Right down the street from our apart­ment– so close I can almost see it from our 9^th floor win­dow– lies the “Con­ver­gency Scan­di­na­vian Seafood” store. B and I call this “the salmon place”- a much more under­stand­able name than its real one. I didn’t even know what Con­ver­gence meant, until I looked it up:

Con­ver­gency: inde­pen­dent devel­op­ment of sim­i­lar char­ac­ters (as of body struc­ture in whales and fishes) by ani­mals or plants of dif­fer­ent groups that is often asso­ci­ated with sim­i­lar­ity of habits or environment

er, I actu­ally still don’t really know what it means, or at least, why a store would name itself such.

Let’s rewind a bit, to talk about how seafood here isn’t (gen­er­ally) safe. Friends here often joke that the fish served in restau­rants is caught in the nearby Pearl River– the same river that hun­dreds of cargo ships pass through each week, the same river whose water is also often jok­ingly said to be bot­tled into the cheap “Pearl River Beer” that is sold at every restau­rant, in every store. A friend asked me once, when I first got here, where I thought the fish that was sold in the mar­kets came from– I was at a loss for words, par­tially for the lack of knowl­edge about the bod­ies of water in the region, and par­tially because I couldn’t fathom fish liv­ing in the water that I did know in the region.

Try­ing to read up about any pos­i­tive thoughts of China’s sta­tus of seafood safety didn’t shed any greater light, and I encoun­tered more neg­a­tive arti­cles than pos­i­tive, scar­ing me away with all things aquatic. China does not have proper cer­ti­fi­ca­tions, China’s waters are poi­soned, and as the exporter of tons and tons of seafood, it does to its fish farms as you would imag­ine a large cat­tle oper­a­tion does to its poor cows. Ever-conscious of where my meat comes from, both at home and here in China, I never thought the fear of where my seafood came from would actu­ally be a legit­i­mate con­cern (even after Dan Bar­ber said so!).

So you can imag­ine the shock, fol­lowed by imme­di­ate trep­i­da­tion, when I heard there was a lit­tle store in Guangzhou that sold fresh, sashimi-quality salmon. Within a stone’s throw of our apart­ment, at that. But our fel­low Amer­i­cans vowed it was true, and after tak­ing their tips for where to buy cheese, bread, and beer, I took this salmon tip pretty con­fi­dently. But of course as I do with any other food oper­a­tion, I walked by the store count­less times to stake it out. I peered at their qual­ity of fish, san­i­ta­tion lev­els, sig­nage, and decided that it looked legit. Plus it was expen­sive, so that was a good sign.

A few weeks ago I made the bold deci­sion to buy a small filet of salmon belly for B and I for a sashimi din­ner. it was fatty, mar­bled, clean, and deli­cious. After not get­ting sick and not grow­ing extra fin­gers on our body, we deemed it safe enough for occas­sional con­sump­tion. And when an invi­ta­tion for Passover rolled around at our good friend’s house, and a decree for dishes to be brought was made, I knew exactly what I was going to do. Because what’s more Jew­ish than lox?

I headed over to the salmon place last Thurs­day morn­ing, giv­ing myself two-and-a-half days of solid cure time for the salmon. The salmon guy was very help­ful and I am sure slightly amused at me, try­ing to deci­pher my choppy Chi­nese descrip­tion of home-cured salmon. We got stuck a lot on the part where I wasn’t going to cook it. I remem­ber stat­ing, in my best Chi­nese, that I was going to mar­i­nate the salmon in a lot of salt and sugar, and let it sit for a few days, and the salt would cook the salmon but it would still be raw, like sashimi, and sliced thin to put on bread or crack­ers, which is how the Jew­ish peo­ple eat it.…”

The salmon guy looked at me quizzi­cally (I don’t think he knew the slight­est bit what Jew­ish peo­ple ate) but then a look of acknowl­edge­ment came across his face: “ahhh, you want what they have at Ikea!” And he hap­pily cut me off close to 2 pounds of salmon.

Note to self: make ref­er­ence to Ikea when want­ing smoked salmon in Guangzhou.