I have just found myself a new sport, and anyone who is a big-nose old Taiwan hand, like myself, will understand just how sporting it is.
As life has become so modern and so civilized in Taiwan, there has also come a certain nostalgia for the old days, say forty years ago, when cockroaches were the size of small mice, and they climbed up the drain holes in the tiled baths in the hundreds especially when typhoons flooded them out of the benjo ditches by the sides of the lanes. And occasionally when in the dead of night you chased one in your bedroom with a thick tuo-xie raised in your hand, and the cornered cockroach would turn and charge. Those were the days of heroism. Heroism fighting the ghosts of Cash-My-Check, too.
Myself, I have to brag that I once did battle with “cockroaches” that were six-feet-tall, maybe, and built like Al Capone’s buddies, and it was a battle of wits where you had to make them feel small and dirty, like by ducking through narrow gaps between the old houses to lose them, and then coming up behind them with a rustle and a derisory smile. Then they would cry crocodile tears, like they had a wife and child to support, and if they didn’t report correctly on your movements and contacts they would be in trouble. Sympathy for cockroaches? But those days are long gone.
In those days too mosquitoes roared thickly along the canals, like at the tree-lined canal along the side of National Taiwan University that has now become the four-lane roar of traffic where Hsinsheng joins Roosevelt, and these buzzards raised welts as wide as a Chiang Kai-shek NT$10 coin, itching and festering for days.
Moreover, they visited you at night in your bedroom, like a multitude of incubi, and your eye or lip would be swollen in some crooked grimace the next day. You could sweat under sheets covering your head, doubled so they hopefully couldn’t insert a proboscis through the threads, or you could leave the lights on and blast the fan directly to discourage them mildly. But next morning, after restless hours when a hand carelessly flung out from under the pillow had became an itching mass that you wished you could cut off, revenge was sweet. The mosquitoes sat on the wall, lethargic and fat black, stuffed with their meal of blood, sitting ducks. You could get half of them, eventually, with a fly swatter or a heavy damp towel. Even though they saw it coming, they flew too slowly with their gory load, and as soon as they settled again on a white wall, they got it. All that flailing was good morning exercise, and imparted a sense of justifiable homicide, if not genocide, as you wiped off your own blood smeared in a stripe across the wall. However, if you didn’t wash it off while fresh, it would bear witness to the violence until the next whitewash. But they deserved it.
When I lived in New Jersey near the old railroad yards I used to see huge mosquitoes do a maneuver like Houdini, pressing their legs together and squeezing through a screen gap that was only big enough for their bodies. The mosquitoes are smaller in Taiwan, and I haven’t seen the Houdini routine here, where the people have also been accused of being meek and easily intimidated.
Now most of the paddy fields are covered over with the concrete jungle, and we live in high rises with tight-fitting screens; less breeding grounds. However, my ten cats and the litter boxes out on the porch can be a powerful mosquito magnet. Especially when it rains, they come in from the wet and seek out the warm bodies, furred and unfurred, in my apartment.
So my new sport, which I must admit now is not really too sporting, like most modern sports, is a new form of mosquito genocide. I can’t imagine why I didn’t think of it earlier. I bought the canister vacuum cleaner five years ago, but then since it riles the cats, I didn’t like to turn it on. Now, however, I have discovered that I can get over a 90% kill rate, and it is fast and bloodless. The mosquitoes don’t react to the hum of the machine, maybe it even lulls them, and the long tube reaches to the ceiling if I carry the canister in the other hand. You approach slowly from the side, and when they feel the pull of the air stream, they try to hold on rather than flit, so you can get three or four squatting in one wall area, and then go on to another area, as long as you don’t get one bouncing around and warning the others. You can even suck them out of crevices. I wake up in the morning and right away sweep the bedroom and bathroom walls, and clear the fur balls out of the corners for good measure; by now the cats are watching my kill rate intensely and jealously. But sometimes it is imperative to do this at four o’clock in the morning, and the neighbors must think I have evolved into an insane house cleaner, and it is better not to confront me.
I’ve been known to vituperously attack green as well as blue, in some previously imperative moral order. But the world is not so black and white anymore, and the mosquitoes are just dark gray. I don’t think anyone will stand up for them, and a little collateral damage is unavoidable. True, they are rather trivial prey. But I have to protect my household and my way of life, and keep my little world free of terror (except that exercised by me, of course).
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