The joy didn’t last long. Soon, a fish had died.
My father decided to get an aquarium for our house one day when I was in primary school.
“You guys always wanted to have pets, right? Well, fish are a kind of pet. they don’t make noise and it is very easy to keep the fish alive, so it’s decided.”
Together, we strolled through the Goldfish Market on Tung Choi Street North in Prince Edward. We bought a medium size fish tank, some small pretty fish in transparent plastic bags and a can of fish food. We travelled back home as quickly as we could, fearing the fish might die of suffocation. Once we were at home, we placed the fish tank on the windowsill and filled it with fresh tap water. We then cut the bags open and poured the fish into the tank.
At first the fish seemed to be frightened, swimming frantically around. But in a couple of hours they began to get familiar with the new environment and the gigantic two-legged beasts who couldn’t stop staring at them. I remember the fish were almost transparent, with a red-colored back. I also remember feeding them with a sort of “shredded paper” like fish food, and that I could only feed them one pinch of it at a time. I remember that for the next few months the first thing I did after school was to rush home and just stare at the fish for hours. I would be so distracted by the fish to the point that I couldn’t focus on my homework and revision.
One morning, during my morning fish observation, I saw a fish separate from the crowd and come to rest at the tank’s bottom. The tank was practically empty with nothing but water and fish, so it was very obvious that one fish was lying at the bottom. At first we thought it was sleeping. Its fins were moving, but only because the currents moved them. We only realized it was dead when another fish started eating its corpse.
Unlike me and my brother, who were overwhelmed with sadness, my dad just took the thing as it was. He didn’t even bother to remove the dead fish. “The rest of the fish will take care of that!”, he said. His cruelty made we wonder, “How did Mum for in love with this guy?”. The experience was heart-breaking, as if I had committed a murder, but the worst was yet to come.
Almost a week later, another fish died, and then another. It was as if a serial killer who targeted small fish with red backs was on the loose, and we were helpless against the situation. We went to the fish shop to seek help from the professionals. They told us it could be the water, that it might be dirty or contaminated. So we went home and changed the water. We knew we had to change the water every now and then, just not very frequently. But the death continued, like a plague was ravaging the fish tank.
A strange thing was that the fish always died at night. No one in the family could catch how the fish passed away, but every morning there would be another fish lying on the bottom of the fish tank. Then a friend of my dad suggested adding a water filter to filter the water in the tank 24 hours a day. We bought one and had it working in no time. Still the massacre continued, and we started believing there might actually be a fish murderer in our midst. I remember asking my brother to sleep on the couch next to the fish tank with me to stand guard over the fish. We fell asleep very soon and the fish kept being found dead. We had about forty plus fish when we first started the whole aquarium thing, but it was only when two fish were still swimming that the dying stopped.
We were all surprised by the sudden halt of the death. I was so relieved by the fact that I thought maybe something we did finally worked. I looked at the survivors and I decided to give them names When we had forty-plus fish of the same kind, it was impossible to recognize any of them. I called the bigger one John and the smaller and slimmer one Chris, because the two fish were always swimming separately at the two sides of the tank. They were more like brothers than lovers. Unfortunately, like the others, John and Chris did not escape the grasp of death. Within a few weeks, they were dead.
I was devastated when I saw John and Chris dead, and I buried them myself, unlike the rest which my father had dealt with. As I put them into the ground, I decided that I would never keep any pets ever again, as I knew I could have done more to help, that I wasn’t taking my responsibility seriously and that I was incapable of properly taking care of animals.
I also was confused by my own cruelty and injustice. Although I had felt really bad when the first fish had died, I was sort of numbed by the fact that for almost a month forty fish died, and I felt nothing for them. The treatment between the forty fish and their brother was unfair, and I realized that I was a person of partiality and bias. And finally, I had only buried John and Chris, like the lives of the other fish weren’t important, so I was actually just as cruel as my dad. So at that moment, I made a life-long decision: I will never ever have any pets again nor will I be involved in any businesses related to pets.