Yet another archival dredging

I need to re-start my writing.

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Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2001 04:46:16 -0400 (EDT)

Setup: I'm an agnostic, a former rabidly anti-evangelical who was that way thanks to conversions in the family. (I've mellowed with age and no longer feel compelled to snarl/snap at evangelicals) Last April I visited my cousins and my auntie in Houston, who are very evangelical and who I love very much but who test the limits of my mellowing.

(They took me to church on Sunday, for one. That was a real teeth clencher, but all for the family, hey?)

Since young I've been unable to eat crustaceans without flinching. Molluscs, fine, raw oysters even. But not crabs/lobsters/prawns. Until I went to the Army, I would refuse to eat a single mobile crustacean. I mean a single. I didn't eat one unless by accident, and then would stop and pick through every single liftable thing on my plate until I had winnowed out every single crustacean. Yes, I was a terribly picky eater.

(One day in boot camp, after a long, long day's work with lack of sleep and physical work starting to tell, I went to the messhall for dinner. The cooks plopped onto my messtray perhaps one of the most disgusting dishes I ever ate in the Army -- prawns and hairy gourd (as bad as it sounds.) So there I was, with a bone-deep weariness that you have to experience to understand, and this glop of sticky stuff in front of me. I had eighteen years of avoidance behind me. And I stared at the plate for all of fifteen seconds before I realised that there really was no other viable way out. That's then enlightenment struck, and I realised that there is no facet of the human psyche that is not modifiable, given enough pressure. That and the garbage point story (but that's another story))

Well, April is crawfish season, and the first day I landed there, there was enough talk and anticipation among my cousins that I knew what was going to come and had plenty of time to steel myself for it.

I just didn't know how bad it would be.

Why didn't I speak up and say I didn't like shellfish, you say? Well, since I saw that all my relatives were so hyped up about it, I felt that I just couldn't let them not have their five pounds of cockroach-of-the-sea -- and that after I'd been in the army, there was really no excuse for me, since I knew that I was able to make myself physically eat the things.

We'd already had lunch, and so being Chinese and prone to idle gluttony, we wandered over to the nearby foodcourt and sat down for our second round. My cousin's husband drifted over to the crawfish stall (I still remember it being called Crawfish Beignets) and ordered four pounds of crawfish etouffee.

So I'm sitting there chatting with my cousins, when back comes my cousin's husband with this opaque garbage bag full of HUGE. RED. COCKROACHES. He upends the bag over the table (which is covered with this plastic tablecloth/garbage bag) and in front of me, in all their chitinous glory, are about 100. HUGE. RED. COCKROACHES.

And I smile, grin at my cousins, and dig in, picking up those wet -- fresh from the boiler, no less -- clawed things, snapping their tails off with this sickening hollow crack, breaking the tails in half, like with their bigger cousins (makeitstopmakeitstop), yanking out the meat, stripping off the digestive tract and popping the meat into my mouth. And chewing. And chewing.

Then after each tail is done, cracking open the little claws, all the while convinced that they're going to come to life and snip off my fingers, breaking the body, sucking the juice out of the gills (right above the little once-scurrying legs), getting massive, massive chili burn.

And smiling. And smiling.

And talking. And talking.

And getting up twice to go to the toilet, splash water on my face, wash my hands, stare at myself in the mirror, feel the little cockroaches screaming "I WANT OUT OF HERE!!!! LET ME OUT OF HERE!!! YOU BASTARD, WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?!", wiping my mouth, and diving back into the fray.

And eating about four pounds of crawfish myself (seconds, thirds even, with none of my cousins suspecting a thing.)

So... that's the crawfish part of the anecdote.

Later that night, I get into a conversion argument with my other cousin. He and I sit down for hours, from ten till three in the morning, debating (a useless thing for me to do, but he wouldn't stop), discussing, evading. Until finally, since I have a flight the next day, I make him a promise to cut the flow off (besides, he got uncomfortably close when we started discussing my pride, but that's another story too.)

I promise him, with all my heart, that I'll sit that night, and pray. Pray and try with an open mind to see if I can accept Jesus as my personal saviour. I do this too because I'm myself wondering -- the seed of doubt planted well, but would it wither?

So after he's gone back, I sit down and think. And pray. And think and pray. And open up whatever heart I can, and then, out of the blue comes my answer, a vision if you will. I'm still wondering if it's a touch of the divine, incidentally, or just my subconscious ticking over. And the answer is:

A crawfish.

A Platonic crawfish etouffe.

And at that point, I know what has been revealed to me.

So the next morning, I go and talk to my cousin. And I tell him that I tried, I really did; and that I had a vision. And that vision was a crawfish.

And as expected, he cracks up laughing -- until I tell him my hidden secret; that I probably ate more shellfish yesterday that I had in literally my entire life. That I hate, abhor, can't tolerate the sight or smell of shellfish (note that I say nothing about the taste). And that to come to him and embrace his brand of Christianity would be exactly in spirit -- exactly! -- the same sacrifice to family happiness that I'd made yesterday.

Of course, it was a lot greater a sacrifice, since I couldn't make it.

I could stomach some parts -- some parts were surprisingly sweet -- but the whole was completely indigestible and entirely against my nature to approach, yet alone embrace. Note that this does not at any point preclude a conversion, but it would require such a deep destruction of my mental makeup that I don't think that whatever converted would be "me".

Neither he nor any other members of my family had realised that I was in the least bit malcontented with eating crawfish. I was actually quite proud of that, since it showed me that I could still be cheerfully inscrutable even among people who know me reasonably well.

And apart from a few other inconsequential things, that's pretty much it in its cliche ridden, rambling glory. If nothing else, it shows that the divine and I have a good relationship if it can grant me visions with this perfect -- divine, even! -- irony.
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