Kelly Yu is going to reveal that she knows a bit too much about goldfish.
She admits this, smiling modestly in the way of someone who doesn’t want to bore you with the minutiae of their accidental obsession, yet can’t help but talk about it.
She begins listing off facts: They're extremely invasive if ever released into the waterways, usually when they're flushed down the toilet by kids who think their fish is dead but is still clinging to life. They grow to whatever size their environment is, so they can expand into 60-pound monsters. They steal natural resources from native fish. They can't cuddle like dogs. Their main cause of death is stress.
“Goldfish, on paper, actually don't contribute anything,” she says. “They really are just ornamental, decorative creatures.”
Everyone in the cafe is in a lull, sitting at gray laptops, pens pressed to blank notebooks, staring off in a daze. It’s a Tuesday afternoon at 4 p.m. and I sit by the door to wait for Kelly when I arrive. Not until fifteen minutes later do I realize she’s been here all day, stationed at a tucked-away table, swimming between pixels on screen.
She’s been working on the feature-length version of her short film “Endling,” a story about a dutiful elderly caretaker for the world’s last goldfish, set in a reality where the species is a thread away from extinction. The 20-minute documentary-style film debuted at Tribeca last month, produced by Lena Waithe’s production company Hillman Grad and spurred by Indeed’s Rising Voices fellowship, through which Kelly was one of ten selected filmmakers.
After Tribeca, “Endling” played before screenings at Hollywood’s TCL Chinese Theatre over the course of a week. The short film will properly premiere in L.A. on Aug. 14, as an official selection at HollyShorts Film Festival.
Kelly speaks easily about her path to Tribeca, semi-glossing over the accomplishment as a pleasant surprise rather than a poignant destination along the trajectory of her career, and it becomes clear that while she’s humble she’s also been trudging through a swamp of outside perception, all while holding tight to a lifeline of trust in herself, in her artistic vision.
She’s not unfamiliar with dimming her glow when exterior envy becomes apparent. But we’ll get to that.
“Endling” started as an idea Kelly had in college at USC, sparked by an Atlantic article about the caretaker for the last surviving tree snail, which silently passed away in 2019, taking an entire species’ lineage with it.
“It was such a tiny, inconsequential thing, but it marks the extinction of a species that's never going to come back, and nobody will know because it's not anything flashy. That just really resonated with me. I'm an only child,” Kelly says. I confide that I am too.
“The response I get is always ‘you hide it so well.’ I never know if that’s a compliment,” she says. I’ve been told the same, a questionable flattery.
“It really made me reflect about what it means to be ‘the last,’ in a way,” Kelly says of the tree snail’s quiet annihilation, “like if I choose never to have kids, and what it means to carry that weight and expectation. In film, we want to leave behind something, whether it's a body of work, a legacy. What does that mean, really?”
We’re sitting on the cafe’s back patio in Hollywood, both only children of immigrant parents who watched us go into the arts instead of STEM. I nod as she continues to speak, but my mind is reeling as I grapple with the weight of my purpose and the simultaneous realization that if I don’t have kids I’m ending the direct bloodline to both my parents.
For her titular endling, Kelly plucked a goldfish from her imagination instead of a tree snail, conjuring a creature both mundane and subtly tied to Chinese culture. Pairing the tale of extinction with her observations on the consequence of work for those who immigrate to the U.S., Kelly crafted a universal narrative about the lengths we go for our legacy, each other, or simply for ourselves.
“Endling” begins with a minute of animation chronicling how common carp mutated into goldfish, illustrated by a Chinese proverb that Kelly learned in childhood. According to legend, carp made an evolutionary leap by swimming upstream and jumping over the Dragon Gate, transforming into golden dragons.
Kelly is worldbuilding, putting her characters in a distant future — “period agnostic,” she calls it, a decadent phrase I jot down — but despite the fiction, everything is grounded in reality. Richard, the short film’s caretaker protagonist, is based on Kelly’s dad, and the premise heavily pulls from her father’s struggle to feel valuable after severing his ability to work.
Kelly is into an “East-meets-West” lens, a term she favors over “Asian American representation.” Tropes in the genre can be common, she says, so her mission is to go beyond by finding a universal thread that connects and comforts audiences across cultures.
Born in Sweden and raised in New Orleans by Chinese parents, Kelly didn't become an American citizen until turning fourteen. The discrepancies in her background put her at a loss, often leaving her wondering where she fit as she grew up caught between cultures, at times resonating more with being Chinese than explicitly Asian American.
The weight of her parents’ decision to move to the U.S. wasn’t lost on her either. When her father, reared in the Chinese countryside, became the first in his family accepted to college, his family raised a banner in the village celebrating his accomplishment: “you’ve jumped over the Dragon Gate.”
“He emigrated to America, with that dream to change the world,” Kelly says. “And things didn't really work out.”
“Endling” is bittersweet, and when I tell Kelly this I add that I found parts unexpectedly funny, bridging a gap between drama and humor in a zany, absurd way that caught me off guard. Kelly herself catches me off guard a few times, bridging a gap between the professional and deeply personal in conversation, divulging details I’d expect to learn months into a concrete friendship. I can’t tell if she’s purely an open book or if I’m just asking questions she’s been asked a dozen times before.
She goes on to say that absurd elements of Chinese culture translate universally, that anything seemingly singular to Chinese culture is, at the core, very human.
In her first short film, “Plum Town,” written in Kelly’s native Mandarin, a farmland father and cityscape son reunite; the son is home over matters of business, but the father is trying in vain to reconnect, offering his now adult son his favorite childhood foods that go rejected now that the son is gluten-free. The pair sings karaoke, the father belting a traditional ballad, the son rapping in English. It’s funny, but my heart is constricting at the invisible gap, the disconnect innately familiar.
Kelly isn’t a perfectionist, but she admits she’s hard on herself. Really hard on herself. On the day we meet at the cafe, she tells me she’s been having a categorically bad work day, struggling to push past mental barriers to write or get anything palpable done. Still, she’s learning to give herself grace, as hard as that may be.
She reiterates a quote from filmmaking duo the Daniels, essentially saying that in any given frame you can find an imperfection, and clinging to perfectionism only gets in your way as an artist. It’s one of many quotes she whips out seamlessly from the fringes of her mind during our chat, among them a Carl Sagan phase about extinction and survival that made its way into “Endling.”
“Perfectionism gets in the way of what’s important,” Kelly says. “To me, I've never been one to obsess over every little detail in certain situations. I'm looking at a bigger picture.”
Her partner, Joe Barton, perceives her the same way, through the dual lens of love and professionalism as both her longtime partner and recent collaborator. Joe edited “Endling,” the couple’s first official foray into the often murky waters of collaboration, and spent the process acutely aware of their choice to trespass into the territory.
“You always hear stories about how it's not good to work with people that are that close to you,” Joe says, on the cusp of his and Kelly’s three-year anniversary. “We had a very honest conversation before I officially came on board where we asked if we really wanted to do this, despite knowing that there's a risk.”
In the end the couple decided to go ahead with it, relying on patience, respect, and a mutual dedication to the project. At the end of each work session when they closed the door to their shared office in their shared apartment, all conversations on the film were cut off, giving them a clear distinction between their work relationship and personal relationship.
Joe and I went to high school together, peripherally, but we were introduced an indiscernible amount of time ago (two years, give or take) through my then-boyfriend, a friend of his. On a triple-date in West L.A., I met Joe and Kelly over conveyor-belt sushi in Sawtelle, six of us squeezed into a small booth. Out of the three couples around that table, Kelly and Joe are the one pair that remains in-tact to this day.
They both acknowledge that he wasn’t her first choice as editor. Neither tells me it was easy, but separately both confide that they were met with challenges among breakthroughs, using phrases like “learning process” and “pick your battles“ to covertly delineate that the collaboration was complex but ultimately worth it.
“Nothing is worth messing up our relationship over,” Kelly says. “You can say it as much as you want, but it's hard to separate that relationship. At the end of the day I think he was the right person for the job, but we both had to learn how to create our own working relationship.”
“It’s never going to be a perfect, traditional director-editor relationship,” Joe says of working with Kelly. “But I feel like I was able to be far more honest with her than I would with another director because I have never cared about a project more in my life, because it was hers. So there was no universe where I would fail her.”
Disagreements were minor, Joe says, spurring them to challenge each other and think critically about the work. Frustrations arose, Kelly added, but the pair maintained composure. In the end, respect for the other topped any other emotion. They’re proud of each other. They close the office door, they make dinner, they keep close.
“I'm so proud of the work he did,” Kelly tells me. “I loved our process, but it was definitely our own original process. A lot of that came from being so close to someone and knowing each other so well, and because we know each other so well we’re not mincing words.”
“I’ll be looking forward to the next project. I don't think anything happened on this project that turned either of us from wanting to do more,” Joe says.
The prospect of collaborating on another project is realistic, and Kelly comfortably calls herself a realist, favoring the term when others label her outward doubts as impostor syndrome or self-deprecation.
“It’s very cool to see her evolution over these years,” Joe says. “She's still so close yet so far from being where I think she deserves to be. When Kelly was still at USC, she treated it as if she was in a graduate program. She knew exactly what she was doing, and it was so palpable that other people in her cohort picked up on that. Some embraced it and became her friend, and others almost resented her for it.”
In her 40-person college film cohort, Kelly was met with genuine support from her peers early on. But when Kelly produced “Plum Town” on her own — launching a Kickstarter campaign, raising tens of thousands of dollars, and hiring a professional crew rather than relying on college resources — the atmosphere shifted.
“I had all these really good friends in the cohort and everyone was like, ‘We’ll make things together and work together forever!’” Kelly says earnestly, a crinkle in her brow. “I was the first in my class to raise money and make an independent film outside of USC that wasn't a student film. And after I made it, I think it rubbed a lot of my classmates the wrong way.”
The drama set in when the rumors began, spreading through the cohort in a twisted-cord game of telephone that made Kelly uneasy. When her peers became convinced that she thought she was above the rest of them, she shrank herself in any way she could. Accomplishments went unspoken of, social media went dark. Kelly put her head down for the rest of the school year just to get through classes, retreating into a shell she found herself in as a child.
“I think I associated being proud of something with that ostracism,” she says. “And I still feel the effects of that.”
Even now, taking a compliment is an internal struggle, setting off the fear that to show pride for her work translates to others as conceit.
“You’re very self-aware,” I tell her. “And you're aware of the fact that you’ve had to shrink yourself in the past. Do you feel like you're still in that shell, a little bit?”
“I'm trying to unlearn it, to just be proud of my accomplishments.” She takes a breath. “I think ‘Endling’ was such a gift, because I’m really proud of it and really proud of the work that my team did. I love it a lot. In a way, it’s not about me because I'm so confident in what everyone else did that there's no room to shrink their accomplishments and their talents and what they did on it.”
The realism might be a safety net, but I don't think it's a bad thing, and neither does Kelly.
“Maybe I'm delusional, but something unlocked in me a year ago where the most freeing thing was letting go and succumbing to fate,” she says. “There are some things you just can't control. When I say, ‘Oh, we'll see what happens,’ there's something freeing about embracing the unknown.”
Find Kelly Yu at @itskellyyu and see “Endling” in L.A. at HollyShorts Film Festival on August 14.
First Name Basis is Izzy Sami’s bridge between journalistic integrity and personal relationships, pushing the definition of “conflict of interest.” Profiles of people she meets out in the world will be published once a month, or twice a month if she gets a grip on her time management skills.