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Your search eventually focuses in on the legendary “Super Red” arowana in Borneo. Describe your misadventures trying to reach the remote lake of Sentarum.

[Laughs.] It started with a six-week deep dive into the fish world. At the end of that, I cancelled my flight home from Asia and risked missing my own wedding reception because I was so determined to get to this fish in the heart of Borneo. I was warned of a trifecta of bogeymen: a supposed fish mafia, Islamic terrorists, and the Iban, who inhabit the lake region and are traditionally headhunters.

I was probably one of the least well-equipped people to go find a fish on my own, much less the elusive arowana. I had never been fishing a day in my life. I didn’t speak the language or have any wilderness experience. [Laughs.] Luckily, I got help from someone called Heiko Bleher, who is known as the Indiana Jones of the tropical fish world. He’s a third-generation icthyological explorer. His grandfather started one of the first ornamental fish farms outside Frankfurt at the turn of the 20th century. His mother took Heiko and her three other children into an uncharted region of the Amazon rain forest in the 1950s, in search of what was then the world’s most expensive aquarium fish: the “discus,” a perfectly round fish that looks a lot like the ancient Greek discus. Ever since, Heiko has spent his life in the manic pursuit of new species across the globe.

I did eventually manage to get to Sentarum. Unfortunately, it was the worst time of the year. The lake system drains seasonally. I got there just at the point where you couldn’t take a boat into the swamp because it was too low or walk in because the water was too high.

Charles Kingsley, the British children’s book author, wrote “The pleasure of finding new species is too great; it is morally dangerous.” Were you “corrupted” by your obsessive search for the arowana?

Yeah, I think I was. There is something dangerous about fetishizing a fish: placing a species on a pedestal, trying to own it, and hold it up as an iconic species. My own quest, as well-meaning as it was, took over my life. The first sign of trouble was when I changed my name to get into Myanmar. I was worried I wasn’t going to be able to get a visa as a journalist so I took my husband’s last name after I got married. At that point, I should have realized that maybe I was getting in too deep. [Laughs.]

Mine is not the only life to have been corrupted by this fish, either. While I was reporting, someone in New York ended up in a high-security prison for his involvement with the fish. You think of a pet fish as this innocent thing, a reminder of childhood. But the Asian arowana is an agent of chaos throughout the world.

You traveled to 15 countries in search of the arowana, by plane, jeep, and canoe. What were the best—and worst—moments of that quest?

During this whole quest, there was never a time where I was sitting back, thinking, “Well, isn’t this a fun adventure!” It was all pretty painful. One of my lowest points came in Myanmar (formerly Burma) when I found myself sneaking into a closed-off war zone in pursuit of the fish. That was pretty nerve-racking. In terms of the awe it inspires, nothing could beat the Amazon rain forest. This was my first time in South America, and I found myself days from civilization in the jungle. The Amazon Basin is the same size as the continental U.S