The Golden Fish

In the days when the T'ang court was young, there lived, in a small chiefdom among the southern hills, a girl called Ye Xian. Her father had been the chief of a little valley, and her mother had died while she was still a child; her father had married again, and he, too, had died before Ye Xian was grown.

So the girl was left to her stepmother. The woman was not, by nature, a monster; she was a woman of her own daughter's age and a woman of her own household, and she did not love the child her husband had brought with him. Ye Xian was set to draw water from the river, to gather firewood on the hill, and to cook the bitter meals that the stepmother and her daughter ate without thanking her.

She was a gentle child. She did not complain. The valley was small, and her work was hard, but she had one comfort. It was a small fish, no bigger than her hand, golden in color, that she had found one day in the shallows of the river and carried home in a water jar.

She kept it in a pool behind the house, fed it with her own scraps, and talked to it in the evenings when the day's work was done. The fish grew. It grew beyond the size of any fish in the river, until it was as long as Ye Xian's arm, and its scales began to shine in the dusk as though it had swallowed a piece of sunset.

It would rise to the surface when she called, and take food from her hand. No one else in the house dared go near the pool; the fish, which was gentle with Ye Xian, would flare its fins and dart at any other hand that came near the water. The stepmother, watching from the kitchen door, frowned.

"Where does the girl find the courage to sing at her work?" she said to her own daughter. "There is a secret. We will find it."

So the stepmother, one morning, dressed herself in Ye Xian's old cloak — the tattered one the girl wore to the river — and went down to the pool at the hour when Ye Xian was usually there. She held out a scrap of food, just as she had seen the girl do.

The golden fish rose. It did not know the stepmother. It took the food from her hand — and in that moment the woman struck it with the knife she had hidden in her sleeve. She struck twice. The fish thrashed and was still.

She killed it. She carried the body to the house, cooked it, and ate it with her daughter, and threw the bones onto the midden behind the kitchen. She thought that she had ended the girl's secret.

When Ye Xian came home at dusk and called, as she always did, down to the pool, there was nothing in the water but the evening light. She called again. The pool was still. She went home, and that night, in the straw where she slept, she wept as she had not wept since her mother's death.