Sushi and Ngapi
It is Friday. It is a day that we do not eat meat, but does not us prevent from eating fish. We keep this traditional practice, if only to remember the significance of that Good Friday.
I went to the Ft. Lee Commissary to buy sushi. There is a small stand in the store where a couple of lads made sushi. It is the best, in the take out category, wonderfully fresh and fragrant. Today I happened to notice that one lad was named "Win" and also noticed that they were not Japanese. (Many asian nationalities and even mexicans have taken to wearing Japonaise clothing while making sushi.) I asked him where he was from, and of course it was Burma. What do you know Burmese pretending to be Japanese and making sushi. This to my mother would have been a total outrage, given the depredations of the Japanese during their conquest during WWII. I remember that she did have for a short while have animus toward Japanese friends of ours when we were young. These Japanese friends had their relatives suffer depredations during their internment in the U.S. camps during WWII at the hands of round-eyes. Our friend Byron Sakamoto would tease my mother, by asking for mangoes. My mother as a teenager once gave a defeated and retreating Japanese soldier a mango, or perhaps even threw it at him. I remember she said the soldier, said he could have killed her, but simply walked away.
The Burmese making sushi makes me wonder what the Greater Asia Co-prosperity sphere was all about and certainly the meaning of WWII.
To round out this tale of raw fish, I add ngapi. Ngapi is that wonderful and pungent preserve of fermented fish, enjoyed by few round-eyes. So now the cycle is complete. We love fish from its rawness to its utter putridity. It is good to be Burmese.
posted by THET-SHAY at 8:37 AM
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