Nam Pla
“I know a place where there's still somethin' going on” – Bob Dylan, Summer Days
Article by Willa Schendler, art by Koli Razafindandy
“I know a place where there's still somethin' going on” – Bob Dylan, Summer Days
rotten 1. adj. suffering from decay
Before I got the job at the Thai restaurant last summer, they made me take a quiz on the menu.
“What is nam pla?”
I googled it. Fish sauce.
Fish sauce doesn’t go bad. I mean, it makes sense that a liquid produced by squeezing the juice out of rotten anchovies doesn’t have a hard expiration date. The fermentation process just continues while the bottle festers on the shelf, creating new enzymes. Earthier flavors, different elements of “punch,” each jar unique to its environment, the date of opening, the temperature of the room. Until, one day, several years after you’ve opened it, you might decide the taste is off. You might throw the bottle out. Start again.
Right after I got the job at the Thai restaurant, I made a mistake with a boy. It felt like everyone in my goddamn town knew. Afterwards, he ignored me. I remember that I felt empty for weeks. I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I just came home at midnight with fish sauce stains you couldn’t see on my black jeans.
It’s funny, feeling like you’ve been catapulted into some twisted version of adulthood, or womanhood, whatever you want to call it, with no romantic buildup. Rather than an appropriate series of “firsts,” I manically forced a growing up in those hazy weeks of summer, between giving my graduation speech and my early shifts at the restaurant. In the aftermath, instead of mature, I felt silly.
My favorite flanêur, Fran Lebowitz, once called civilization “merely the accumulated debris of a chilling number of bad nights.” Fran is also famous for having horrendous, career-stifling writers’ block. As she put it, “I was supposed to be writing a novel six years ago, but I took ten years off to sulk." If Fran took 10 years, then I took at least the three months between high school and college.
I also accumulated my personal debris of bad nights – running mindlessly from one job to another, to a party, arriving home after my family was already asleep. I’d lie awake for hours, only sleeping if music could drone out my regretful monologue.
In the morning, I’d drag myself out of bed at noon to do it all again. I was constantly fighting a sense of missing out, or missing something – trapped in a mental refrain expressed best by the Boss: “There’s something happening somewhere, baby I just know that there is.” All summer. Until, at the end, it was time to leave, and I said goodbye to my parents with the impending sense that something was off. But decay, on the day to day, is hardly noticeable.
While getting dressed to be the hostess every night at the restaurant, I came to terms with the fact that I am not beautiful. My mother reassures me that I am. Her love is difficult to separate from the fact that my face is not easy to look at. I am not one of those girls whose faces you steal glances at in class.
Maybe I did figure out how to manage my curls. Or line my eyes right so that my jarring features passed as interesting. I could feel the way men looked at me when I led them to a table, cleared plates, and told them to have a nice night. Eyes moving over my body. I’m nothing if not inelegant. I’d turn deep red, tremble with adrenaline, break glasses, bend down to sweep up the shards.
Walking to my car after work, a man followed me and leaned against my window. “I want to get to know you.” Would you? I imagined he thought to describe to me the way food critics talk about fish sauce: bite, oomph, depth, richness, funk. What a disappointment.
Last summer, the chefs would mutter confessions of love as I racked dishes in the sink, back turned, blushing, clenching with the effort of showing no emotion. “Mi amor.” “I’m going to marry her.” “I’m in love.”
The cashier at 7/11 started giving me drinks for free. I wished he charged me.
My small town’s sex-ed taught me abstinence was the best way to prevent pregnancy. But I didn’t learn anything about feeling like you want to melt into the red matte tiles of the restaurant kitchen from shame, eyes watering from vaporized chilies, hands covered in fish sauce, adrenaline coursing because the chef’s “compliments” remind you of the mistake you made with that boy, how you hate the way you look, the way you can feel eyes on your ass.
Some fish sauce historians (who exist, by the way) believe that the condiment developed at the same time, independently, in the East and West of Ancient Eurasia. Across a culture and a continent, people recognized the uncomfortable, un-intuitive beauty of its flavor. The first Greek to leave an unattended anchovy in a barrel for nearly a year must have been pleasantly surprised. The thing about fermentation is that it’s unpredictable. You also can’t rush it. It’s hard to tell if something’s gone rotten, or if it’s just different – that’s up to you. And, after all, it’s that twinge of decay, a slight off-ness, that makes fish sauce the liquid gold of the culinary world.
How do you know if it’s time to throw fish sauce out? You take it out of the cabinet, hold it up to the light. Investigate the new crystallization around the spout. Try it. Make a friend try it. Maybe it’s ok, for now.
Last summer, I learned that lilac purple cotton underwear from seventh grade and drunken car camping and workplace harassment and growing up and smudged eyeliner and fish sauce that’s gone bad can coexist.