The Fishbowl Trick

The Pledge

In Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel The Prestige—memorably dramatized in Christopher Nolan’s 2007 film of the same name—we are told of a magician from Shanghai named Chi Linqua, working in London under the stage name ‘Ching Ling Foo’, and famous for a very particular illusion involving a fishbowl. In Nolan’s film, the character is known instead as ‘Chung Ling Soo’, for reasons that may become clearer later.

In the novel, young magician Alfred Borden describes going to see Ching perform at Adelphi Theatre in Leicester Square, sometime in the late 19th century. After watching the show, Borden goes to see Ching backstage. Ching would not discuss his magic, but Borden’s eye was caught by Ching’s most famous prop: a large glass fishbowl, well-filled with water, and containing at least a dozen ornamental fish, all of them alive. The spectacular climax of the show involved Ching making this fishbowl appear as if from thin air.

Ching invites him to examine the bowl, and Borden tells us, “I tried lifting it, because I knew the secret of its manifestation, and marvelled at its weight. He was obviously unsure whether I knew his secret or not, and was unwilling to say anything that might expose it, even to a fellow professional. I did not know how to reveal that I did know the secret, and so I too kept my silence.”

Borden lets us know that many years have now passed, and Ching is long dead, so he may reveal to us the magician’s great secret.

In itself, it is quite mundane, even obvious: “His famous goldfish bowl was with him on stage throughout his act, ready for its sudden and mysterious appearance. Its presence was deftly concealed from the audience. He carried it beneath the flowing mandarin gown he affected, clutching it between his knees, kept ready for the sensational and apparently miraculous production at the end.”

Borden then presents us with a contradiction: “No one in the audience could ever guess at how the trick was done, even though a moment’s logical thought would have solved the mystery.”

Why should this be so? Well, “It was obvious to everyone that Ching Ling Foo was physically frail, shuffling painfully through his routine. When he took his bow at the end, he leaned for support on his assistant, and was led hobbling from the stage.”

The secret is now clear: the trick was not really about the hoisting and final presentation of the bowl to the audience. While this act required skilled maneuvering, Ching was in reality a physically fit man of great strength, making this a fairly trivial task. Concealing the fishbowl between his robes, however, required him to shuffle as he walked. This drew attention to the way he moved, threatening to reveal his secret. Thus, for Ching’s entire life, day or night, at home or out in the street, he walked with a shuffle, under the guise of a frail old men, in devotion to the performance.

The Turn

Rachel Dolezal taught Africana studies at Eastern Washington University, and was head of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington. Jessica Krug was a tenured professor of African history at George Washington University. Carrie Bourassa was the scientific director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Indigenous Peoples’ Health. Andrea Smith is a professor Ethnic Studies who founded INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence and the Chicago chapter of Women of All Red Nations.

One thing each of these highly accomplished women have in common is that they all appear to have deceived other people about their ethnic identity, having pretended to be African American or Native American.

This is nothing new, of course. Archibald Stansfeld Belaney, born in in Sussex, England in 1888, moved to Canada in 1906 and would go on to have a successful career as a ‘Native American’ conservationist and writer known as Grey Owl.

Sylvester Clark Long, known as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, was an African American journalist and actor who pretended to be the son of a Blackfoot chief and wrote a fraudulent autobiography, published in 1928.

‘Grey Owl’ had the fortune of dying of pneumonia in 1938, before his secret was publicized. Rumors about ‘Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance’ being a fraud however apparently began circulate with his growing fame, and he killed himself in 1932.

Before them all there was William Ellsworth Robinson, an American magician who started going by the stage name Chung Ling Soo in 1900, copying some of his persona and act from an actual Beijing-born Chinese magician, not coincidentally named Ching Ling Foo. ‘Chung Ling Soo’ would ultimately die on stage during a failed bullet catch performance in 1918. If you have read or watched The Prestige some of the elements here may be familiar to you.

Poster of ‘Chung Ling Soo’ aka William Ellsworth Robinson’s “Condemned to Death by the Boxers” trick. Robinson would ultimately die while performing this trick in 1918, due in part to a failure to maintain and keep clean the trick gun.

What is it that makes these individuals special? That they pretended to be something they were not? I don’t think so. People are selectively representing themselves in self-interested ways all the time, in every society, in many different contexts—in a species as interdependent and socially individuated as ours, where reputation is paramount, people will often promote themselves in ways thought to lend to more favorable impressions from others. As Erving Goffman put it in The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life,

When an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about him or to bring into play information about him already possessed. They will be interested in his general socio-economic status, his conception of self, his attitude toward them, his competence, his trustworthiness, etc.

Social interactions often have a dynamic to them that—while distinct in key ways, such as through reciprocity and turn-taking—exhibit similarities to that of a stage performer carrying out his tricks before an audience. A person builds about their identity through a lifetime of external and internal influences and experience, which result in a persona cultivated in part with an audience—family, friends, partners—in mind. We have our name and reputation, we put on our costumes, we perform particular tasks and roles and take on particular identities in relation to the audience in front of us, such those with whom we are interacting with or seeking to impress.

The Prestige

Looking back on the previous paragraph, I see this post getting a bit trite. ‘And, so you see kids, much like the magician, we too are performers, wearing costumes and seeking to impress an audience!’ Yeah sure, okay, but that isn’t entirely right, is it? Because there is something distinct, something different, about the magician, the Rachel Dolezal’s and Chung Ling Soo’s of the world.

It is not that they constructed their identity, or that they misrepresented themselves, it is the orientation and single-minded focus and extent of the construction that makes them different, and perhaps contemptible to many people. These weren’t examples of people unthinkingly repeating dubious family lore about a native ancestor, or exaggerating the number of books they read to their followers on social media, or other little bits and pieces of selective representation and disclosure that people tend to do everywhere.

It wasn’t enough for Carrie Bourassa, whose ancestors come from Eastern Europe, to present herself as a Native American woman and devote much of her scholarship to focusing on Indigenous women’s health: she gave a TEDx talk in traditional Native regalia identifying herself as ‘Morning Star Bear’. Africana studies professor and NAACP chapter president Rachel Dolezal used excessive amounts of self-tanner and bronzer and wore a weave to complete her costume.

‘Morning Star Bear’ aka Dr. Carrie Bourassa on stage performing during her 2019 TEDx talk.

The performer does not merely selectively represent themselves: the self itself is the illusion. This is what makes them different, their identities are crafted entirely and pretty much exclusively around a fiction. This has much in common with some other cross-cultural domains I have written about previously, such as sorcery, charlatanism, and men’s cults [Ed: I highly recommend you check out these links, because I think they really help flesh some of this out in a broader cross-cultural perspective].

In her post where she admits to having pretended to be African-American, African history professor Jessica Krug writes,

I have not lived a double life. There is no parallel form of my adulthood connected to white people or a white community or an alternative white identity. I have lived this lie, fully, completely, with no exit plan or strategy. I have built only this life, a life within which I have operated with a radical sense of ethics, of right and wrong, and with rage, rooted in Black power, an ideology which every person should support, but to which I have no possible claim as my own.

I have lived this lie, fully.

She says this as though it makes her performance less lamentable, but ironically this level of devotion and committal to the act is where much of the problem lies. There can be no exoneration through some kind of personal misapprehension or confusion, or benign exaggeration, or regrettable but not altogether atypical self-deception on her part—she knew precisely what she was doing, took measures to conceal the act and perpetuate the performance—her devotion to the role is what convicts her.

I have lived this lie, fully. That is the trick. To lie selectively, contextually, once-in-awhile?—everyone does that. But to live a lie, fully?—this is the work of the charlatan.