To Kill A Golden Fish

Today I’m in Vietnam at a roadside café. While waiting for my coffee, I look out over the rice paddies and spot a taut, mud-brown body that is the same deep brown as the mud it rests in. I point out the snake to my husband. We stare at the snake and watch together. The snake is so still, for so long, we wonder—is it dead? Stalking prey? My husband hypothesizes: that it’s coiled rope or a hose dropped haphazardly that we mistook for a snake. But I make out the slight taper of a snout. I marvel at the snake’s stillness, and hope it isn’t dead. The sun above us is hot, and the water reflects a bright sheen of light.
Today is also the third anniversary of my brother’s death.
# # #
What I remember most about China opening its borders in 2022 was how quickly the government dropped the rules regimenting our lives. For about three years, without a green QR code you couldn’t use public transport, go to restaurants, or see a doctor. Streets were lined with pop-up stalls where hundreds were tested daily by battle-weary nurses sweating in full PPE.
Overnight, it was all swept away, as if it had never happened.
# # #
I remember a boss who told me about cleaning out his dead brother’s apartment. He told me how depressed he was when everything his brother owned fit into one heavy-duty garbage bag. And with his brother’s belongings gone, it was harder to remember that he’d been alive—all evidence of him was simply wiped away. I vowed to inconvenience whoever survives me (an obituary word choice that has always struck me) with an excess of beautiful things.
When I found a copy of Chinese fairy tales filled with exquisite ink illustrations, I had to have it. Another beautiful thing in my life, another beautiful thing to impose on others. I didn’t buy it immediately, but kept it in my Taobao cart for months, trying to balance the urge to collect with some modicum of restraint. Only after I enrolled in a course on mythic memoirs did I justify the purchase. The book was lovelier in hand, and fit right in with my inconvenient, beautiful things.
One of the stories, The Golden Slippers, was clearly a version of Cinderella. The beautiful orphaned daughter, Yeh Shen, lives under the thumb of her wicked stepmother and stepsister, who work her to the bone. One day, she rests by a stream, and when the sun glints on the water she sees below the surface a golden fish, who is as beautiful and hungry as she. Yeh Shen gives the fish bread. She sees him every day and shares what little she has with him. He is her only friend in a lonely and cruel world.
I was at my desk, on a bright winter afternoon, and the sun’s glare hit my eyes. A missed call from my mom popped up, which, unfairly, annoyed me. (Mother’s, unfairly, get the brunt.) We’d just talked the day before; another call so soon was not the norm. A message: “Check your email now.” At the top of my inbox was an email from my dad that just said: “Coleman.”
It was hard to read with the sun glinting in my eyes. Which is also why it was hard to process what he was telling me, that my brother was dead.
# # #
My brother and I were almost identical at birth, a quirk of genetics made us the same length and the same weight. Our lips were the same, like cupid’s bows upturned. We both had blue eyes, one light as ice and the other dark like a pool. Now, I can’t remember whose eyes were darker. We were both jaundiced.
My case was mild and I was put in the window a few hours every day to soak up sun. Coleman’s was more severe and he came home in a light box, with thick dark rubber goggles protecting his eyes from the powerful lights zapping him to health. I remember staring down at him, my small toddler hands pressed against the glass case, marveling at his miniature being.
# # #
My twenties were spent working in TV. My life was either long days in a writer’s room or long days on set, punctuated by long drives to and from my apartment for minimal sleep. The pattern was interrupted only by the Chanukah-Christmas-New Year’s holiday that shut down the town. One year, my time off lined up with my brother’s move home. The friend who had agreed to join him dropped out at the last minute. My parents enlisted me: Fly out and help your brother.
I was a bit nervous. While we’d mostly gotten along, his temper could be apoplectic and easily triggered. He was a tough read, one moment joking happily, but one word off, a slightly wrong tone of voice, and the room froze over with his rage. Childhood games were ended by cards hurled across the room, board games launched into a wall. But that was in the past.
Trepidations aside, there wasn’t an easy way to say no to my parents, not without sounding like an asshole. Besides, there was the intrigue of a cross country road trip, which I’d never done but had always seemed interesting. I was happy to trade dark bullpens and drafty stages for wide-open country, so long as my brother and I didn’t end up in a blowout fight in the middle of nowhere.
When I was in college, Coleman was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a name finally given to the sharp edge that tormented him. That led to a slew of medication combinations. A perfect medication fit does not exist for bipolar disorder—the only choice is to play with brain chemistry. Some of the side effects were extreme, like stopping him from sleeping. There’s a reason sleep deprivation is classified as torture. It didn’t help that despite his slim stature and young age he also had sleep apnea, dangerously compounding his symptoms and destabilizing his mood.
I was living in China when he started electromagnetic stimulation (TMS). He said it was helpful, something that finally gave him relief, the only thing that had made a noticeable difference – until the pandemic cut off his access to treatment.
That was later though. In the winter of 2015, having no idea what to expect and hoping for the best, I took a plane to Boston.
# # #
Memory is fickle, and there is a cruelty and a blessing there. I don’t remember when or where my brother picked me up. It’s likely that it was at our aunt and uncle’s house in Boston. I had stayed the night, after all. Though maybe we all met up at a restaurant. There are small shards of memories, but nothing complete.
What did we say? What did they say? I’ve toiled over that field, but the memories are gone. The casualty of a moment that was categorized as “the norm” and not recorded. It’s only in looking back, too late, that the moment has any significance.
Here is what I can guess, from pictures and general memories: when he picked me up, I was struck again by how similar yet dissimilar we were. His hair, which had been blonder than mine, was now darker and curlier. My hair had darkened too, but nowhere near as dark as his. He towered over me, but that wasn’t new. If we were at a restaurant there were quick hugs, some small talk, and then we got in the car, he was ready to get the show on the road.
The LA Kings were playing in Boston that night. It felt like kismet, our city playing in this city. I tried to convince him to go, but he had a schedule to keep. Turns out, if we’d spent the night, we would’ve been stuck for days. Boston got a historic dumping of snow, which is saying something for a place accustomed to winter’s battering.
We quickly fell into a comfortable groove on the road, swapping driving duties with navigation and music control. I agreed not to play songs on repeat, a habit I know drives some people crazy. The trappings of childhood fell away and we were standing on our fledgling adult feet, which added an ease to our relationship.
Our first night, we got to Philadelphia and our room had one bed. Coleman’s face flushed red, deeply embarrassed, that now as adults our easy air and familiarity read less as siblings. We hurried to the front desk and explained. I was used to people romantically attaching me with any man I happened to be near, but it surprised me when it was with my brother, who so clearly looked like me. We learned when checking in to say, “Two beds, thanks.”
# # #
A story about death demands a death. The ways to go are endless and random. You can go bodysurfing and die crushed under a wave; a highly competent skier can slam into a tree that is willing to demonstrate the devastating effects of a stationary object on one in motion; you can be hit by a car while crossing the street or a drunk driver can slam head-on into your car; a stranger can decide to open fire on the grocery store or Fourth of July parade or concert; an incorrect prescription can lead to a fatal overdose, just as drug use of the recreational or self-medicinal variety can lead to a fatal overdose; a brain aneurysm rupture can kill you in 24 hours; you can be separated from you snorkeling group and drown; sometimes inclement weather causes a car to skid and crash into a cement divide; small planes are easily toppled from the sky, their human contents rarely surviving the experience; cancer can fell even the youngest; you can be trundling along a trail you know well, when one misstep sends you tumbling; you could be leaving a doctor’s appointment when your heart gives out; you can be in a hot air balloon, enjoying the view, when a malfunction plunges everyone in the wicker basket to their death. The way of going is immaterial—what matters is that they are gone.
In all this death, the only death I am willing to offer is the death of the fish.
Yeh Shen has carved out a sliver of happiness, having this golden fish as her friend. Her stepsister notices her absences and spies on her. Thinking it hilarious that Yeh Shen talks to a fish, she tells her mother the story. Driven by malice and fairy-tale logic, the stepmother decides she wants this fish. Yeh Shen must be denied all pleasure. The stepmother sends Yeh Shen off, disguises herself as her stepdaughter, and visits the stream. Believing that his friend has arrived, the fish swims to the bank, where the stepmother grips its writhing body in sinewy fingers. The fish fights back, stirring up mud in the struggle, but it’s no match for the determined stepmother.
She takes out a knife.
I imagine that it glints in the sunlight, just as the fish’s golden scales glinted in the struggle. The stepmother reaches under the fish’s belly and guts it. I imagine the fish’s red blood mingling with the mud-clouded stream, the sun glaring down in the stepmother’s eyes as she wipes the blade clean before putting it away. She lifts the fish, its golden scales glimmering in the sun, blood flowing. Perhaps it jerks as the final volt of electricity courses from brain to muscles.
At home, the stepmother lays the fish on the table and tells Yeh Shen to prepare dinner. I imagine a smile on the stepmother’s lips. She has triumphed, she has dominated the stunning girl who eclipses her own daughter’s beauty. I imagine Yeh Shen seeing the fish and for a moment not understanding, not believing, though knowing that what she sees is true. Her friend is dead. I run with her out of the house to the stream where she collapses in tears. Her world has changed forever, for the worse.
# # #

Nothing could have prepared me for the physicality of grief in the wake of Coleman’s death. I felt like I was hit by a speeding semi and my body was thrown up, up, up—then at the arc’s zenith, I was slammed into a stone wall. I felt crushed under the momentous weight of a dying star collapsing in on itself.
When the shock lifted, I stumbled into my now-husband’s office and wailed. I’d never cried like that. I didn’t know it was possible. I wept, and my now-husband held me, knowing there was nothing else to do. Minutes and then hours fell away, how did I get on the couch, when did I move to bed, did brushing teeth, eating food really matter now, and when my eyes couldn’t produce tears, soundless sobs wracked my body.
# # #
My parents were concerned. I was on the other side of the world, and they wanted me to see a therapist. No, that’s not entirely true. They wanted me home—a therapist was the compromise.
My therapist sent me a nice official document to skip work Thursday mornings in the narrow window when our time zones aligned. She suggested I connect to some level of spirituality to reconcile with Coleman’s death. A way of facing the nagging, unanswerable why. I couldn’t help but find this stupid. There was no why, there just was. Why did the stepmother have such a visceral hatred for Yeh Shen? Even accepting this casual hatred, why did she have to kill the fish? There was no reason, beyond stepmotherly animus. Maybe even she didn’t have an answer.
# # #
On the road trip, Coleman wanted to smoke less.
Nicotine affected us so differently. I was younger than him when I started smoking, but I could always put it down. I could go for years without thinking of a cigarette, then, at a party, dip into the habit aggressively and the next day feel no tug for more.
Not so for Coleman. With incredible speed, he’d gone from an occasional smoker to an over-a-pack-a-day smoker. He hated it. He couldn’t stop. He hoped that being on the drive would whittle down his use. I worried that a wildly high goal, like no smoking for a week, that nobody smoking that much could achieve, would make him feel like a failure, feel that nicotine ruled him.
I proposed a plan: when he wanted to smoke, we set a timer for 15 minutes. If he still wanted a cigarette after, he could have one. It sounded like a long shot, but there was a steely determination in his voice. This mattered.
He still smoked but, more often than not, after fifteen minutes, he passed.
# # #
As my time in China, originally planned to be no more than two years, stretched on longer and longer, Coleman and I talked less and less. Sure, when I sent a message, he’d always respond, and quickly, too. We sometimes had calls, but always at my initiation. It annoyed me a bit, but I also knew it wasn’t in his nature, and there was enough happening in my life—a serious relationship, starting a master’s program, focusing on writing—that I didn’t notice the silence maybe as much as I should have.
# # #
When Yeh Shen returns home, her stepmother and stepsister have gorged themselves on the flesh of the fish. She carefully collects and cleans the fish’s bones. She keeps them in a small pot, that she weeps over and speaks to.
Similarly, my conversations with my brother continue. He lives vividly in my head, and sometimes I am confused if these chats happened or not, and it surprises me with a jolt to remember again that he is dead.
When I scaled back therapy to every other week, I nearly told my boss that they would have me again every other Thursday morning. It was the knee-jerk “good-girl” habit, one that hadn’t served me well. Then I saw Coleman sitting upright on my couch, long legs tucked under him. He arched his brow high. “Fuck ’em,” his voice rang in my head clear as a bell on a still winter morning.
I kept Thursday mornings for myself.
# # #
I couldn’t attend Coleman’s memorial because China’s borders were closed, meaning the flight that could return me to my job, my apartment, and my cats would cost over ten grand, and that was assuming I successfully jumped through the equivalent of bureaucratic hoops on fire and was allowed to board, but the memorial was being planned and my parents asked me to send any pictures I had of Coleman. So I scoured my phone, laptops, and hard drives, where I unearthed metric tons of memories, from our road trip, from a family trip to Maui when we went to a farmers’ market and found avocados bigger than our hands, where Coleman took a picture of my hand stretched over one, and my chipped gold nail polish glinted in the sun, and gone on a coffee plantation tour where, bored, we slipped away and wandered to the beach, these pictures fossilized normal moments that have gained in importance now that they are it, the sum total of our siblinghood, moments that had just been ours, and then suddenly had just been mine, and now were about to be shared, and for a moment I resented that they had to be shared. But keeping them to myself was not the thing to be done.
# # #
The summer after China opened their borders, I went home to get married. In the week leading up to the party, family poured into town, helped set up, and took advantage of the pool in the rising heat.
I’d been away for four years, and there were some people I hadn’t seen for even longer. My cousin’s two children were the most surprising to see again. When I last saw her youngest, he was a baby tumbling on the ground and now he was a boy—it was as if he’d appeared fully formed like Dionysus from Zeus’ leg. He was mostly interested in swimming and playing with his brother, and his mood quickly shifted between taciturn and bubbly. It took a few days before I recognized the nagging sense of familiarity, that a generation apart he was shockingly like Coleman.
They had the same slender, reed-like build. Their hair was the same ripe-wheat gold. Shared inheritances are strange to behold and offer a front row seat to the randomized whac-a-mole of genetics. Being with him felt like reaching back in time and seeing Coleman when he was that age. Even their exasperated sigh when you hadn’t caught up with their brilliant idea was the same. It unnerved and fascinated me.
I mentioned this to my husband, who shared that my mom had said the same thing.
# # #
Coleman had set strict deadlines for our road trip. There wasn’t time to dip south and see New Orleans, like I wanted. We zipped through small towns and open country, farmland, Ozarks; strip clubs in hangars all whizzed by; we stopped only for food, gas, and the bathroom. We stayed a night in Nashville. I was surprised that Nashville had so many churches and admired the delicate spires stretching up to the dusk purple sky. They were daintier and more elegant than the churches in LA that lean towards blocky, clunky, gaudy.
When Coleman was six and I was maybe eight, we had a family trip to France because our dad’s music was being performed. When our dad was rehearsing, our mom took us to Notre-Dame. I remember being in awe over the building, with intricate stonework that reached above us like a tree canopy whose delicate branches magically supported a massive weight overhead. Even if I couldn’t believe in God, I would happily go to church if it was in a building like that, under the stoic gaze of gargoyles, in the kaleidoscope light of ancient stained glass, knowing that everything had been created by long gone humans. Afterwards, Coleman and I crumbled under the weight of jetlag and homesickness that was only appeased when our mom took us to Pizza Hut, where we wolfed down individual pepperoni pizzas, normally forbidden in our otherwise vegetarian household.
In Nashville, we hoped to see a concert, but, frustratingly, no one was playing that night. We decided to come back, at some vague point in the future.
Most of our time spent driving further west, on a road that represents a colossal feat of engineering connecting two coasts of a massive continent, was spent talking. We talked about everything and nothing—the specifics have slipped from my memory. We also wanted another road trip to see parts of the country we’d missed. We assumed that we had a long road together.
# # #
Back in Vietnam, before leaving the café, I check the muddy rice paddy. The snake has disappeared.
I’m elated that I was right. I feel certain that it snapped up some prey and slithered into a dark recess, away from the glaring sun. Anyone looking now would have no inkling that there’d been a predator in the paddy—all traces had disappeared, as if it had never been there.
# # #
There is a lack of satisfying ending in myths. They come to an abrupt stop, like a car skidding on a highway. Yeh Shen marries the Emperor after he insists that she try the impossibly tiny golden shoe that the fish’s bones magicked into existence. Her clothes transform into a magnificent gown and cloak, all provided by the dead fish. The fish lives on, worn on Yeh Shen’s body.
There is no revenge for tragedy, there is simply going on.
# # #
The last time I saw Coleman was the day I moved to China in 2019. I was shoving things in my bag, shocked that I was moving to the other side of the world. Coleman laughed as I made down to the wire decisions in wide-eyed panic. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Just grab what you forget next summer.”
Our neighbor arrived to take me to the airport, we were in crunch time. I think we hugged? Probably. I like hugs. I believe they are important with people you love. I’m sure I said I love you. I do things like that.