeks later, on a Wednesday at one in the morning, a livery cab dropped me at the toll gates of the New Fulton Fish Market in Hunts Point in the Bronx. The market’s hours are 1 a.m. to 8 a.m., Monday through Friday, making it only convenient to the city’s wide array of fishmongers and the occasional inquisitive customer who dares to make the trek. I had spoken on the phone briefly with a security officer, Kevin Bailey, the morning before my visit. I mentioned his name to the girl in the tollbooth. She let me in and said, “If you cross the parking lot and walk toward that white building, you’ll see a pedestrian walkway entrance. Feel free to ask people questions. Kevin’ll see you on the cameras walking around.”

The white warehouse building contains the largest fish market in the country, with seafood arriving daily from all over the world, mostly by airfreight. Eight-and-a-half years ago, the New Fulton Fish Market moved from its location next to the East River in Manhattan where it had operated for nearly two-hundred years; the climate of the market had drastically changed from an open-air urban gathering to a refrigerated distribution center. As I stepped into the building and maneuvered around quick moving forklifts to the walkway, the temperature dropped to its regulation temperature of under forty degrees.

Men bundled in hats, sweatshirts, and waterproof pants led pallet jacks that carried stacks of fish boxes across the long, expansive floor. Lining the building walls were a dizzying amount of seafood companies, each with their own designated walk-in coolers. Boxes of fish, cutting blocks, and weight scales were in open air and on display. The interior of the building was clean, sterile, and blindingly bright. Gigantic fish carcasses lay waiting to be broken down. Sounds echoed off the walls; the engines of the workers’ moving machines and the occasional smarmy yelling of one fish salesman to another filled the dead air.

These men worked with purpose. With only a seven-hour day to sell their wares, adrenaline was high. Fortunately, I had picked a slow day at the market, so salesmen eyed me with curiosity and were willing to lead me in the right direction.

I spoke to one fish salesman after another, each with a separate story and opinion about the nature of the Chinese seafood market. There was Ziggy, a thirty-year-old veteran of the fish business, and the first Puerto Rican to start his own seafood company at the Fish Market. He said, “Chinese people pick the best for what they eat, but they sell the cheapest stuff they can get in order to make a profit. I remember when we were in the Manhattan location, Chinese women would come with their shopping carts, fill them up with fish, and then resell them on the streets in their neighborhood, just to make a quick buck. They’d come back five times in a day. I miss those days. We don’t get that kind of business here. The whole life of the market has changed. It’s so sterile now.” Now that they’ve moved, Chinese fishmongers travel to the new location with less frequency, and seem to rely more on direct sales that can be delivered to their store.

Then there was Bobby of South Street Seafood, who wrote the book Tuna Grading and Evaluation, and Ronny, his brother, of Universal Seafood, who worked right across the lane. Bobby was filleting a large piece of glistening white monkfish as I asked him questions about how Chinatown sources its fish at the New Fulton Fish Market. Contrary to current local food mantras, he was very clear on the fact that local fish did not necessarily determine the highest quality; he motioned to whole bodies of pink-hued tuna flesh from Ecuador on his right.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Bobby said. “I’m not talking bad on the Chinese, but they eat what’s cheap on the market, because that’s what they like to eat. They like fish with bones and fish with heads. It’s not very high grade or expensive, but it doesn’t mean it’s bad fish. They just don’t sell the expensive varieties like large cuts of tuna because it’s not what their customers are used to. If the American market ever caught on with their type of fish, the demand might increase, and the prices might change. But for now, the Chinese have a good business plan going.”

Bobby and I walked over to Ronny’s desk on the market floor. They both chuckled over the fact that Chinatown’s whole business is based off of cash sales, which is another reason why buying product straight off the delivery trucks often proves a better choice for Chinese fishmongers. Credit is the predominant way sales are processed at the New Fulton Fish Market, Ronny explained, but purchasing bulk fish in cash was a better deal. Delivery trucks have the variety of live fish that interest the Chinese. The only live fish to be found at the Fish Market are crustaceans. All the live fish in aquatic tanks are delivered to Chinese storefronts, as Nick from Sunset Park mentioned.

Ronny sat in his Universal Seafood jacket with a lit cigar dangling out of his mouth. He said confidently, “All the live fish is caught in New England and then delivered to their shops.”

When I asked him about live frogs and live conch coming from Taiwan and North Korea, he wasn’t sure if shipping them from across the world was a smart business plan. “But if they’re doing it, I’m sure it’s legal.”

Almost two hours into my investigation of the fish market, I started regretting my decision to wear shorts. I was cold, tired, and losing the steam to push people for more information. This is when Jerry Phillips of Montauk Seafood Company stepped jovially up to me. Jerry, a rosy-faced man with a white beard, told me that his Chinese customers often buy the Jonah Crabs from his company, and that the crabs come from Maine and New Bedford.

“By sourcing a lot of their fish direct from delivery trucks, they’re cutting out the middle men. There are freight costs at the Fulton Fish Market. And since they pay their workers next to nothing, they can really save a lot of money. But with direct sales you can’t choose what you want. The product can get knocked around in the shipping, and in that case a Chinese fishmonger may not have any choice but to take a product that has been handled poorly. Or they have to send it back. That’s why people come here to buy fish. Because they have the choice.”

At this point, Jerry commented on the unsanitary conditions in Chinatown: “They don’t refrigerate half of their stuff all day. Flies land on it. Chinatown is what the Fulton Fish Market used to look like in the old location. It was gross. Imagine this in the summer: Scallops are caught in ninety degree water, then blast-chilled in in the truck to forty degrees for a few hours. Then they are unloaded in Manhattan on an unrefrigerated dock, where they come back up to ninety degrees. Until, finally, they are put in a walk-in refrigerator. It’s too much transition between hot and cold, and it really compromises the quality of the fish. At the old market, fish would sit out at room temperature all day, until white maggots coated the entire floor. Imagine that! That’s why this new location is so much better. Back in the day in the winter, we used to drive open air trucks of seafood, and when sludge from FDR Drive would fall onto the fish, we’d say, ‘Well, the fish is on ice now.’ But it was really polluted sludge!”

Jerry still spoke incredulously about the fact that the Health Department doesn’t regulate Chinatown, but is extremely diligent with the New Fulton Fish Market.

“We get marked off here if we don’t have a roll of paper towels in the right place, but the Health Department doesn’t touch Chinatown.”

I mentioned the bacterial skin outbreak that I had read about earlier that spring and if he thought it had to do with the way the fish were being cared for in Chinese markets.

“There are parasites in everything,” he responded. “Fish are live creatures. They live in the ocean. But where does the illness start? Not at the Bronx. It has to do with how it’s stored.”

Despite these numerous storage horror stories, the Old Fulton Fish Market is a symbol of a traditional way of handling food, one similar to the streets of Sunset Park Chinatown: a communal ground where sea creatures can be viewed in their entirety—a simple system that lacks regulation, and in some ways, is viewed as more authentic and more reflective of a cultural narrative. Many of the older fish salesmen at the market reminisced on a time when people knew how to cook numerous varieties of fish, and women would plan their days according to these diverse food traditions. Bobby had seemed remorseful at the idea that American society was losing the drive to preserve these traditions. The Old Fulton Fish Market was an incubator—not only for bacteria but for an active, colorful urban landscape. Much of that soulfulness was only a memory to the New Market.

These sentiments, of course, go beyond the fish industry, and extend into a commentary about every type of food imaginable, and its evolving place in our supermarkets. Advancements in microbiological understandings or bacterial outbreaks from certain products incentivize the government to refresh regulations, sometimes with such harsh adjustments that the core of the industry is compromised. In these situations, the fish salesmen and fishmonger will need to have a more proactive voice of a cultural and scientific expert in order to safeguard certain types of fish from completely leaving the market and no longer being accessible to everyday consumers.

So I still take comfort in the bold Chinese manner and relationship to seafood. When I return to their shops, I will still investigate the processes of their harvest and continue the discussion of locally versus globally sourced—and how this fits into my own sense of food aesthetics. As David Foster Wallace once commented in his piece, “Consider the Lobster,” the physical suffering of animals forces an individual to reflect on “the connections between aesthetics and morality, and these questions lead straightaway into…deep and treacherous waters.” Wallace ends his piece on this consideration, without delving further. Yet I would advise to leave all food inhibitions at the front sidewalk of the seafood market. On the surface of those deep waters, we can catch glimpses of our own reflection and of our larger place within a complex food system.