I discovered the delicacy of flower crabs through a big plate of Typhoon Shelter Crabs. A man who liked my mother ordered it at a restaurant table. I was eleven.

Neither Mother nor the man finished the single piece of crab in their own bowls. I ate the rest of the plateful. In fact, I wallowed in the succulent, sweet meat so much that my lips and white dress were spotted with fried garlic and scallion crumbs.

“Wipe your mouth. You are embarrassing me,” Mother said when the man left the table to pay the bill.

He seemed pleased that I enjoyed the crabs.

“And look at your dirty dress. You are getting yourself into eating saanwak* when we get home.”

Mother glared. She clamped her teeth to enunciate the words clearly to me in Shanghainese, our mother tongue. It was also my only time eating flower crabs—a local delicacy here that had no place in our Shanghainese roots.

Before the meal, Mother had said she would not keep me long with her this time.

“I will be married again soon.”

When we got home after the meal, she said it was for my own good that she would discipline me with eating saan-wak to ensure that I wouldn’t pig out on anything again.

Manners and elegance, she said, would someday land me a good job and marry well, or at least make me a lady.

A flower crab can molt up to twenty-seven times over a lifetime. During each molting, she would find it impossible to eat anything despite her cravings. As I grew older, I understood what Mother was trying to teach me—the tacit path to womanhood is, through molting, perhaps as much as twenty-seven times. Because of that, I grew to feel a special affinity with the flower crabs—almost a kinship to them.

Mother was divorced again when I was fifteen. I moved in with her again.

Mother gave me money to buy instant meals. Mother doesn’t allow snacking.

“What money do we have to buy that junk food? And don’t you know you are getting fat?”

The daily meals and sharing a small bed with her in her small apartment were my privileges of being her daughter, she said. I couldn’t have asked for more, and I had no complaints—we had only each other then in the vast and strange city we had come to call home. I never told my mother what I wanted to eat or didn’t have enough to eat, even though I had come to realize I have a big appetite growing up.

Her discipline with me about eating saan-wak continued into my adulthood.

It happened when I forgot to clean the bedsheet stained by a spot of period blood; when I failed to bring her an umbrella to the metro station when she came home from work on a rainy day; when I asked her for money to pay for a graduation day trip for secondary school. In early winters, Mother always had me buy and steam some Shanghainese hairy crabs to eat with a dipping sauce made of ginger, Chinese black vinegar, and a pinch of sugar. It was our most ritualistic meal of the year—we didn’t celebrate festivals. Mother said she had grown up eating these hairy crabs.

I never liked these crabs—they are not meaty or pleasant to look at. Shanghainese hairy crabs’ drab and muddy looks don’t match up to the flower crabs’ majestic blue armors that gradient into ivory and then brownish speckles. The flower crabs are like the goldfish of the crustacean kingdom—whoever had first come up with the idea of eating them in human history must have had been starving.

The flower crabs in a red basin at a neighborhood seafood stall became my only friends since I was fifteen. I went to talk to them often: “I know you guys would rather be eaten than bound here by ropes. Someone will take you home and make you eat saan-wak. But I promise it will be okay eventually. You see, you do get used to eating saan-wak, like me,” I chanted the speech to them in Shanghainese whenever I visited—to comfort my friends who could only wait for their own demise.

Once, as I was talking to them, I saw one crab’s black, round eye fall into the water in the red basin. The tiny eye disappeared instantly under the bodies of the dozens of crabs trying to scuttle among themselves, jostling. After a while, the one-eyed crab forced itself towards the other side of the elongated, oval basin and then back to where it was again, as if to say to me: “You can get used to it yourself, but not us. We are here to play the field, no matter how bounded.”

The vendor, a man who said he was originally from Guangdong, told me I can tell the gender of the crabs by the shape of their flaps on their stomachs. The female crabs have dome-shaped flaps; the males have triangular ones.

There is something rounder about women compared to men. Maybe that’s why the Chinese moon deity Chang’e is a goddess. In the story of Chang’e, she trades off the life she shares with her husband on Earth to ascend to the Moon for her own divinity and immortality. She then lives there alone in the Vast Cold Palace with the Jade Rabbit as her companion. Does she ever miss her husband and her non-solitary life on Earth and regret her decision? Mother may have been Chang’e in her past life—which explains why she has to ensure she never lives in solitude in this life.

We only have this life now. You can only have it either way, never both, I suppose.

My breasts had been starting to develop at nine years old. A boy in my class had crashed onto them with his chest while he was running around in the class. It probably hadn’t registered in his mind or body that anything had happened, as he had kept on running and playing without stopping. I had been stunned that my breasts were such sensitive receptors of pain that I’d been unable to move or make a sound for a minute or two.

As Mother heard what happened when I came home, she peered her eyes in the mirror on her vanity table at me and said I must wear bras from now on.

I put them on—the kind that mature women wear with wires in them. Is this how women felt every day? I wondered. I covered myself with baggy clothes that Mother gave me so as not to expose my wired breasts to any attention or ridicule. I knew that I had become different from the other girls who had not reached their bodies’ puberty. I became a woman.

As Mother took me on the journey of womanhood, my body also became rounder. I brought secret snacks with the money I got from part-time jobs, and I ate the snacks before coming home so Mother wouldn’t see me.

I became the fat girl in class, and it did not bother me much until Josiah showed up when we were both in university. I had met him at an ice-cream shop where I worked as a part-timer. I felt intoxicated when he spoke to me. He said he loved my round face and curly hair, and he spoke to difficult customers on my behalf.

Mother saw us once when he walked me home and told me not to see him again, as she had arranged me on a blind date with her friend’s son who was also from Shanghai.

“Why do you have to hate everything I like?” I asked.

“My little girl, you don’t know anything about men yet. I will screen them for you,” Mother said in a soft tone.

“What about yourself? You got married without asking me.”

“There is only one way to be a good woman in our culture. To go through the pain of being a good daughter and become a mother yourself. Then you get to have the say. You will have it someday too, like me. It is only a matter of time.”

“So you can do anything to me because you’re a mother now? Is that what makes you happy?”

“No, that is not what I meant,” Mother said matter-of-factly. “See—I have been trying to teach you this since you were young. There is only one path to how women are made—we learn to be a good daughter, a good mother, a good wife, a good daughter-in-law, a good friend, a good employee, a good lady. This is how you earn your dignity.”

“What if I don’t care about the dignity?” I asked.

“Dignity is the price of your freedom in this society. That is why we say—a daughter-in-law must go through many trials to level up to become a mother-in-law. Without that dignity, we are like a woman without a piece of clothing to wear. Now you tell me, how will you live like that?”

Perhaps Mother was right—I can learn this game from the flower crabs.

Like the flower crabs, if they were born to be eaten on this earth, they can submit to fate while still dreaming of becoming a goddess, swimming fast at the bottom of the sea.

I left Josiah and quit the ice-cream shop job.

Mother went on a trip back to Shanghai last week. Every day while she was gone, I had been buying four flower crabs daily with my savings at the vendor’s stall.

“I know they are good, but don’t eat so many,” the vendor said, standing
on the wet floor in his black rain boots. “And don’t you think I want to do business? But these crabs have high levels of toxins in them. You can’t eat that much.”

It was the third day I had been going back for more crabs.

I waited for him to finish his short speech, and I assured him that I wouldn’t eat all of them myself, so he sold them to me.

It was raining. The crabs were in the plastic bag in my hand.

I opened them, washed their legs with a toothbrush in the kitchen sink, and put two of them into the steamer.

I’d seen many flower crabs on streets—women in the latest Zara dresses and neon nails, with their flashy boyfriends. Wired bras, reshaped noses, balanced heels—they had been through molting to flourish like a goddess.

I was yet to become them, but I have been on my way—

I asked for the crabs’ forgiveness and ate them.