While Alex diligently runs overtime protein immunoblots at the Lehigh department of biology, let us take a brief gander up the family tree to our father, Brian. To an even greater extent than his youngest son, Brian Chen has spent his life off the beaten path, blazing his own trails of habit, philosophy, and humor. Evidence of this has been documented from time to time, and among other things, he's been dubbed the Netflix Zen Master and arguably post-produced Lord of the Rings better than Peter Jackson himself. A story he told me today presently makes him our guest appearance.
Brian Chen attended National Taiwan University as an electrical engineering major. For those unfamiliar with the structure of Taiwanese academia, all prospective college students take entrance exams and each student is placed solely on the basis of his or her scores (an elegant system--albeit one indicative of a very troubling attitude on how students and people are valued). With this system--unlike, say, the American system--an objective comparison of schools based on their academic merit becomes quite simple. Within this scale, National Taiwan University is the very best, and at National Taiwan University--at least for men--the electric engineers (the "EEs" as they're called) are the very best. In the average year as well as my dad's, the top 0.1% of EE test scorers is invited to NTU. I say this both as a proud son and, more importantly, in order to undergird the acute idiocy and irony I'm about to describe.
According to my dad, back in the day at NTU one's area of study usually determined one's social life as well: the EEs hung out with other EEs. If they wanted to hang out with the opposite sex, then they'd go find the English majors, which was apparently the female equivalent to EE--that is, the most prestigious and competitive major upon entrance (it seems these folks were all incredibly elitist, refusing to date or even spend time with perceived lesser areas of study). Commonly on weekends, the EEs would invite the dames of the English department on trips to the beach. According to my dad, the local beaches were usually deserted and quite undeveloped; they were extremely rocky in parts and sparkled with smaller pools of water that collected in recesses between tides. At low tide, these pockets of sea would fill with fish. And on these day-long trips, these NTU scholars would often get very hungry.
Now in his retelling of these halcyon days, he failed to mention any reason why fishing rods were out of the question. But whether fishing rods were in some way unattainable or they just chose to forgo them, he and his friends opted for an alternative: cyanide.
I gather it went down roughly as follows. The EEs would find a good-looking pocket of fish and throw some cyanide in. When the fish died (which apparently happened almost immediately), they would float up to the surface for a few seconds before sinking. In this time, my dad and his friends would need to dive into the pools to snatch their prize before it sank--careful all the while not to ingest even a drop of the poisonous water. Then they would proudly present their catch to the beautiful English majors waiting on the beach before gutting, cleaning, and cooking the fish over an open fire.
When I inquired as to the possible toxicity of the fish, my dad simply replied, "Well, we had a theory. Because the fish died instantly when the cyanide-laced water passed through their gills, we figured if we just cut out their gills we'd be fine..."
Taiwan's best and brightest, folks.
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