Goldfish

They say that the memory span of a goldfish only lasts about three seconds. Of course, this is just an ancient myth with an untraceable origin. In fact, the goldfish can remember things up to 5 months. But a goldfish's lifespan is around 30 years. If the meaning of life could be found only in the captivity of memory, that is to say, the goldfish has lived life about 72 times: (30*12)/5 = 72. I think about this a lot. Unlike in the movie Groundhog Day, the goldfish isn't Phil who remembers everything from living the same day over and over and over again for an estimated ten thousand years; it is Rita, the unaware girl who begins to live, every day, from a certain point in her life. The only difference is that the goldfish keeps aging.

I had a goldfish when I was little. Well, to be exact, it wasn't my goldfish. I wasn't in charge of taking care of it. My mother cleaned its tank once in a while, fed it, tapped on the glass and gave it attention. It had a name. Translated to English, it roughly meant Golden Bowl. I wasn't raised in a very superstitious family, we don't believe in Feng Shui or anything, but when it comes to naming pets, Chinese people like to relate them to wealth – it's more of a habit. I wasn't fond of any domestic animals apart from cats and dogs. You can't touch a goldfish. You don't know what it's feeling. Besides, we weren't professional fish breeders or aquatic experts, any fish that had been kept in our house wouldn't live up to even half of their expected lifespan. Golden Bowl wasn't exactly a pet to me.

We never forget anything really, unless there's a memory loss. Learning is the process of creating memory, and as we are learning, our behaviors are changing simultaneously. To me, forgetting and being unable to retrieve a memory are different things. The former means that it ceases existing, while the other implies that the memory is still there, but it's too far back in your head that you can't immediately recall the experience. The memory span of humans lasts about a lifetime; even so, most of us try to make it last more than a lifetime, because we'd like to believe that life is purely made of memories, and that memory, is life. We build monuments and museums, we write books, biographies, diaries, blogs just to prove to ourselves that we are not as pathetic as the other things that have history, too.

Golden Bowl was brought home along with a few other goldfish. One died the day after, because it couldn't adapt to the new environment. The others died one by one in the following three or four years. They all turned upside down and died. Some people say that this is because there isn't sufficient oxygen in the water. So basically, they drowned to death. Yes, goldfish can drown too. So every time a fish started tilting to its side like it couldn't balance its own body, we knew that it was on the verge of dying. Golden Bowl did that a few times. We thought it couldn't make it. But it did. It kept surviving day after day. It tried very hard to force its stomach under without turning upside down. My mom helped, too. She put some seaweed into the tank and gave it more oxygen. That was when I started to take care of the fish like a pet. I didn't want it to die. I knew this one was a fighter.

Memories make us who we are. They are the basis of our identity. But if a piece of memory was never spoken of, did it really happen? If someone did not know of that small moment I’d experienced, who was I to him? There are thousands of conversations I’ve let slip – the moments that I’ll never speak of. Sometimes there is no point in telling anyone. There is no point in verbalizing a moment that is so vivid, that contains all the other senses that words can never replace. Our experiences are too profound, too multiplex in forms to be expressed with sounds aspirated through the gaps between our teeth. Meanings are lost when a moment is being spoken; it ceases to be what it was in my head. Communication distorts our meanings, our personal experiences. And I think that the best parts of us should be well-hidden. I keep a collection of these moments in my heart. I preserve it because it is unique, because it is so much greater than what I can encode. I keep it untouched and I keep it from the world simply because it is nothing but mine to own. I dig holes in the back of my mind and bury its ghost – the ghost that humans call “memories”, and I shall be the only one who knows where to find it. When it acts up inside my head attempting to haunt my thoughts, I’ll even try to hunt it down and kill it; that’s how much it matters to me. But like I said, we never forget anything. We can't just erase it. The best we can do is to shove it aside and hope it doesn't sneak around when we least expect it to.


Can you imagine if humans were like goldfish? Every time when we reach the last day of the 5th month, we instantly forget what happened 5 months before. And everything will just start building up again from the beginning - the awareness of the existence of our own and of others gone forever and reappear. What can I learn from in five months’ time? What's it like if I only had five months to acknowledge the world around me? What would I do if I knew that five months later we would be someone completely different? My “6 months” come and go irregularly, mostly by choice. Of course, I still remember what happened before my 6th month came; I’m not a goldfish. It only means that I leave behind all the things that I’ve learnt every now and then and try to see the world with new eyes.

One day I came home from school in the afternoon, the tank was empty. Up until today I'd still like to think that it struggled and fought with all it had. It just died like how the others did. It turned upside down with its stomach facing the ceiling. And my mother flushed it down the toilet. I'd existed in its life for roughly 12 times and yet it had only been in mine once. But this memory is still lingering in my head and I'd like to ponder over it once in a while when my heart gets broken over and over again, as a reminder that I am constantly creating myself, if not erasing.