By Trin Encarnacion

Originally published in West Coast Review #2

It’s 1 a.m. and I’m on a nude beach fully-clothed with a can of sardines stuffed into my windbreaker pocket. My thumb fiddles with the pull tab, teasing its silver with the tip of my finger as moonlit swash and seafoam creep up to my Converse planted in the sand.

My phone chimes. A TikTok notification—some influencer I follow is live streaming. I click onto the app, my screen glowing as I scroll. Lately, my For You Page feeds me clips of tinned fish connoisseurs cracking open eclectic cans of expensive razor clams in brine, smoked salmon with chili crisps, mussels in basil pesto, codfish pâté. Close-up shots show silver tines impaling flesh chunks doused in sauce, transporting bites to boards decorated with crackers, cornichons, brie, pickled onions. Or into pans to toss with pasta. Or straight into their ring-light-illuminated mouth before their eyes roll back on cue and say links to everything in the video description—like and follow for more! Mixed reviews flood the comment section—these tins either gentrify pauper’s food or bring awareness to new cuisine.

I turn my phone off. It’s never been a novelty for me, eating meat from cans. Corned beef. Spam. Once, my mom relayed a memory she had of hiding out in a typhoon shelter in Guam where my grandma sliced open her palm opening a can of Vienna sausages. She refuses to eat them now, claiming that little wieners seasoned with her mother’s blood haunt her in nightmares. Says my palette is refined now, American. Calls her nurse friends mixing Century Tuna with patis-drenched rice, funny immigrants.

Yells shut up, smartass! when I ask and how long since your naturalization?, her ego swimming, already halfway across the Pacific Ocean to archipelagic beginnings. Still, she eyes the cheap cans my grandparents keep stacked in our pantry, the same ones she’d buy from the sari-sari store in her old neighborhood. She enjoyed Ligo and 555 back then, before her dad joined the U.S. Navy and her family bounced around from the Philippines to Guam and Hawai‘i and finally settled in San Diego. Those cans she once loved, her parents now source from Seafood City, bought discounted with coupons cut from a weekly advertisement.

Sardines for $10, who the hell would buy that? Boy these Americans are stupid! I remember my grandfather shouting when I took him to Whole Foods for the first and last time. As he stood before a sea of overpriced anchovies, I wonder if the tidy grocery store aisles faded to the calm tides near Subic Bay in his mind. As a teen, he’d wake up hours before dawn to sail his family’s bangka out into the water. Beside him, his siblings baited long lines with multiple hooks, flipped off commercial fishermen passing by, and kept their eyes peeled for American sailors. Milkfish is what they were after. While some of the catch they kept for themselves, pan-frying the fish until golden brown and fighting over who got to eat the eyes, their goal was to sell. I’d just sit at the local market with my fish—only 20 centavos per tumpok! Less than an American cent!

Long after he passes, when I have my own money to spend, I’m influenced to buy an $11 can right before the supermarket closes. Instead of going home, I drive west, craving the coast.

Now, waves crash before me as I peel back the tin top, oil spilling over the sides and onto my hands or into the sand as I pick out fillets and plop them into my mouth. Sardine flesh squishes between my teeth. As I swallow, I envision the fish not flowing down my throat, but migrating across waters. I imagine them swimming in synchronized schools, one mass of silver scales wanting nothing more than to survive as they journey, ignorant to the adjacent coasts cultivating tomatoes they will one day be sautéed in. Ignorant to blast furnaces in faraway lands smelting iron ore, coal, limestone to make steel containers that will one day entomb them. Ignorant to the de-skinning and de-boning on their horizons—their final resting place providing only enough room for pieces of who they were.