The poem is dedicated to the author's father who was tortured and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution.
In the first stanza of the poem, the author describes that how his father was a school principal and one day he caught a carp and everybody in the school tasted it. The poem emphasizes the importance in Chinese culture where it represents perseverance, luck, and success. Paradoxically, Wang writes that her son is named Carp and yet he died an early death.
The carp also represents a loss of innocence and the flawed nature of people with the lines "they had tasted the carp". This stanza shows how a good memory turned into a painful one.
In "The Carp," by Yun Wang, the use of the carp to represent something deeper is an example of Synecdoche. The carp is used to represent the pain and injustice of her father’s imprisonment. “The Carp is dedicated to Wang’s father, and many of the poems in her little book tell stories from that period.
