Jemimah Wei
1. THE DISPATCHTen Ways to Kill a Goldfish
1.
A sure-fire way to assassinate a goldfish without suspicion is to hand it to a child.
2.
For don’t you remember the forbidden games of your childhood? Have you tried your best to forget those long afternoon races, squatting by the longkangs with your brother, back when he was still your best friend, counting down to go? Don’t tell me you’ve successfully sealed away the fierce sting of pride you felt, when you emerged, dripping with drain water, wriggling prize in hand? No? Not ever? When was the last time you loved like a child, that crimson love blotting out all else, holding on and squeezing tight—
3.
Oops. It’s dead.
4.
Pin your hopes on a different goldfish. Put it next to an insomniac. Tell him: This is how we do it back home. (It isn’t, but you’re lonely, and your lie costs only a dollar.) You’ll be thirteen by this point; your brother has just surprised you by outgrowing your company over the course of the twenty-seven-hour flight to America. In fact, your entire family seems to have aged into brittleness overnight, leaving you floundering, still trying to trade friendship for a fish. (Don’t be naïve.) But no matter. Each new school is just a different pond. (Repeat after me: A better one!) The insomniac accepts the gift and thanks you for going above and beyond. Let your hope flare. Ask the insomniac every time you see him in the hallways: How’s the Zzs? It’s getting better, isn’t it? Howwwwwww much did you sleep last night? Persist, even when your brother takes you aside at home (a rare occurrence!) and tells you you’re getting a reputation and to please just stop being weird. Don’t be fazed by your brother’s betrayal. Plough away at the friendship. Be surprised when the insomniac tells you that the goldfish met with a tragic end, when his hand swept into the bowl by his nightstand, knocking it (accidentally!) off, and onto the floor, where your goldfish flopped helplessly, still trying to complete one last round, still trying to lull the insomniac to sleep. When he begins to avoid you, assure him that accidents happen, that you understand. But something about him stays chilly. Don’t offer to get him another goldfish.
5.
Hold up hold up. Let’s backtrack a bit. Did you know that a goldfish’s problem isn’t its memory, but its lack of restraint? Back in Singapore, (the year before your family relocates across continents, chasing a tail of some amorphous promise) you volunteer at a nursing home after school. You have a soft spot for this one guy with Alzheimer’s, an old man who is looping. Every day, when you say hello, he exclaims: Ooh! Palmolive! It’s the advertising jingle of the eighties, for that shampoo everyone was using, including the woman who never showed at the altar, triggering a year of publicly performed depression and (yes!) tears in school, where the man, before he was old, taught. You hear this story from the other nurses, and take bets with them too, when his niece comes to visit one day, carrying a goldfish bowl and instructions for twice-daily feeding. You are only twelve, and there is nothing more exquisite than the promise of being folded into the laughter and gossip of the older nurses who are underpaid and bored. You understand that this is their turf, and you thirst for their acceptance, despite all parties knowing that long after you leave, they will stay. After the goldfish expands and nearly explodes, you give the nurse with the blonde extensions five dollars. You don’t ask the question in your mind: which is, if she’d known the old man would smother the goldfish in fish flakes, why—
6.
Here’s a fun fact. The Chinese believe the eyeballs of fish to be delicacies, and to be offered one when there are only two! in the whole fish! is considered a great honor. Nobody under sixty gets offered the fish eyeball, ever ever ever, unless he is the favorite grandson, in which case, it happens all the time. Either the favoritism will manifest blatantly, or it’ll be hidden under a thin veneer of concern: Eat the eyeball and you’ll do well in your exams (Mother); Where else will you get such rich unsaturated fatty acids, DHA, EPA, Vitamin A, don’t be wasteful, don’t be daft (Father); and pop! goes the eyeball (Brother, so satisfied.). And you, why do you need the umami flavor dancing across your tongue, why do you lust after a secret that you will later have to hide in the roof of your mouth and brush and floss and gargle out, in hopes of a kiss behind the garage? You are already in America, and unlike your family, who you understand are older and stuck in their ways, now know to update your desires. You know if anyone in school hears about you holding the eyeball under your tongue, savoring the gooey layer, the crisp wafer of the center, you will never be spoken to again. Still, you want. And you do not interrogate this want. Many years later, after you’ve moved cities again and again, you will finally admit to it, but in a calculated manner, in a cool, disaffected tone. God, you will say, I know it sounds so crazy, but it was a big deal, okay? And when your new friends, all shiny and glamorous and coiffed, burst into laughter, join them. Don’t look back.
7.
The week you turn thirty, Wong Kar Wai has a moment. The IFC near your office screens his films all month, and even though you’ve seen them all you go again, and again, and again, with your co-workers. You dispense fun facts about Hong Kong even though you’ve only been there once, when you were six. You like the way they accept your statements as holding absolute authority, none of them pointing out that Singapore and Hong Kong are not the same. After a screening of Chungking Express, one of them comments, longingly, on the gorgeous, pastel-lit fish tanks that populate the film, which are so endemic to Chinese households back in Asia, but rare in America. And the memory that you’ve worked so hard to suppress rears its head again: of that old man, nearly eighteen years ago now, weeping after his goldfish died from suffocating in its own want. He cried and cried, then forgot. A week later, he was back to squealing Ooh! Palmolive! whenever you walked in, and it felt like you were the only one left with the memory of that fish, swimming round and round, allowed to drown in its own appetite while the rest of you watched.
8.
When your brother calls, splintering years of cordial distance by tugging on the thread of family obligation, don’t give in to your resentment. He’s coming to town, trying for the fourth, fifth time, to start over. Let him stay on your couch, offer to buy him dinner. Resist the urge to bite back when he insists that you had it easy, that the odds are unnaturally stacked against Chinese men. Don’t say a word when he calls you a banana. Remind yourself that he’s drunk, already and again. Smile at him, and when the food comes, a steaming casserole of sea-bass doused in ginger and soy, offer him its eyeballs, both of them.
9.
After the dissolution of your engagement (at least it wasn’t a marriage yet, thank god!), you learn not to invite your parents over anymore. Not when you have that season of breakdowns, not when you leave your first career for grad school, not even when you get your PhD – not until you find yourself solidly encased in the position of adjunct professor in a hallowed institution, something even they can’t pick apart. You fret all week in the lead up to their arrival. Yet. When you first see them stepping unsteadily out of the car, flinching at the sounds of the big city, their gazes latching and clinging on to you, you wonder how it was that you’d gotten everything wrong, again.
10.
Goldfish become your quirk, your thing. You keep one, a Shubunkin fantail, in a globe bowl on your desk, presiding over student conferences. Your office is the coziest in the department, filled with paraphernalia, gifts announcing a haphazard blend of Asian cultures: Chinese folding fans, Japanese origami paper, watercolor scenes screened on lengths of Thai silk. At the university, you’ve been awarded Educator of the Year thrice, appointed head of the diversity initiative, and been bestowed the honor of representing the department at orientation, year after year. You’ve accepted each gift and honor graciously, and looking at your Shubunkin, you understand that all of this was your choice. Still, when your co-workers present you with a Lionhead to celebrate your tenth year, you stiffen. You have no idea how to get rid of it without being rude, but you decide a smart thing to do would be to extract idea from circumstance, and bring the goldfish to class. Package and offer it up as a prompt to a room of fresh-faced writing majors: tell me how a goldfish dies, and let it cook for twenty minutes. Unpeel their stories after, and blow. After the steam clears, you should have at least two-and-a-half good, hardly suspect ideas, which you can then bring home, select a favorite, and apply.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYLarge pot of instant black coffee.
A massive rainbow wall of post-its, comprising deadlines, notes to self, novel notes, revision notes, and a strip of post-its for each month I have left for my fellowship term in the Bay Area, so I have a visual representation of the time I’m running down.
Four or five craft books I keep nearby for the company of writers thinking about writing.
A custom Disney Munchkins playing card encased in glass, illustrated by my husband. It features a cartoon version of me, back when I was still blonde, hugging a book and singing out of a tower. It was my Christmas gift from two years back.
A painfully revised outline of the novel I’m presently editing.
Blue light glasses that I keep forgetting to wear.
Large, noise-cancelling headphones, which are linked either to my work-from-home playlist, or a looping YouTube video of this girl typing on her mechanical keyboard for an hour. I’ve learnt recently that this practice is called mirroring.
Small table clock. I previously hung one above my desk but it crashed down in the middle of the night and I nearly had a heart attack.
An electronic heated blanket I bought for my husband that I’ve since appropriated. Everyone told me it’d be always sunny in California but it’s actually bloody cold.
And in a shelf below my desk I have a wine rack, which I gaze at longingly whenever things get hard on the page, and that I use to bait myself into finishing just this chapter, paragraph, whatever.
3. BIOGRAPHYJemimah Wei is a Singaporean writer based in the Bay Area, where she is a 2022-4 Stegner Fellow. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Columbia University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Singapore’s National Arts Council, Writers in Paradise, and the Francine Ringold Award for New Writers, she has been named one of Narrative’s “30 below 30” writers and recognized by the Best of the Net Anthologies. Her fiction has won the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and appears in Guernica, Narrative, and Nimrod, amongst others. A host for various broadcast and digital channels, she has written and produced short films and travel guides for Laneige, Airbnb, and Nikon. She is at work on a novel and two short story collections. Say hi at @jemmawei on socials or jemmawei.com.
Ten Ways to Kill a Goldfish is an extended version of the story Assassination, originally published in Volume 01: The Bureaus of The Bureau Dispatch.