Mussels in Brussels

Mussels have no identity problems, they say,

Perhaps . . . After all, don’t we, here in Brussels,

Eat Canadian mussels?

Clamours the sixth-generation director from mainland China: 

Art is pure! Art is universal! The East?

The West? Why exaggerate their differences?

Hasn’t the Czech novelist, he claims, 

Written a novel very French in style?

                                                      What about mussels?

Are they ‘universal’? Not so sure.

Some mussels are fat, some shrivelled up because

They’re undernourished, or overcerebral.

And where industrial developments top the agenda,

Mussels taste . . . of chemical wastes. Some fresh with sand,

Others served on silver plates, cooked with white wine, or

Fried with blackbeans, pepper, and garlic . . . Just the way you like.

                                                                               And what about us?

Don’t we have different backgrounds and tastes too?

Yet at this international festival, the avant-garde artist

From Taiwan figures he was a Japanese in an earlier life,

And now in Belgium, he says loudly, why not be a 

Belgian? Why bother with clichés like cultural identity?

Sixth-generation director applauds

He’s all for going ‘universal’. 

                                            And yet in the universe,

There are different kinds of mussels, always will be, with

Shells broad or narrow, displayed on ice along the streets,

To be picked by tourists all over the world. Are we all the same?

Read carefully, the Czech novelist hasn’t written

A French novel. Chinese mussels strayed from home,

Thousands of miles away, still taste of

The ponds and lakes that bred them. All mussels have their own

History. There isn’t a mussel pure and metaphysical.

Translated by Martha Cheung. This poem appeared in Foodscape, published by Original Photograph Club, 1997. © Betty YY Ng