As a 10-year-old I thought pet lobsters sounded “fun.” I was wrong.
Jenny Chang
The skeletal remains of a four-inch lobster have lingered somewhere in my parents' home for nearly 20 years.
It started with the 1993 FAO Schwarz holiday catalog. I was 10, and I flipped through it at the kitchen table of our railroad-style apartment, emotionless, like a creepy zombie child. As a kid in the '80s and '90s, few things were quite so thrilling as the moment you opened the mailbox to find this catalog, filled with life-size stuffed snow leopards and Mercedes-Benz kids cars with prices too high to list. Well aware of my parents' inability to afford most of the items in the catalog, I glossed over most of the toys — until! I laid eyes on the holy grail of Christmas presents: a live lobster kit.
Becoming the eager guardian to a gaggle of nontraditional pets was in the cards for me from an early age. As a child I lived near a live poultry market in Brooklyn, which my mom and I walked to often. Four-year-old me assumed any homogeneous collection of live animals in a small, dimly lit space was a zoo, and my delighted mom confirmed it. Maybe she didn't want to explain the slaughter process to me, but more likely, she simply realized that, for a lower-middle-class family, producing a child who believed a group of chickens in small wire cages constituted a zoo was like hitting the parenting jackpot: free entertainment only a 10-minute walk away.
In those visits — traipsing through the narrow, sawdust-sprinkled aisles, greeting and waving at dozens of doomed fowl — my pseudo-hippie mother instilled in me a sense that all living creatures deserved compassion. This included the stray cats for which she and my dad built winter shelters in our backyard, and it included a holiday collection of mail-order micro-lobsters.
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Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd ever find something so wondrous and so affordable in that catalog: For just $50, nine blue Australian lobsters would arrive along with a lobster "condo." And man, they could not arrive soon enough. Sea life was fascinating to me; I would even apply to a marine biology–specialized high school three years later. I circled the item number in a red Sharpie and handed it to my parents with a convincing plea. "This looks interesting," my mom said. I figured it was in the bag.
And so Christmas Eve arrived, along with my nine new crustacean friends — no more than three-quarters of an inch long, and almost completely transparent — each in its own little plastic baggie filled with water. How anyone could legally get away with marketing these water-cockroaches as "blue" Australian lobsters was an afterthought; I was already excitedly assigning them names, watching them balance on their teeny little tails and lift their micro-claws into the air to catch brine pellets, to care too much about the fine print. We set up their living quarters, a four-tier tank with a base and nine cubicles, each roughly 2 square inches, and I spent hours watching these sea aliens investigate their surroundings and disassemble their food with tiny little pincers.
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