Seafood Memories

It was a seafood platter. A tower of seafood so extravagant my sheltered and simple self had never seen before.

It was likely 2003 and I was on a jet setting work trip only the heady days of unrestrained corporate budgets that a successful airline could afford. We were in Sydney for a meeting. We flew in in the morning, had a meeting and were meant to turn around and fly back on the first flight the next morning. But before that, we went out for dinner.

Growing up, the meals my mum cooked were delicious and simple. Seafood was present in our diet but treated like a luxury. It would be a special meal if we had fish or prawns. Most of the time, it would be seafood scraps like prawn heads or fish heads that would be used to provide intense flavour or take the place of prized pieces of fish.

And it is with this background that my mouth dropped to see the tower, the multiple stacked plates of prawns, exotic scampi and oyster. My horizons were still very narrow at 26, some say they still are at 48, and I was deeply impressed. This must be how successful corporate types operate. I noted down the ease at which the senior executive ordered dish after dish of expensive seafood. I was easily impressed by the superficial.

This memory lay tucked in a corner of my mind until I read the first chapter of Candace Chung’s Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You. She mentioned a seafood tower and this memory surfaced up. It is nothing and yet something. It is a marker of time past and the journey that I’ve taken. Wide eyed young corporate newbie to someone learning to be comfortable in my own skin.

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Scenes from this morning’s walk in Pukekohe, Auckland New Zealand.