When I ask him to recommend a good Chinese restaurant, my chiropractor rattles off a few names then starts to reminisce about his late mother’s cooking back in Shanghai, how flying insects used to circle their overhead lamp then land into a pan of water where they’d be cooked into stew, how she’d remove intestines from a fish then scramble them with eggs. Years later he still holds his nose. How the brothers would come in proudly waving a snake, a cat, or dog—how he even hated the thought of eating organ meats from a pig or cow. This chiropractor with a humongous collection of wooden mallards who never touches duck.

A fly lands
on the lama’s
shaved head

Bio: Alexis Rotella