Goldfish in the Palace
By Kaci X. Tavares
一。
It’s been too long since I’ve tried to write my Chinese name 黃曉殿 Húang Xǐaodìan. Muscle memory—barely. In Chinese, your family name comes first, the unit identified before the individual. My family: orphaned sisters who borrow a benefactor’s name. Me: Daybreak over a Palace. I cannot find the palace—
instead I spy
yellow 黃
the sun 日
a mound of fresh earth 土
土 土
It becomes a way I find familiarity in a language made of pictures. Sometimes it works. When I distinguish a tree 木 from the forest 森林. When I witness someone say thank you 謝謝 with both speech 言 and body 身. When I realize heart 心 first greets death 亡 in the act of forgetting 忘.
2.
They say the creature most familiar with forgetting is the goldfish.
Three second memories, long enough to capture
surface sunlight
bubbles
a brown human eye.
If what they say is true, I envy those little gilded fish. Some days I wish I could dash 忘 against the ground, relieve heart of its burden, swim with it around a glass tank. Complete a lap, never realize when I began there was something to miss.
三。
When you’re constantly forgetting your Chinese, there comes the moment you need to consult your dictionary.
Through research I find the palace 殿
a corpse 尸
held together 共
by a weapon 殳
It’s moments like these when the pictures don’t make sense anymore—I’m shocked back into facing the fault lines of my Chinese. Hairline fractures that begin with one misplaced stroke
until sun wanes into moon 日 月
person splits into eight 人 八
scholar composts back into earth 士 土
But Chinese is forgiving in a way English is not, even a single line means something: 一
one
4.
Can a goldfish distinguish brown from black? My brown—dark iris bleeding into pupil.
Google says they can. That is to say, God has appointed these small household fish tetrachromats. Whereas you and I see in three primary colors: red, green, blue, these descendants of carp see in four.
A symbol of good luck and fortune, a man’s gift to his wife on their first anniversary, my goldfish sees in ultraviolet. To her, my blue jeans thrum electric iris, my yellow nail polish pulses neon. My face during feeding time, subtle and luminous.
五。
When writing in characters, it’s only too easy for hairline fractures to crack into canyon rifts. Hit delete twice in English and a school becomes a fish. Hit delete twice in Chinese and you start making sinkholes:
我最喜歡的動物是我的金魚
我最喜歡 是 金
big enough to swallow 魚 whole.
6.
The next time someone claims you have the memory of a goldfish, thank them. Goldfish have memories of at least six months, but probably longer. Trained in captivity to expect food at the sound of a bell, they remember the ringing even when returned to a river.
Who dismissed the intelligence of such a tiny creature? I trace the myth, find the unexpected: goldfish were made in China, too. In the Song Dynasty, it was illegal to own yellow goldfish outside of the Imperial family. Perhaps that’s why the orange variety are more prevalent today despite the fact nature selects for the yellow ones.
I want to try it: condition my fish. Release her. Six months later, ring the bell and see if she will come to the shallows, lap at my outstretched hands, still expecting to be fed.
七。
It becomes more complex if I write my name in simplified characters— modern mutations of their traditional ancestors.
The changes between the two are often imperceptible—
the gentle aging
of my mother’s face
overnight
黃 黄
But sometimes the change is substantial—
the earth
nearly fossilizes
a spear
曉 晓
Most of the time, though, nothing changes—
and the corpse
gets to stay
in the palace
殿 殿
8.
Compound words are also products of natural selection. Vestigial hyphens, fused like coccyx to spine, made invisible to the naked eye. But look closely, the bones are still there.
I first learned of compound words in kindergarten.
Examples on the white board: popcorn outdoors
drawstring chopsticks
bluebird goldfish
九。
Goldfish is a compound word in Chinese, too.
金 + 魚 = 金魚
When did the West decide to borrow more than goldfish from China? Did some English-speaker realize words are building blocks after observing those who first pieced broken things together?
The legend goes a Japanese shogun broke his favorite tea bowl and sent the shards back to China for repair. It came back in one piece, but grotesque and puckered, held together with a line of ugly metal staples. He challenged his craftsmen to find a better way, and so they did, by coaxing gold dust into the scars.
Kintsugi 金継ぎ, the art of mending ceramic cracks with gold dust preserves scars, names them the most valuable part of an object, the same way someone struck by lightning tattoos survival into their skin.
10.
I’m afraid one day I will no longer be able to find the pictures. Every day I greet the sun by writing my name, 黃曉殿. Muscle memory—barely.
I’ve long since given up on perfecting stroke order. I now settle for making sure all strokes are present, let my language gaps gleam. What should gild the cavities?
Some options: goldfish scales
dead skin from my face
my last name
我希望 黃 I could
告訴你 黃 all about
昨晚的 黃 dream
Kaci X. Tavares is a bilingual poet and editor from Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. She is the co-editor of two anthologies: Come Shining: More Poems and Stories from Fifty Years of Copper Canyon Press (with Michael Wiegers) and the UEA MA Poetry Anthology 2020 through the University of East Anglia Publishing Project. Tavares served as a Writing 360 mentor with the New York-based non-profit Girls Write Now. She holds degrees in English and English Education from Boston University and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She lives in Washington state.
