Cracking

My mother used to say that lobsters scream when boiled, but it’s only air escaping the shell. I was seven when she first told me this, standing at her station in Cannery Building C, watching her feed crawlers into the steamer. “Listen,” she said in Mandarin, though the foreman had posted English Only signs at every door. “That’s not pain. That’s the sound of becoming something else.”

Twenty years later, I understand she was also talking about herself.

We lived in Lubec, Maine, in an apartment above Tidal Road that shook when trucks hauled their catches to the plant. I was the hundred and thirty-second baby born in the cannery nursery—they kept a register, like breeding records. My mother worked Building C, Line 4, the killing floor. While she split shells, I slept in an old salt crate cushioned with her winter coat, the wool still smelling of cigarettes from the woman who’d worked her station before.

“破—pò,” Mother would whisper at night, unlacing boots crusted with brine. “Break day. Hatch day. Careful which you mean.”

On school forms I wrote Louise, but she called me Xiao Le—Little Happy—though the syllable Le also means “to fall.” Our language is a room with two exits: joy or plunge. In Chinese, truth spills like blood from a fresh wound; in English, I craft fables thin as rice paper.

My mother’s name was Chen Mei-Xing, but the cannery women called her May. She was twenty-three when I was born, though I didn’t learn this until I found her work papers while cleaning out the apartment. In my memory, she was always ancient—hands swollen from ice water, shoulders curved forward like she was perpetually bracing for impact. She spoke English in careful, measured doses, as if each word cost money. At home, our Mandarin mixed with Fujianese, sentences that started in one language and crashed into another, like the tides that governed our days.

My father arrived in Maine with two possessions: a hammerhead shark tooth from Guangzhou and an English degree that meant nothing here. The tooth had a story he told differently each time, but I believed the version he whispered to me when I was eight, feverish with flu.

He sat on my bed, the tooth in his palm. “I was your age,” he said in Mandarin—he only used Mandarin when he forgot to perform. “Swimming where I shouldn’t. The older boys bet I couldn’t reach the bottom of the harbor.”

I watched the tooth’s serrated edge catch the nightlight.

“The water was black. Like swimming through ink. My lungs burned, but I kept going down.” He closed his fingers around the tooth. “Then something brushed my leg. Huge. I grabbed the first thing I could—this tooth, stuck in the dock’s support beam. When I surfaced, the boys were gone. They thought I’d drowned.”

“Were you scared?”

He opened his hand again. “I was alive. Sometimes that’s the same thing.”

Years later, preparing for his citizenship test, he’d practice English by telling the story again, but cleaner, heroic: how he’d fought a shark, won this trophy. Mother would listen from the kitchen, her silence loud with what she knew—that some truths could only survive in their original language.

The cannery hired him to translate citations for foreign vessels—Russians who anchored too long, Japanese trawlers in restricted waters. At home, he translated us into border-friendly versions: my mother’s silence into dinner schedules, my homework into futures he could brag about at the Fujian Association. “Rowena,” he’d say, practicing the American name he’d chosen for me. “Row-ee-na. Perfect for interviews.”

I was thirteen the year everything cracked. Old enough to work illegal shifts at the cannery, young enough to believe my mother when she said the shells were hatching under her skin.

I.

The trouble began, as it always did in our house, with translation. Father had been hired to mediate a dispute between the harbor master and a Taiwanese captain who’d damaged the pier. Simple enough, except Father heard “fifty thousand” where the captain said “fifteen,” and by the time the error surfaced, contracts had been signed.

He came home that night holding his right hand strangely, like it had betrayed him. He touched his throat where I’d seen him finger the shark tooth during testimony, but the tooth was in his pocket now, wrapped in a casino receipt.

“They think I did it on purpose,” he said in English. “They think I’m in on it.”

Mother ladled congee. I watched the shark tooth when he finally set it on the table, remembering his story about diving into black water. Some days he still moved like he was swimming up from the bottom.

“Mei-Xing,” he said. “Are you listening?”

She set down the ladle. “I hear you.”

“They’re cutting my hours.”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

She didn’t answer, but I knew. The cannery women talked. They talked while their hands moved through thousands of pounds of meat, while the steam rose around them like weather. They knew which husbands drank, which ones gambled, which ones hit. They knew my father had been caught in a lie before it even reached our door.

I wanted to believe her. When you’re thirteen and your mother has given up everything to process seafood in a foreign country, when her hands crack and bleed in winter and smell permanently of brine, when she exists in a language that makes her sound like a child—you owe her your belief.

So I looked where she pointed. I nodded when she traced patterns under her skin. At night, I’d see her dust her arms as if something might fall from them, half exorcism, half apology to herself for what the work had done.

Before everything went wrong, there were good days. Like the Saturday Father decided to teach me to read tide charts. This was before the translation disaster, when he still wore his good shoes on weekends, still believed in eventual promotion. He spread the charts on our kitchen table, their blue lines like veins.

“High tide at 11:47,” he said, tracing the curve. “But that’s not the real time.”

“What do you mean?”

“The chart shows when the tide is highest, but the fish know before. They feel it coming.” He pulled out a red pen, began marking the chart with his own calculations. “In Guangzhou, my grandfather sold fish. He never owned a watch, but he always knew.”

“How?”

“Birds,” he said. “The birds change their songs twelve minutes before the tide turns. Twelve minutes exactly.”

I thought he was making it up—another story that shifted between tellings. But that afternoon at the harbor, we timed it. 11:35, the gulls’ cries sharpened, turned metallic. 11:47, the tide peaked, just as the chart promised.

“You see?” He looked proud, but also surprised, as if he hadn’t quite believed it himself. “Some things translate perfectly.”

On the walk home, he bought us Italian ice from a street vendor. Lemon for him, cherry for me. We ate them slowly, not talking, watching the fishing boats return. I didn’t know it was the last good Saturday we’d have. Maybe he didn’t either. Or maybe he did, and that’s why he wanted me to understand about the birds—that some warnings come in languages we have to learn to hear.

The week before the storm, I found Father in the basement at 3 a.m., surrounded by English textbooks. Not reading them—correcting them. Red pen in hand, marking errors only he could see.

“The subjunctive,” he muttered when he noticed me. “They’re teaching it wrong.”

I sat on the bottom stair. His shirt was inside out, the seams showing like exposed bones.

“It should be ‘If I were,’ not ‘If I was,'” he continued. “The whole book is wrong. How do they expect people to learn?”

“Dad, those are my old textbooks. From elementary school.”

He looked at the book in his hands—English Adventures, Grade 3—as if seeing it for the first time. On the cover, a cartoon rabbit held a pencil bigger than itself.

“I have a degree,” he said quietly. “From Guangzhou University. Do you know how hard that was? How many nights I stayed awake memorizing Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth?”

“I know.”

“‘I wandered lonely as a cloud.'” His accent made the words sound like a question. “I can recite the whole thing. Want to hear?”

“Sure.”

But he didn’t recite. He just stared at the cartoon rabbit, its oversized pencil ready to write perfect

English sentences. After a while, he said, “The casino translations are easier. ‘Hit.’ ‘Stand.’

‘Double down.’ No subjunctive needed.”

“You could get another job. A better one.”

He laughed—not bitter, just empty. “With whose English? Mine or theirs?”

I wanted to say something comforting, but I was thirteen and didn’t know how comfort worked between fathers and daughters. So I sat with him while he corrected the already correct sentences, his red pen turning each page into a small war.

When I finally went back to bed, I could still hear him downstairs, conjugating verbs in the dark: “I am, you are, he is. I was, you were, he was. I will be, you will be, he will never be.”

II.

I started working at the cannery that spring, after school and weekends. Mother had arranged it with the floor supervisor, a Portuguese woman who’d known my mother since I was born. The work was simple: sort the meat, pack the cans, keep your head down. The hard part was the smell—it got into your clothes, your hair, under your fingernails. No amount of scrubbing could remove it entirely.

But I liked being near my mother. I liked watching her work, the efficient grace of her movements, the way she could strip a lobster in seconds. The other women treated her with respect. Here, in the steam and noise, her broken English didn’t matter. Her hands spoke fluently.

I began to understand what she meant about the shells. After hours in ice water, your hands went numb, then burned, then felt like something else entirely—like they belonged to another creature, something that could survive in the deep. The women all had the same hands: swollen, marked, transformed by the work.

One day I skipped AP Chemistry when Mother texted only the character 急—urgent. Inside the plant, conveyor belts flexed like intestines digesting midnight. She stationed me beside her. “Watch,” she said, sliding a lobster under the splitter. One guillotine fall, one wet syllable. She removed the meat whole, a pink scroll that cooled into exclamation.

Later she guided me to a door marked OFFAL / MEMORIAL. Inside: pink shell fragments bound for chicken feed. She plunged her arms elbow-deep into the bin.

“They’re hatching under my skin,” she whispered.

The day Father pulled the knife was a Tuesday in March. I remember because I was doing my Marine Biology homework, drawing the anatomy of a lobster, labeling each part: carapace, rostrum, telson. Father had come home from another shortened shift to find Mother hadn’t started dinner.

She was at the sink, staring at her hands under the running water. The burst vessels on her arms seemed darker in the kitchen light, spreading up from her wrists like roots seeking soil.

“Mei-Xing.”

She didn’t turn.

“Mei-Xing, I’m talking to you.”

“I’m listening,” she said, but she wasn’t. She was watching the patterns under her skin, the way cold and heat and years of salt water had rewritten her body’s map.

Father went to the drawer. I kept drawing, my pencil tracing the lobster’s antennae. The sound of metal on metal as he sorted through utensils. When I looked up, he was holding the bread knife.

He didn’t threaten. He just stood there, the knife pointing at nothing, his face a question none of us could answer. Mother finally turned. She saw the knife, saw him, saw me watching.

“Put it down,” she said quietly.

He did. But we all knew he’d picked it up. That was enough to change the air in our apartment, to make the walls feel closer, the ceiling lower. He stuck the knife into the wall instead—a violent gesture that made me flinch—where it stayed for weeks, rust blooming along the blade like evidence.

Father’s humiliation at the harbor happened the next week. A tourist couple mistook him for a valet and tossed him their Tesla keys. Father’s bow started as courtesy, deepened into severity— he bent so low the ocean could have sipped his ear. When he straightened, he marched home without the keys, his dignity a cracked shell he carried in his pocket next to the shark tooth.

I found him that night in the living room, the bread knife pulled from the wall, crumbs still clinging to the steel. Mother watched with the blank mercy of an unplugged lamp. He saw the crumbs, saw us seeing, the shame unbearable. He pushed the knife back into the drywall, where it would hang like a rusting sundial of what almost happened.

III

The storm came in April, one of those northeastern squalls that strip shingles and flood basements. The cannery called all hands for an emergency shift—they needed to process the day’s catch before the power went out.

Father had been gone for three days. Not unusual anymore. He’d started disappearing after the translation disaster, returning with the smell of other rooms on his clothes—cigarette smoke and something else, something like desperation. Mother didn’t ask where. I think she was grateful for the space.

But that night he came back in the middle of the storm. Mother and I were gathering our rain gear when he walked through the door, soaked, holding a plastic bag from the casino. “Where are you going?” His words slurred slightly.

“Work,” Mother said. “Emergency shift.”

“In this weather?”

“Especially in this weather.”

He dumped the bag on the table. Casino chips scattered, their colors garish in our brown kitchen.

“I won,” he said. “Four hundred dollars. We don’t need their emergency pay.”

Mother continued putting on her boots. I did the same.

“Did you hear me?” He stepped closer. “I said we don’t need it.”

“We need everything,” Mother replied.

I saw him remember something then—maybe the gulls changing their songs, maybe the water closing over his head in Guangzhou harbor. His hand went to his pocket where the shark tooth lived.

That’s when he grabbed the knife—not the bread knife still rusting in the wall, but a fillet knife from the dish rack. Thin, flexible, made for precision work.

The lights flickered. In that stutter between dark and bright, I saw my mother’s face change. Not fear—something else. Recognition, maybe. Or relief.

“Go ahead,” she said.

He looked confused. This wasn’t the script.

She pulled up her sleeves, showed him her arms. The burst vessels seemed to form a pattern in the storm light, like characters in a language none of us could read. “Cut them out. Whatever you think is there. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To see if I’m lying?”

Thunder shook the apartment. I found myself standing between them without remembering how I got there.

“Move,” Father said.

“No.”

He looked at me—really looked at me—for the first time in months. I saw him see me: thirteen, stubborn, my mother’s daughter. I saw him remember teaching me about tides, about translations that worked. The knife trembled in his hand.

Then the power went out completely. In the darkness, I heard the knife clatter to the floor, heard Father’s footsteps retreating to their bedroom, heard the door slam. Mother and I stood in the dark, breathing.

“Get your coat,” she finally said. “We’ll be late.”

We worked through the night in the emergency-lit plant, our hands moving by muscle memory.

The storm howled outside, but inside was only the rhythm of work: grab, split, extract, pack. Mother worked beside me, silent. I watched her arms as she moved, the way the patterns seemed to shift with each motion, a living map of damage and endurance.

Near dawn, when the storm had calmed to ordinary rain, she led me to the waste room where they dumped the shells. Mountains of them, pink and white in the dim light.

“Help me,” she said, filling a bucket.

We filled five buckets with broken shells. She lifted one, tested its weight.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“Starting over.”

As she lifted the bucket, I saw her arms clearly in the emergency light. The patterns weren’t shells moving under her skin—they were the visible history of what the work had done. Burst vessels, repetitive strain, the body’s record of years spent in ice water. But in that light, with shell dust in the air and exhaustion making everything shimmer, I understood why she saw them as something more.

We loaded the buckets into her ancient Corolla. Drove through the flooding streets to a condemned smokehouse on the point that had been for sale for years. She broke the padlock with a tire iron, and we dragged the buckets inside.

The space smelled of old smoke and older wood. Daylight leaked through gaps in the walls.

Mother set down her bucket and looked around like she was seeing a cathedral.

“We’ll sell it,” she said. “Shell grit. For gardens. For calcium supplements. For whatever people need to believe it’s good for.” She touched her arms, tracing the patterns only she could fully read. “I’ve been carrying this damage all this time. Might as well transform it into something useful.”

IV.

Father left the next week. No fight, no farewell. Just gone one morning, along with the shark tooth and the casino chips. He left one thing: a tide chart on the kitchen table, the kind he’d taught me to read. Red pen marks showed the high tides for the next month, and in the margin, in his careful English: “For Louise. Some things still translate.” Mother found me staring at it when she came home from her shift.

“He’s gone,” I said.

“I know.”

“Are you sad?”

She considered this, unconsciously rubbing her arms where the vessels had burst and healed so many times. “I’m sad for who he wanted to be.”

Six months later, divorce papers arrived from Las Vegas. Mother signed them without reading.

We worked on the smokehouse in the evenings after our shifts. Cleaned, patched, painted. Mother had a gift for making things look better than they were—a skill learned from years of stretching nothing into something. We made business cards on the library computer: Tidal

Calcium: From Sea to Soil.

The first customers were the organic farmers at the Saturday market. Then the health food stores.

Then, somehow, a distributor from Portland who wanted to talk about “scaling up.”

“Americans love a story,” Mother told me as we ground shells in the industrial blender we’d bought secondhand. “Tell them these shells survived the journey. Tell them about transformation.”

I became our storyteller. At farmers’ markets, I explained how lobster shells contained chitin, which helped plants resist disease. How our shells came from sustainable sources. How my mother had discovered their properties through traditional knowledge passed down through generations of coastal women. All of it true enough, sideways.

By winter, we had enough saved to put a down payment on the smokehouse. The owner, eager to unload it, threw in an acre of scrub land that flooded at high tide.

“Perfect,” Mother said. “We’ll grow samphire.”

I didn’t know what samphire was. Turned out to be a salt-tolerant plant that fancy restaurants paid good money for. Mother had been talking to the cannery women again, learning what they knew about making things grow in hostile conditions.

We moved into the smokehouse’s upper floor. Minimal heat, no insulation, but it was ours. I strung lights around my corner, hung curtains made from boat canvas. Mother planted scallions in coffee cans on the windowsill.

Sister Ling called on Chinese New Year. I could hear desert wind through the phone, or maybe just static.

“How’s the rock business?” I asked.

“Solid.” Her laugh was thin. “How’s Mom?”

“Growing things.”

“She always was.”

We talked about nothing—her dissertation on plate tectonics, my plans for high school. Neither of us mentioned Father. Finally, she asked, “Do you hate me for leaving?”

“No,” I said, and meant it. “You showed us it was possible.”

After we hung up, I found Mother on the narrow beach below the smokehouse, throwing shells into the waves. Not frantically, but methodically, like she was feeding something.

“The shells,” I said. “Under your skin. Are they gone?”

She looked at her arms in the moonlight. The patterns were still there—they’d always be there, the body’s memory of labor—but they no longer seemed to trouble her.

“I think I understand them now,” she said. “They were never shells. They were maps. Showing me where I’d been, where I needed to go.”

We sat on the cold sand. “Your father wasn’t a bad man. Just a frightened one.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Bad men know what they’re doing.”

Winter garrisoned the coastline. Inside the hostel we practiced new conjugations of plenty. Guests arrived slowly at first—two hitchhikers who smelled of patchouli, a divorcée writing her memoir, a runaway who called herself Sparrow. The world leaked its girls into our ark.

Each night Mother led a cracking ritual by the fire: everyone received one lobster shell and named what it used to protect. Then we’d pass a mallet, smash the shell, grind it into salt for morning congee. Hunger, renamed communion.

V.

I left Maine five years later for college, then graduate school, then a job in a landlocked city where no one knew what samphire was. But I came back every summer to help with the harvest, to watch my mother’s small empire of salt-adapted plants spread across the flood zone.

She never remarried. Never dated. But she gathered people—cannery women past their working years, teenage girls with nowhere else to go, anyone who needed to learn how broken things could still grow. The smokehouse became a kind of commune, though Mother would have hated that word.

The last time I saw her whole, before the stroke that took her speech, she was standing in her samphire field at low tide, hair completely gray now, directing a group of workers in a mix of Mandarin, English, and gestures. She looked like what she was: a woman who’d transformed damage into cultivation.

“You did it,” I said.

She shook her head. “We’re all still becoming.”

That night, sorting shells for the grinder—we never stopped processing shells—she told me she’d been dreaming of Father lately. Not nightmares. Just dreams where he was young again, pulling shark teeth from dock pilings, believing everything could be translated cleanly from one life to another.

“I hope he found what he was looking for,” she said.

I thought of the tide chart he’d left, those careful red marks. How he’d tried to warn us, in the only language he had left. Sometimes I pulled it out and checked his predictions against the actual tides. He was always right. Some things, as he’d said, translate perfectly.

“Maybe he did,” I said. “Maybe what he was looking for was a way to let go.”

Mother nodded, her fingers absently tracing the vessel patterns on her forearm. “That’s what the shells taught me. Sometimes what we carry under our skin is just the body keeping score. The trick is learning to read the marks as maps, not wounds.”

Now I teach marine biology at a community college three hours inland. My students have never seen the ocean. I bring them lobster shells, let them hold the weight, feel the joints and segments. I tell them about molting, how lobsters must crack their own shells to grow, how they hide, soft and vulnerable, until the new shell hardens.

Sometimes I tell them about the gulls, how they change their songs twelve minutes before the tide turns. They write it down dutifully, file it under “Animal Behavior.” They don’t know I’m teaching them about my father, about the terrible precision of timing, about knowing when to let go.

My office has a tide chart on the wall—not for any practical reason, this far from the sea. But I like looking at those curves, remembering his red pen, the way he tried to mark time for us. In the margins, I’ve written my own notes: Mother’s birthday. The day the smokehouse became ours. The date Sister Ling finally came home, carrying rocks from the desert like prayers.

Once, a student asked about the marks on my own arms—faint now, but visible if you know how to look. Heredity or coincidence, I’ve developed the same burst vessels, the same patterns that shift in certain lights.

“Occupational hazard,” I told her. “From my cannery days.”

But sometimes, late at night, grading papers about invertebrate biology, I trace the patterns and remember my mother’s words: They’re maps, showing where we’ve been. In the lamplight, I can almost see what she saw—not damage but direction, not wounds but the body’s own language, writing its story in blood and time.

After class, I drive to the coast. Not to Lubec—that’s too far, and anyway, the cannery closed years ago. Just to the nearest beach, where I can smell salt and remember.

I’ve inherited my mother’s hands—wide palms, strong fingers. Good for sorting, she used to say. Good for building. When I hold them up to the light, I see the same vessel patterns beginning to form, the body’s memory made visible.

The tide is turning. If I listen carefully, I can hear the birds beginning to change their songs.

Twelve minutes, my father said. Twelve minutes to prepare for transformation. I learned from both of them: you can’t control what breaks you. But you can choose how to read the damage. You can see it as wounds or as maps. You can carry it as burden or as story. You can let it define your limits or mark the beginning of your next becoming.

At the bottom of the tide chart, in characters he taught me to write: 破—pò.

Break, hatch, begin.

In the end, they’re all the same word. But you have to live through the breaking to understand why.

The waves come in, go out. Eternal revision. I watch until the light fades, thinking about translation, about the languages written in our bodies, about all the ways we learn to read ourselves and each other. Then I drive home to my landlocked life, carrying the salt smell in my clothes, the tide chart in my memory, my mother’s story in my hands.

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