On my eighteenth birthday, my parents asked me where I wanted to go and I chose the zoo. I knew it is not the best place to grow up, but there lived the only panda in my hometown, who I kept visiting when I was a small kid, and who many years later, when she had already passed away, I found was the most long-lived panda in the world. Visiting this panda could be very boring, because almost every time I went there, she was sleeping with her back towards the window, rarely moving, which is natural for an aged granny to do but only understandable to an older me. But when talking about panda, I was enchanted. I could stay there all day, watching her yellowish back hair, holding my breath to feel her heaving chest, and waiting, always waiting for an occasional yawn or an idle turnover. In summer she enjoyed the air conditioning and lay by a big ice cube, always surrounded by dry bamboo leaves and thick bamboo stems she didn’t bother to eat. I could stay there until everybody left and my mother seated dozing aside. Disappointed, exhausted, my feet aching, my waist stiffening, I stood still. I didn’t know why but I had to see.

     That day my parents were wise enough to bring me to a show before visiting the narcoleptic panda. We saw normal things, a bear riding a unicycle, a monkey standing upside down on a sheep, and tigers lining up to jump through fire rings. When we came out of the tent, we saw a short girl and a red bucket. There was a small show not free in the zoo, only performed by this girl. A few tourists stayed when hearing the word “snake.” I guess my father was willing to buy extra tickets because it was my birthday. I, most afraid of snakes, lingered because this could be a part of my fear resistance program. Since I found I was scared by snakes, I began to read books like The Secret of Snake Island and news articles on people harassed by these cruel creatures, including a girl who drank spring water and bred two snakes in her stomach, and a man whose penis was bitten by a snake that crawled into his toilet through the sewer. I watched the movie Anacondas and documentaries on viper, cobra, and python. Perhaps it was time to see snakes without a screen.

     I sat there, ready to be shocked and disgusted. The girl with a pony tail, thinner and smaller than me, was around my age. A wrinkled grey-haired man stood behind her, who looked like her grandfather but might actually be her father, which is normal if you grew up laboring on the farm in the country. They must come to the city for an easier life, after many years’ hard work. It was disappointing though. When the girl removed the lid and reached into the bucket, what she took out was not a big clammy snake that would raise its head and hiss. A small black snake, a little longer than a pencil, coiled in her palm, and she lifted it up, taking a look at its head before putting it in her mouth. She had to pinch the snake and push it several times to force it to slither in. Then she closed her mouth and probably stirred her tongue. The girl tried to smile. I stared at her throat and waited. I had only seen girls swallowing daggers. It took a while, and the poor snake finally found its way, crawling out from her right nostril. But soon she opened her mouth and pressed the writhing snake, making it return to the mouth. Such a performance seemed not to satisfy some viewers so she picked up a bigger snake and also put it in her mouth. We got to see two snakes creeping out of her nostrils. A man whistled.

     But only years later did I learn to shiver, when remembering what my mother told me as a little girl. “You’re lucky,” more than once she said. “You can live a decent life just because you were born here, not there.”

Pembroke 49 (March 2017)