Moth Logistics

The mosquitoes have returned to Nanchong, back from their timeshare vacation in Thailand. I didn't notice them at first. I figured the constant buzzing in my ears was the televised vuvuzelan ambiance of the Uruguay-Ghana game. I assumed the stinging sensation in my right lovehandle was merely the onset of my usual late night Nescafe DTs. I sat there writing. Twitching and writing. Itching. And writing. Backspacing. Rewriting. Twitching. Itching some more. Then I whirled around to see that a twelve-legged helicopter with a stabber the size of a Capri-Sun straw was sucking my blood through my shirt.

I swatted the beast and tried several times to finish him on the rebound, to no avail. So I went nuclear. I picked up a nearby canister of Chinese Raid. Psssssssshhhhhhhh! Not quite a direct hit, but the ominous gray mist spread across the room and, upon contact, the mosquito buzzed a frantic mayday to his comrades, went into a tailspin, and crashed audibly to the floor. I turned the canister over and squinted at the ingredients. The Chinese symbol for death. Whatever is in this stuff, I thought, it can't be good for anyone.

Living abroad, you will find existential questions waiting for you in your morning bowl of imported Fun Pak Alpha-Bits. "ARE YOU HAPPY?" the Alpha-Bits will ask. Yes, you tell them, I suppose I am happy. "ARE YOU BECOMING A BETTER PERSON?" I dunno, you grumble, probably. "DO YOU FEEL THAT YOU ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN YOUR COMMUNITY?" By then, you're just trying to finish your cereal before it finishes you. It's hard to tell, you gurgle as you're slurping up the sickly sweet dregs, but I believe that I am. And then the Alpha-Bits have nothing left to say because you've eaten them all and moved onto Raisin Bran, who isn't much for conversation.

Existential questions may nag from time to time, but they are easy to answer because you realize by now that they are unanswerable. Far more distressing to the incompetent bachelor are more practical questions, questions of survival, questions like: Why are there so many bugs in my apartment? and, Why are bugs drawn to my apartment? and, How should I go about killing all these many bugs in my apartment without killing myself in the process?

My host family, in my deafmute days of grunting and gesturing, once gave me an electronic device that, through much grunting and gesturing, I learned was supposed to be plugged into the wall. Then, every couple days, my host family would supply me with a small teal-green tablet that bore the Chinese symbol for "bugs." After more grunting and gesturing and several rudimentary diagrams, I learned that I was supposed to slip the teal-green tablet into the machine, and that the machine, via a small heat plate, would disperse fumes that would kill on contact any and all mosquitoes, ants, cockroaches, chiggers, no-see-ems, rats, and burglars.

The heat plate machine seemed to work. But here in Nanchong, I cannot find it and wouldn't know how to ask for it. So instead, I use these DDT-frosted cinnamon roll incense sticks that take a solid ten minutes to light, and once lit, fill the apartment with a foreboding stench of indiscriminate death. The DDT cinnamon rolls get the job done, but at what cost? Minute by minute, I watch insect after insect drop to the floor like Spanish futbolistas and wriggle their legs until death sets in, and I begin to wonder whether I am biologically above all that. In the afternoons, I watch - somewhat amused, extremely disgusted - as an insectoid World War II rages in my living room. The mosquitoes come in droves, gather and mount kamikaze offensives that are suddenly and abruptly quashed by my mustard gas cocktail of DDT and cigarette smoke.

But even with the aid of chemical weapons, I am at an extreme disadvantage. I am but one man. The insects are infinite. I will reproduce when I am 35, if ever. They reproduce every two seconds, put Catholics to shame. The bugs have strength in numbers. All the DDT in China could not stop them. So, although I fear insects more than anything in the known universe - it is not rats, but cockroaches that await me in my Room 101 - I have learned to live with them. I regard them almost as pets. If you can't beat them, sublet your apartment to them. Naturally, when my six-legged roommates aren't around, questions of entomology occur to me.

Why are flies so attracted to humans? I wondered. I asked Jeeves.

"Well, old chap," he said, lighting up a Winchester, "flies are attracted to humans because humans often possess food. We are an upper class species with upper class sensibilities. Flies, as scavengers, are always on the dole. So they mooch off of us. Our pheromones attract them in droves, and once they have found us, they refuse to leave us alone."

I was eating fourthmeal at the time, so I told Jeeves to shut up. His answer was more disgusting than anything I was prepared for, and I preferred not to think about the matter any further.

Late one evening, I heard a sudden chorus of vuvuzelas overhead and glanced up at the ceiling. I was appalled to find a biker gang of black-winged insects clinging to the light bulb. I had never noticed them before. During the days, they ran rampant, but at night, I had no clue as to where they went, what they did during their afterhours. I figured they migrated down to the Jack Bar. But no, my living room ceiling was their headquarters. Their Central Perk. The Point. The light bulb was where they mated, swapped business cards, held clandestine Socialist caucuses ...

Curiosity got the better of me, so I asked Jeeves again. Say, Jeeves, why are bugs attracted to light?

"Well, old chap," he said, "nobody's quite sure about that, but I reckon ol' Jeevesy has a jolly good hunch."

He turned 'round to the blackboard.

"Nocturnal insects," he said, "use the moon as their compass star when migrating long distances. With the advent of the electric light bulb, the insect community has found itself in a sticky wicket - they think light bulbs are the bloody moon! And that's not the half of it! When they ... why, hullo ... well, what's this, then?"

A white van screeched up to the curb. The doors flew open. Jeeves's Winchester fell to the floor. One man threw a bag over Jeeves's head while the others worked on him with billy clubs. "Oh, dear me," Jeeves said, fainting as the men carried him away and dumped him in the trunk. The doors clapped shut and the van screeched off into the distance. My screen went blank. "The connection to askjeeves.com has been interrupted," it read. Weird, I said.

Though it was nearly midnight, I decided to get out of the house, away from the bugs. Outside, I ran into my neighbors and their four year-old son. This is not unusual. There is no curfew in China for children under the age of five. Parents here never miss an opportunity to show off the solitary fruit of their loins. My neighbors, a professor of basketball and his wife, a yoga instructor, were out in the courtyard, running a high-speed passing drill with their giggling son while several elderly admirers looked on.

"Hah-loo, Uncle!" whispered the father as I passed.
"Hah-loo, Uncle!" whispered the mother.
The child said nothing. He was busy eating his own hand.

"The Germans lost yesterday," I said.
"Ai-ya! I know. I wanted them to win."

My neighbors, for whatever reason, are the only people I know who are rooting for the imperialist powers in this year's World Cup. The rest of China is - or was - pulling for Brazil, Argentina, and North Korea, in that order. After North Korea lost seven-nil to Portugal, I risked a chuckle in front of my students.

"But teacher," said one student, "they tried their best."
"Yes," said another, "they tried their best."
"But seven to nothing!" I cackled. "Hilarious!"
"Very sad," said a third. "They tried their best."

A few days later, when, glowing and somewhat red in the cheeks, I told the basketball professor that the United States had defeated Algeria at the last possible second, his wife jumped up and down and clapped her hands. This is all fairly unusual, of course, but has nothing to do with anything.

"What a pity the Germans are lose," said the basketball professor, in English, and was about to continue when his son interrupted him.

"Daddy?" the boy said in Chinese, pointing at a nearby streetlamp. "Why do moths always fly towards the light?"
"Well, son," said the basketball coach. "I'm not really sure. I think they like the heat."

Instinctively, my hand shot up in the air. I knew this one. And I was stoked, stoked to have understood the exchange, and stoked to be privy to such a formative moment in the life of a Chinese youth.

"Actually, I just asked my friend the same question," I said, thinking of poor Jeeves. "He is a bug expert."

The basketball professor nodded dubiously.

"It turns out - well. You see," I said, fumbling for my vocabulary, "moths like to travel. They travel to very far away places, very late at night. The moon helps them find where they are going. They are not used to electric light. It is a new invention. The moths think light bulbs are the moon. So they fly to the moon, so to speak."

It took my neighbor a moment to sort out my clunky syntax, but when he did, he nudged his son and said, "You hear that? Moths think light bulbs are the moon!"

His son laughed, amused.

"Well, good night, Uncle," said the basketball professor.
"Good night. Uncle," said the kid.

And in the moment, I did feel like an uncle. Just wait 'til they get a load of the pull-my-finger gag. I bid the neighbors goodnight and, gazing up at the half-eaten moon, fluttered off to a neon light on the dark side of town.

Igo ani jana.

It's like The Shawshank Redemption. All the English teachers here are chiseling their days into the walls, pacing like caged pumas up and down the streets, chain smoking, tunneling through the floor with rock hammers by moonlight. I, myself, have a d-day countdown running on my cell phone: 271 days until I fly away. I am not homesick and life is not even that unbearable here, but it would be silly for me to deny it: Korea is a stepping stone.

I did not come to Korea because I am a kimchi connoisseur, because I enjoy being stared and pointed at, because I have a penchant for hostile languages or because I thought second-hand radiation might do me some good. I am here unabashedly for the money. But I want the money so I can travel, so that I can become poor again, so that I can work, so that I can travel, so that I can become poor once again, so that I can keep growing and dying and growing, so that I can keep moving without ever having to stay still, all that idealistic bullshit. That bullshit is my plan and it will not become reality. Something will get in the way: I will get pregnant, my kidneys will spontaneously burst, my nose will fall off, my ears will melt down the sides of my head, I will get the guinea worm. But the universe is a large place; I would at least like to get to know the planet I'm stuck on.


Starting with the Oprah restaurant two blocks from my apartment.


Daegu is divided into specialized districts with a trillion specialized shops selling the exact same junk for the exact same price. So on Sunday night, when the Bostonian and I wandered downtown for all-you-can-eat at a foreigner bar, we first had to pass through a pet shop district, a used tuba district, a Protestant Church district, a wig district, and a district of boarded-up windows, scattered plastic bags full of ball bearings, and discordant faraway piano tinkles - en route to the foreigner bar district, where foreigners go to sniff each other's asses, and drink.

The buffet was packed and buzzing with the hysteria of a hundred human beings united in a quest to eat themselves to death for fifteen bucks a head. After finishing our fourth course, the Bostonian and I decided to sample some of the insect cuisine, one bug apiece, with lemons for chasers just in case. It was a brownish bug, maybe some sort of larva, football-shaped, a chewy morsel with a dash of crustacean pizzazz. I had just about choked the thing down when a blue-shirted Korean man at the table next to me collapsed and went into a seizure.

I've always imagined my moment of truth to be a dramatic or at least somewhat distracting affair, drawing some concerned glances and maybe a paramedic or two. But this poor bastard just lay on the floor writhing around for five minutes while his friends sat with their beers stalled en route to their mouths. The guy must have stopped breathing, so the hero of the bunch felt obligated to kneel down and give a few halfhearted chest compressions. Meanwhile, a drunk expat across the room stood up and performed an impeccable reenactment of the "Da Bears" SNL skit, pounding on his chest, hacking and pantomiming the projectile dislodgement of a Philly cheese steak, a hot dog, or something.

The bug was still on my tongue so I swallowed it and reached for a lemon. A man in an orange jumpsuit parted the gathering crowd with a stretcher. A tense but mostly impatient silence weighed heavy on the buffet as people waited for it to become socially acceptable to go back for more cocktail wienies. At the bar, a Korean was bellowing without using his honorific forms because the weissbier was kaput.

Finally, the seizing man ceased seizing and rose to his feet. I fought that primal American spectator's instinct to give him a standing O, realizing morbidly that he could collapse again at any second and die. He staggered around a bit, let out a few probably incoherent words (doubly incoherent because I don't know Korean), looked around, scratched his head, and bowed ashamedly to the onlooking crowd, deciding by default that he was terribly drunk. His two friends grabbed him by the arms and grumbled as they dragged him out of the bar. Your worst enemy is your own nervous system (Orwell, 43).

The Bostonian had not finished his bug.

"Eat up." I pointed a chopstick.

"Fuck you," he said.