by Kat Chow
I tensed and backed away, though I suppose this was not in the realm of abnormal. Nothing was, when it came to my father or his house. I was confused, though, that I could not smell the fish. Perhaps the scent of the basement’s mildew and the cat’s litter box, which my father infrequently cleaned, were too pungent.
Why do you have a fish down here? I yelled. I grabbed the pan and ran upstairs.
It’s from when Stephanie and Steven took me deep sea fishing.
What are you doing with it? I paced the kitchen to steady myself.
My father stood at the counter and mixed flour and water with his hands. He shrugged.
Well, I taxidermied it.
For Father’s Day that year, Steph and her husband gifted their fathers a day of deep-sea fishing along the Connecticut shore. To them, it seemed like an ideal present: useful, hands-on, something their parents wouldn’t do by themselves. It seemed especially suitable for our father, since he was always one for adventure.
But as Steph had told me a few months back, this past Father’s Day, the temperature was well into the nineties. Once the boat sped to sea, it became hotter. This, paired with the rocking of waves, lulled our father into sickness. While everyone else learned to cast lines, he spent much of the afternoon sitting inside the cabin as he clutched a water bottle and tried not to hurl.
Afterward, when they returned to the dock, the boat’s two-person crew took stock of their catch.
My father watched as the crew filleted the striped bass and blue fish, slicing behind the gills and removing the heads. My father’s arms were probably folded, his face sunburned. He later told me that he thought the crew was wasteful, and that they were trying to keep the good parts of the fish for themselves. When they mentioned their taxidermy services—a way to remember this day, they’d said—my father perked up and listened raptly. The captain reeled off more details about the trophy mounting, and how the person they worked with—an artist—specialized in saltwater fish. My father was less interested in memorializing the day, since he’d been sick, but he was intrigued about the process itself. He could teach himself anything, he was certain, and this was no different. It would be a nice thing to have in his home. And so, my father—who had not caught any fish himself that day—asked the boat’s captain for one to bring home.
Leave it whole, he said.
When he was home, he filled his laptop’s browsers with searches like taxidermy fish or stuffed fish do it yourself. He skimmed a few articles, ignoring the instructions and materials list. Then he searched the basement and garage for planks of wood, Elmer’s glue, and any other material that seemed helpful.
I think you should throw that out, I said. I pleated a dumpling.
It looks like it’s rotting, I continued when he did not answer.
No, he said. It’s taxidermy. Some people pay a lot of money to do that to their fish.
I don’t think like that, I said, dipping my finger into the bowl of water and running it along the edge of the dough wrapper. It looks really scary.
He shrugged.
Hey, he said. It’s none of your business. It’s my house.
I considered taking a broom and sliding the fish into the trash. My father would be livid, though that wasn’t what concerned me. I was a coward and I thought then, I don’t ever want to touch that fish. I would be too afraid of what was living in it, or how its insides might seep out.
If my mother was still around—and had my parents stayed together—my father and I wouldn’t have had to look for a dumpling recipe in the first place, and in the basement there probably wouldn’t be a dead fish, its flesh soaked in preserving chemicals but still decomposing.
* * *
This was not the first time I discovered dead fish in this house. A year or two earlier, I opened the oven to bake brownies, and I found a tray of my father’s angelfish, both of them tiny and roasted. They looked up at me, their eyeballs dehydrated and shriveled. Like crackers. He had left them on a baking sheet, days or weeks or months ago, among all the other pans that he stored in the oven.
Daddy, I called out, though he sat at the kitchen table. Please tell me you weren’t going to eat these.
He hoisted himself to his feet and met me by the oven. I waited for him to make a joke. They’re like those cheese Goldfish! I could see him saying in a tone woven with amusement. I had flashbacks to one of his favorite sayings: I’m Cantonese, and Cantonese people eat anything with four legs, except for tables! This, I worried, did not exclude pet fish.
Some months before, my family piled into the minivan and road-tripped from Connecticut to Toronto to visit my father’s extended family. That weekend, one of his relatives—a niece’s husband—led us to their basement, which was filled with tanks arranged neatly on shelves, pumps whirring and water trickling. He explained to my father how he raised and bred angelfish, which he’d in turn sell to pet stores for something like fifty cents each. He changed the water almost daily, fed the fish bloodworms, and kept a close eye on the temperatures and pH. As the fish spawned, he tended to their births, netted them, transferred them to different tanks, and began the process again. My father peppered him with questions while my sisters and I ambled between the aisles and studied each tank. The fish floated like ghosts suspended in air, their long, stringy fins dangling underneath them as they glowed neon in the light. They were so still and peaceful. But on closer examination, I could see their translucent side fins fluttering quickly, all chaos, as they bobbed.
Before we left, my father’s nephew netted half a dozen fish and dropped them into plastic bags with water.
For you to raise them at home, he told my father.
They tucked them into a Styrofoam cooler for safekeeping during our eight-and-a-half hour drive. My father was giddy, already envisioning his empty tanks filled once more. When these fish multiplied, he could turn this into a business like his nephew and sell them to a pet store by his house.
My sisters and I exchanged looks.
Do you really need them? I asked. Can’t you get them back in Connecticut?
Hey, my father said. I can do whatever I want.
At the U.S.-Canada border, when customs asked if my family had anything we wanted to declare, my father spoke quickly: No, nothing. Nothing to declare.
In Connecticut, my father kept the angelfish in a tank beside the kitchen table. It remained half full, and the water became a brackish green with a thin film that clung to the glass. The water was not between the suggested seventy-five and eighty-two degrees Fahrenheit; the pH, I guessed, not anywhere close to what it needed to be. My father had taped coins to the outside of the tank so that he could see if his fish had grown, comparing their little bodies to the size of pennies and quarters. If I looked hard enough, I could see the remaining, lone angelfish in there, barely moving.
I don’t understand why you baked your fish, I said. I tried to make my voice calm.
My father opened the oven and pulled out the tray. He held a crisped fish in his palm, inspecting its desiccated fins and tail before he set both on a shelf by the table. They rested by the other knickknacks he had collected over the years.
They kept dying, he said. I wanted to be able to see the difference as the alive ones grew.
If you dry them, don’t you know that they’d contract? I said, bewildered. Isn’t that a fact of science that they’d get smaller if you baked them?
My father didn’t say anything. He sat back down and started cracking peanuts from their shells, popping them into his mouth by the handful. I joined him, cautiously studying his face. He shrugged, though I think because he didn’t try to argue, he understood that this was startling—and he might have even allowed for it to be described as disturbing. This struck me as, perhaps, a matter of an attachment to the angelfish that he could not admit, of poor logic, and of his need to hold on to objects, long after they’d expired. Later, anytime I returned to his house and wanted to bake, I opened the oven, wary. At some point, I stopped tryi
ng to bake there at all. And eventually, my visits became so infrequent they might as well have ceased entirely.
* * *
Years later, I watch hours of YouTube videos that demonstrate how to taxidermy a fish. I wonder if my father had watched these clips.
One way to taxidermy a fish: First, slice open its body on one of its sides—the one that will not be visible, the one that will most likely attach to a board or some other type of mount. Slide a knife between the flesh and the skin, taking care not to tear it; taxidermying a fish is not a forgiving process. Make incisions by the gill and the tail. And then, gently, peel the skin from the flesh and bones and organs in a movement that’s similar to removing a sticker from wax paper, but only more violent. Scoop out the eyes and also the brain. Inject the fish with embalming fluids, such as glycol ethers or ethanol, then sprinkle borax inside. Using a needle and fishing line, sew together the skin, then stuff it with sawdust; alternatively, wrap the skin around a foam mount. After all this, there’s more work to be done: new glass eyes must be inserted and secured, and all of this must be painted.
My father skipped most of these steps. I do not know what he expected, if he thought that he could alter the dead to make it seem alive, or if he thought the fish that he had created looked anything like it had when it was living. I’m curious if he thought he could stop the decay.
* * *
Mommy: Would you have been unfazed? Here I wish I could talk to you.
So, Daddy, he did this thing with fish, I would tell you.
I read this book about the history of taxidermy, The Breathless Zoo. I wanted to understand Daddy’s draw to taxidermy—and yours, too. In the book, there is a photo of zebras at the Natural History Museum at Tring, in England. I can’t wipe the image from my memory. You would have also found it unnerving. The zebras are positioned with their legs tucked under them as if resting in tall grass. There are eight of them, and a foal stands in the corner as if shy. Their eternal bodies look so peaceful, though in reality, they are displayed in glass cases and arranged on shelves stacked above one another. They are an uncanny family, though the author, Rachel Poliquin, points out that they are different species. Species. That word holds so much weight. “There are many species of sadness,” Poliquin writes, which often evoke “what might have been.” She continues: “While sadness for a failed dream is bitter, sadness is most acutely linked with the real physical loss of a person or thing that has passed forever from view. With this loss comes remembrance, and with remembrance a longing for the departed and, in its absence, a sentimental yearning for a token, an object, something that can be felt and touched: a material souvenir of what is no longer but lingers everlastingly in memory.”
I take these ideas to refer to a nostalgia, or a desire. That despite the many reasons people had for creating taxidermy, they wanted to preserve these specimens to understand them, and also for a sense of posterity. Even if they ceased to exist—if they died out—they could still be present. Like you.
“Longing is itself a peculiar condition,” Poliquin writes. “It works as a kind of ache connecting the stories we tell ourselves and the objects we use as storytellers. In a sense, longing is a mechanism for both pacifying and cultivating various lusts and hungers by creating objects capable of generating significance. And here, objects of remembrance or souvenirs are exemplary.” Taxidermy itself—or rather, poor taxidermy—strikes me as melancholic, the way one who is melancholic clings to something, though isn’t quite sure what is gone. The way one who attempts and botches taxidermy enters into a contradiction, unable to capture the essence of what they recreate—that being life.
You and Daddy had taught me that almost any longing could be remedied by effort, and then more effort; desires could be fulfilled if I worked hard enough or completed enough repetitions until, suddenly, my goal was achieved and whatever I’d hoped for—a good grade in school, acceptance to college, a slimmer body—appeared in my life as if by some given, definite transaction. But that outside factors might hinder these desires, and that all of the things I was taught to long for were material because they related to achievement or a symbol of money—instead of, say, happiness or well-being—wasn’t apparent to me until years later, long after you had died. I resented this. I wanted to talk to you about this. A desire to preserve can’t alone resurrect the dead. Holding and hoarding can’t turn ghosts into flesh.
But we create these souvenirs nevertheless. This allows us, in a way, to hold our loss close. Taxidermy, after all, gives the impression of permanence. An animal that has been preserved may not be alive, but it remains here. Sometimes that is enough.
* * *
I don’t ever want to touch that taxidermic fish. But everybody in my family knows that there will come a day in the next decades when Caroline, Steph, or I will be tasked with throwing away the fleshy, peeling sea bass. The angelfish, too, wherever they rest.
Do I dread touching the dead fish, or do I instead dread what it means to dispose of my father’s haphazard trophy, which has over the years become a memorial to him?
6.
In the early fall of my senior year of high school, a prospective college mailed me their creative writing program’s literary magazine. I dragged the book into my bedroom and I paged through the materials while sitting at my desk. I was amazed by a poem from an undergraduate student; it was unlike anything I’d read.
A couple dines by the Adriatic Sea. The title implies they’re on a honeymoon of sorts. At sixteen, there is so much context I missed—like sex—that I understand now, having just reread the poem for the first time in more than a decade. The couple is buzzed. They’d been plied with liquor all evening, and one of them takes a bite from the plate of octopus they’re sharing—octopi, according to the poem—and says, “taste like the motherfucking ocean.” They pitch a glass onto the rocks while the other looks on, perplexed.
I read that as a teenager and immediately I separated the phrase from the rest of the poem. There was something about the word mother next to fucker, its sharpness, how it reminded me of my own mother, who could slice anybody open with a single look.
Your mother is like Bill Clinton, my father frequently said, and how he can say, with a smile, that someone should go fuck themselves, and they will. His use of present tense when referring to her always cuts. This could be a product of Chinese being his first language. There are no tenses in Chinese dialects. Everything is present tense, the marker of something that has happened in the past—了, le in Mandarin or liu in Cantonese—appended at the end of the sentence. An afterthought, in the eyes of this English speaker. When people talk to me in Mandarin or Cantonese, I frequently confuse tenses and I find it easier to assume that everything is still happening. Somebody could talk to me about my mother, and if I had no context, my tense mix-ups might lead me to think she was still alive.
When my father said the word fuck, his voice dropped, not sure if he wanted to commit to the swear. Reading the poem, I marveled at how something as ordinary as an ocean could take on a harder edge with those words preceding it. There was conviction. I wanted to scream, taste like the motherfucking ocean! in my bedroom. Or, Look at this motherfucking mess of a house! The phrase encapsulated something about myself that I wasn’t sure how to express—this untouchable rage and despair, how just thinking those words felt confusing and reckless and scary.
I did not mind saying fuck in everyday conversation, or when it was aimed at someone, so motherfucker did not seem like a stretch. I did not understand the original violence of the phrase.
* * *
I thought again about taste like the motherfucking ocean, and fuck itself, when I was a senior in college. It was a few months after the New Year, and I was in the bed of a man who I’d been dating on and off for the school year. He kept breaking up with me, and we found ourselves getting back together, over and over.
But I love him, I told my friends as they rolled their eyes when I was a couple of drinks in and already weepy.
I was getting fucked in the sense that I couldn’t tell if this was something I didn’t want or just didn’t enjoy. He had told me about one of his fantasies, which was to be awoken from a deep sleep with me on top of him, and in turn, he enacted this on me. I found myself yanked from sleep with him crushing into my body. I willed myself to make my limbs slack. I told myself: I was lucky in that, for the most part in my adult life, I had never had to think of sex as something uncontrollable, that happened to me. And yet, when he rolled off of me—this person who turned me into someone I resented, someone who was needy and prone to shouting and crying and picking fights—he laughed and slapped my ass, trying to get me to smile at him. My mouth automatically turned upward, and this involuntary, nonconsensual reaction made me seethe. I pretended to sleep.
This isn’t a big deal, I told myself. This is whatever. Still: a brittle anger cracked through me, the same one I’d sensed for months. I didn’t know what to do then about my fury, and I don’t know, now.
A few hours later, while I walked to a bus stop, I wanted to call you.
I wanted to cry and say, I feel fucked.