Yueyue Guo was a winner of the Vegetarian Journal’s 2010 youth essay contest.
It was the smell that got to me first. It was my first trip to a Chinatown at age eight, and I was standing right in front of the seafood counter, waiting for my mother to buy the fish that she would turn into a delicious dinner dish later that night. The stench that emanated from the whole seafood area was a combination of the wet, muddy tile floors, seawater, and — I realized later — blood and guts.