Don't Flip the Fish

A whole steamed fish arrives, and the top side is eaten down to the spine. Then, at many Chinese tables, comes a small pause: the fish is not turned over.

Instead, you lift out the backbone and eat the underside from below. The fish is never flipped.

The rule looks like fussiness. The story behind it is a boat.

In the old fishing villages of southern China, a family lived or starved by the vessel that went out at dawn. To turn a cooked fish over was to capsize that boat in miniature -- a bad omen aimed at the next trip, and the men aboard it. So the fish on the plate became a hull. You ate the top, drew out the bones, and left the boat upright.

It is a small, physical prayer for the people at sea.

But travel inland, and the same motion means the opposite.

In parts of northern China, away from the boats, flipping the fish is welcome: it turns the old luck over and starts fresh, the way we speak of turning a new leaf.

A table manner, it turns out, is rarely universal. It means what a place, shaped by what it fears, needs it to mean.

The coast feared the sea, and kept the boat upright. The inland kitchen feared no boats, and turned the fish for luck.

Same fish. Same flip. Two places deciding what it meant.