All Creatures Great and Small

Spring is the wet season in Hong Kong. That means if it's not raining when I walk outside then it feels like I'm walking into an exhale––hot and heavy.* It also means lots of new life.

The trees outside are getting greener and occasionally explode into Skittle-colored blossoms, the campus lawn needs a haircut, the birds and cicadas are double forte, and the frogs at night chirp in the drains where it all goes down. The wet season brings all kinds of new life outside, and inside too.

My apartment has its own ecosystem. I've dealt with the ants all year, and by "dealt with" I mean, "lived with."The ants feed off crumbs and bits of detritus and spend most of their time on the floor. They're small, tasteless, harmless and have yet to ruin any food source in my cupboards. I have seen a couple of bigger ants recently though. They're grey gnarly looking suckers, warrior ants. Three or four times the size of the little browns, and much faster. Along with the ants are the lizards. They're small, half the length of a pen and about an inch wide toe to toe. I'm not sure what they eat, but they spend most of their time on canopy of the high walls. Besides the lizards, the most recent visitor brought in by the wet season are cockroaches. The first one I saw was lying on his back in the middle of my living room. I thought he was dead, until I touched him. They're the size of a quarter, squeezed on the sides. For a while, I kept finding one at a time. I'd scoop the quick-witted little scraper into a tupperware and throw him outside into the bushes––catch and release. About the third time, I began suspecting I had a repeat offender on my hands. The next time, I decided to not release him. My plan was to keep him in his plastic prison for a week, putting punitive punishment to the test. Well, he didn't make it. Not even a week. What kind of a cockroach can't live a week? One morning I found him on his back. Maybe he fell over and decided to call it quits. In the meantime, another one of his cohorts showed up in my trash can, so my theory that there was only one didn't hold up.

Of all the creatures great and small living in my apartment, the one I hate the most is mold. Nothing is safe. Clothes, pillows, walls, coats, computer cases, basketballs, and food have all fallen victim to this silent grower. We'll see who gets the last laugh after I recruit a few Chinese chemicals to my side.



* The exhale idea was introduced to me by the History teacher.

The Year of the Dragon (Part 2: The Mushu Invasion)

Chinese dragons and Western dragons are different. Part 1 describes these differences in detail, but the short is this: Western dragons are scaly mean loners, and Chinese dragons are fuzzy inclusive good-luck charms. Opposites really, or are they?

In the last fifty years the differences between Western and Eastern dragons have softened like rotting avocados.  Movies such as How to Tame Your Dragon, Mulan, and Puff the Magic Dragon all challenge the traditional image of the mean Western dragon archetype. These films cast dragons as friendly, helpful, and approachable. They aren't monsters, they're misunderstood.

On the surface, this doesn't seem like a major problem. In fact, it might even seem positive to recast the  people-eater dragon of the Western psyche, at least it gives kids one less thing to fear on campouts. But even though it may seem harmless, don't be fooled.  It's a real problem. Actually, I think it's a conspiracy.

It's no secret that eastern religion is spreading through conservative churches in the West faster than mold  through a box of Yakima Peaches.  Practices such as meditation, thinking, and eating rice as a 'healthy alternative' to cheddar-cheese, are becoming common place in many denominations, and Adventism is no exception. All kinds of literature from people who have travelled to different countries is being published by the Pacific Press and the Review and Herald. There is even a book being passed around Adventist circles called, "The China Study." It's a problem with no easy solution.

At the center of this systematic easternization is none other than the dragon himself. Think about it, the roots of an 'evil dragon' don't stem from some lonely German village in the dark ages. No, they stem back much further, back to "The Apocalypse of John," and even "Genesis" itself. The roots of the 'evil dragon' archetype are tangled in scripture. They are rooted in scripture.

The Western dragon is under attack, because they (the enemy) know if they can make the dragon more approachable, honest everyday people everywhere, will buy more Apple products, just like Eve did. That's right, why do you think the Macintosh symbol has a bite taken out of it? Don't buy in. And if you come across a dragon in the wild, don't, under any circumstance (baring the apocalypse), pet it.

There are no coincidences.