Eating Ants

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I ate some ants the other day. I thought they were just ant eggs with rice. And I eat chicken eggs so I thought it’d be okay. And maybe they were just eggs but I could see the fully formed ant, legs reaching for the sky amidst a bowl of rice.


Embryos? I ask the table of co-workers. They don’t know.

I stop with the ants and Sarah and I order some tofu. We are sitting cross-legged at a long bamboo table at a restaurant on Little Yen Phu road. An after work, ‘drinks and bites’ for a departing British colleague.

For once, there are two others at the table who don’t eat meat. But the question is eventually directed at me. You’d think I’d be good at answering it after seven years. But there are a million reasons why. I could cite everything from personal health to the global economy but what really surges through me is, ‘I don’t want to kill animals.’

A pathetic response. Nobody does.

‘They’re already dead,’ the automatic retort.

I wish I could explain that pain receptors are pain receptors and love is an instinct. But then, I’m in Vietnam. And my parents didn’t grow up eating insects because Boston never got shelled to shit by a foreign government.

I’m only right in the east coast suburbs where no one’s heard of bee larva patties.

It turns out to be a nice meal even though it’s the kind with one conversation at each end of a table of twelve.

We work with great people. But everyone keeps treating Sarah and me as though we’re adults. As though we’ve been out of the womb of dining hall binges and sticky-floor parties for more than four months.

We Uber home, past the neon lights advertising karaoke bars and bikers careening around drunk or sober. I’m wondering why we’ve been accepted into this cult of adulthood. We’ve been swept along to the workshops and the meetings and I’ve actually taught classes for a week. Little Vietnamese kids come in wailing and wielding plastic pencil cases and when I tell them to take out their workbooks for homework check, they do it.

Now I’m the performer. Now I’m the clown in my dad’s old button-down and my Plato’s Closet slacks. I scribble in red, black, and blue on the whiteboard and kids slide out of their chairs and I turn my voice into what eighth-grade-Mr. Coxon used to sound like. Shit. He was dick. Was he?

The Uber pulls up in front of our iron gate. I fiddle the lock and slide the gate for Sarah to pass through and we clamber up the stairs to our second floor apartment. I turn the keys on the ring until I find the bronze-age-abortion-instrument that opens our door. I get it on the seventh try.

I’m sweating like Fat Albert as we walk in and put down our bags. I’m still hungry and go to the kitchen to make myself a bowl of seaweed soup. With lots of chili and soy sauce it gets rid of the texture of ants in my mouth. I tip back the broth and curl up in bed, arms and legs coming together like the ants in my bowl. I close my eyes and wonder why they were white.

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Photos

Neighborhood walk by Truc Bach Lake