"I don't know... looks like miniature chickens..."
Hilina and I speculated in a whisper about the little headless bodies that Lian was chopping in half with a cleaver at the kitchen counter. She heard the word "chicken," which she knows, and she looked up at us. "Oh no, no chicken," she said. "Is bahd."
"Did she just say it was bat?!" Hilina gasped.
"No, no," I quickly said. "Surely she didn't say bat. I'm sure she said bird."
And our consciences preferred that possibility, so we accepted it.
A little while later, I was reading in my room and Lian - in classic Chin-Zo fashion - came in and put a dish in front of me with two fried halves of an alleged bird, and said, "You eat," and walked away.
"Oh thank you, but I just ate-" Nevermind, she's already gone. Well, why not, right? It just looked like skinny fried chicken wings. I picked the little bit of meat off one half, and it tasted like the dark meat of a turkey. So, not bad. A little gravy might have improved it. At that point curiosity overcame me, so I just had to ask...
"Lian, this is so good! What bird is it?"
"Ah no, no bird," she said. "Different from chicken... I don' know."
"What... color is it?"
"Black."
"And it flies?" (flapping gesture used here)
"Yes, fly at night."
Oh my goodness... My mom called me at that moment and asked what I was doing. "I think I'm eating a bat," I said as I inspected my fried wings again, this time realizing there were hooks at the end of each leg. This definitely tops my list of "Weird Things I Have Eaten."
I asked Hilina if she wanted to try it, and she adamently refused as she backpetaled out the door. She said if it was a bird, then maybe, but there was no way she would eat a bat. I figured that would probably have been true for me too, and that's why I have been cultivating my own "eat first and asked later" policy. It's amazing how one phoneme in one word can affect someone's appetite. I managed to find the grace to eat the second half of the bat by myself. Minus the hooks.
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