One late night, I picked up this book while I was once again drowning in self-doubt, asking myself, “Am I a lunatic?” or “Am I just too weak?”
What is this book about? It follows two parallel lines: One is David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford University, who famously sewed name tags back onto fish specimens after an earthquake shattered them, only to later become a demon of eugenics. The other is the author Lulu Miller’s own life falling apart. She tried to find salvation in Jordan’s story, but eventually realized that the category of “fish” doesn’t even exist. The order Jordan spent his whole life defending was nothing but an illusion.
It took me 14 hours to finish, and I really wish I had read it sooner. However, I’ll admit the first third was a struggle.
At the beginning, the author seems to openly admire Jordan—portraying his act of sewing tags amidst broken glass as something heroic. I went along with it. But then, she started describing, with an almost emotional tone, how Jordan pushed for forced sterilizations and even had poisoned his opponents… That weird praising made me feel really uncomfortable. Some readers even joked that Lulu was obsessed with Jordan. For a while, I suspected so too.
It wasn’t until I reached the scientific conclusion that “why fish don’t exist” that everything clicked. The author was being ironic from the very start; she was just peeling back the layers slowly. She made you love this man first, then made you watch him descend into madness. It is a mirror of Jordan’s life, and a mirror of our own obsession with order: we worship it, and then we watch it crumble.
The line that hit me hardest was: “Fish don’t exist, so the sense of hierarchy doesn’t exist either.” Those labels we use”success/failure,” “strong/weak”are all just man-made ladders.
This book gave me two kinds of peace. First, a sense of relief from the rat race. I no longer feel the need to climb that imaginary ladder. Second, a new definition of persistence. Jordan wasn’t put on a pedestal because he was uniquely brilliant, but because he just happened to be there at the right time. The point of persistence isn’t necessarily to achieve fame or success; it’s simply to never leave the table.
From Jordan, I also saw the danger of the shield of optimism. The line between being determined and being delusional is only as thick as a mirror of self-reflection.
As I finished the book in the early hours of the morning, I wrote in my notes: Nothing in this world has an inherent meaning; only the things we choose to believe in become meaningful.
If you’ve ever sat up at night wondering if you’re a “fish that isn’t good enough “, please read this book. You’ll realize that fish don’t exist—and therefore, you don’t have to be anything that has already been named.
