Teddy Bears versus the Birds

Can a stuffed panda save the world from magpie devastation?

Magpies are considered good luck in Chinese tradition; they're harbingers of positive changes coming. That's great. I need all the good luck I can latch onto lately. I doubt it was a Chinese farmer who came up with that superstition, though.

At first we thought all the holes in our cabbage leaves were caused by snails, until one morning my wife looked outside and saw a black blanket of birds covering our mini-farm. After one loud hand clap, a hundred magpies lifted off and perched in surrounding trees, waiting for their next chance to attack. There are a lot of magpies around lately, and they make sure you know it. We don't need an alarm clock to wake us up in the morning.

Those little black and white birds may be pests, but they're also kind of cute. Maybe that's why Ah-Po is fighting cute with cute. Instead of using scarecrows, her farm looks like an execution ground for plush toys, as if warning avian intruders: "This could be you!" She has pandas, Hello Kitties, C3PO, Disney characters and several species of teddy bear, all gruesomely impaled on bamboo spikes or twisting in the breeze on nooses. It isn't a sight you'd want your five-year-old to see.

Where does she get all these toys? Does she snatch them out of the clasping arms of her own grandchildren? Ah-Po won't say. She claims they just kind of "show up". Maybe she's breeding them in a secret room, like factory farmed animals, raised for slaughter.

I actually believe that plush toys are capable of procreating. The 5000+ stuffed animals in my teenage daughter's room came from somewhere, and I sure didn't buy even a fraction of them. Yet every time I glance at her closet, there seems to be more adorable animals. Maybe we should put some of them to use protecting our food supply.

On the other hand, would you want your garden to look like a cutesy-wutesy slaughterhouse?

Hanging Notice

Like a corpse hanging from a noose, this government notice was discovered dangling from the guard rail today. It contained numerous pages and was laminated, which indicated it was a serious notice.

Indeed it was. They want to pave over part of our garden!

That wasn't the only thing mentioned in 14 single-spaced pages of English and Chinese, but to me it was the most significant.

At long last the government intends to bring a sewer system to Wang Tong. This is a good thing. Houses here rely on septic tanks, not all of which are well-maintained. And when you crowd six generations of a family, plus all their cousins and in-laws into a small house, which is pretty common in this part of the world, it can put a strain on a septic system, as can be seen occasionally in the form of mucky, oily filth leeching into the stream. Many houses rely on septic tanks only for their flushing water, so you can usually tell when certain households are doing their laundry or just finished brushing their teeth. In other words, it can get pretty disgusting. The fish and crabs in Wang Tong Stream, not to mention the human children who play in the brackish outflow where the stream crosses the beach, will live longer, healthier lives once the sewers are in.

But they want to slice off a piece of our garden! They'll need to remove a beautiful (and expensive) granite wall and self-designed cast iron sunflower fence. They'll pave over flower beds and adolescent fruit trees near the border. For what? Most likely just for the temporary purpose of allowing machinery through a narrow section of the footpath. This is government, so expecting them to put things back the way they were after the job is done is like asking Godzilla to clean up after himself when he's finished devouring the population of Tokyo.

Worse, this is the Hong Kong Chinese government. Worse than that, it's Hong Kong Chinese government engineers. Who live and work in the city. If you tell such people that their plans require paving over greenery and killing trees, their response is likely to be: "You mean... that isn't a good thing?"

I'm all for the improvement to the environment the sewerage will bring. But it's depressing that it may happen at the expense of a small but irreplaceable portion of my own environment. I've written a letter of objection and asked for a meeting with the engineers. Please, kind sirs, a stay of execution for our flowers.

Wang Tong People: Mr. Mak

Mr. Mak just finished putting in a garden for a house on the east side of the village. He built the wall and did the landscaping.

His own garden is not a great advertisement for his services. He lives in one of the tiny old-style village houses overlooking the Wang Tong Stream. Clipped to his chain link fence is a hand-scrawled sign on a piece of driftwood, in Chinese and English:

Lantau Horticultural Society
Garden Design

Inside the fence is a scattered hodge-podge of plants and short trees, some in pots and some in the ground. The misnamed Horticultural Society which he presides over is really a bonsai club. Once or twice a year the group puts on a public exhibit of their miniature trees and fantasy Chinese landscapes, many of which are elaborately beautiful. I wish I could say the same for Mak's own garden. He's done a nice job for his client, though, a foreigner who bought the house last year.

Mr. Mak grew up in Wang Tong, the son of his father's Hong Kong wife (the China wife still lived across the border in Guangdong). When Mak was seven, his father ran off to South Africa to work in a Chinese restaurant, and married his third wife there. Mak and his two brothers stayed behind with their mother in Wang Tong, living off the meager remittances his father sent back.

When he was seven his mother died, and his father sent his South African wife (of course she was Chinese) back to Lantau to care for the children. Several years later his father returned, with enough savings to buy land around Mui Wo and provide a more comfortable life for his family.

I knew his father, a jovial old guy who always sat outside his little pink house overlooking the stream and handed Chinese candy to any kid who walked past.

I was surprised when the president of the Lantau Horticultural Society cut down the entire lovely bamboo grove next to his father's house right after he died. He must have his reasons. Some Chinese believe hollow plants like bamboo provide refuge for ghosts. Maybe he didn't want other ghosts hanging around his dad's place like spirit vagrants. Or maybe the bamboo was just too wild and unkempt for a bonsai enthusiast. We never discuss it. Which ever way you look at it, he's a gardener, and gardeners deserve respect.

Snakes in the Garden (again)

Our gardener phoned me. "Sir! Snakes in the lily pond!"

Did she say snakes...with a second S?

At the end of our garden we built a small pond and planted water lilies. The pond is fed by a little trickle of a stream at the edge of the property, entering through an opening in the back and exiting through the side, where it flows into the vegetable farm next door. The pond quickly became home to scores of tiny fish and, within a few months, was filled with tadpoles. Usually you can find frogs of various sizes hanging out on a lily pad. One day we discovered two large turtles chilling out in there; the next day they had moved on. But this was the first time we'd had snakes in the pond. I called the police to send the snake squad and ran downstairs (unfortunately forgetting my camera; I took the photo of the pond this morning, mainly because a gorgeous lily had just opened)

Nothing brings out the primeval gut feeling that we humans are just animals than when you face a snake. Fear, revulsion, the urge to flee and an urge to kill all well up inside and the skin tingles with adrenalin. I've been face-to-face with a brown bear and armed muggers, but the fight-or-flight response is never so intense as when there's a snake in front of me. In this case, not one but two slender dark brown snakes were curled up in the pond, their narrow heads breaking the surface. One rose up and looked at us curiously. Then the other.

And then they started to dance. They curled around each other, uncurled, then curled again in the other direction. Were they playing? Was it a mating dance? Do snakes mate in the water? Whatever they were doing, I couldn't help but think that they looked like they were having fun.

The police snake catchers arrived. They said it would be difficult to catch them in the water, since they couldn't be pinned down, and in any case they looked like non-venomous water snakes. My wife arrived home early from work and joined the crowd. Just as we were discussing whether they might be rat snakes (also non-venomous), one languidly crawled up over the edge of the pond, turned away from us, then calmly crossed the stream and disappeared into the farm next door. The other must have snuck out the water inlet hole, because there was no sign of it.

In the year and a half since we moved into our new house, we've had numerous snake visits. During the construction, a Burmese python ("The biggest one I've ever seen in my life" said one of the construction workers, who grew up in the countryside), passed right through our future living room. After we moved in, one morning a rat snake, easily nine feet long, was resting in the shade outside the kitchen door. When it saw me it lifted its head and indignantly traveled across the garden, over the wall and into the wild ginger field on the other side. We've had several black cobras pop their heads out of holes in the wall. Those are the ones I really hate. They're poisonous and short-tempered. I've had more close encounters with cobras than I can count in my 18 years in Wang Tong.

The oddest snake incident occurred one evening when Cathy, my wife, ran in from watering the garden. "I nearly stepped on a snake!" She grabbed a flashlight and our snake identification book. Next to a papaya tree was a muscular snake curled up like a garden hose. It had a stunning pattern of black and white rings around the length of its body. It turned out to be a banded krait, uncommon in this part of China, and so venomous that its bite will kill an adult human in 8 hours. The police sent over a brilliant snake catcher, who used a flashlight and a bamboo stick to actually hypnotize the reptile. He then stunned it with a tap on the head, and did something I'd never dare: he picked up the living but woozy snake and tossed it into a bag. Kraits are a protected species, so he had no intention of killing it. It would be taken to a remote spot and released.

Lucky for those snakes I'm not Chinese and my wife isn't a snake eater. In our previous house on the other side of the village, whenever anyone shouted "Snake!" several local men would come running with sacks and bamboo sticks. They could name instantly the species of the snake, as well as the price per pound of its meat. Their goal: catch whatever it was alive, carry it home and drop it into a pot of boiling water.

When the two snakes scurried away after their brief romp in our pond I actually felt kind of touched. They'd enjoyed a refreshing mid-summer-day swim, perhaps a little afternoon delight, and gone back to work. Live and let live, even snakes.