Letters From Narnia

When I was in Grade 4, my father was posted to the American Embassy in Kuala Lumpur.  Coming from Moscow and winters so cold our spitballs would freeze into deadly bullets, it was quite a shock to find ourselves in the tropics.  Gone were the roly poly Babushkas selling the freshest baked bread.  They were replaced by riots between races, blazing hot sun, and durian (fruit that smells like the Dead).  In Moscow, we lived in an apartment, and the closest we came to wild animals were the little tadpoles that my big sister brought home from a pond she explored on a school fieldtrip to the country.  The tadpoles grew up and the tiny baby frogs hopped out of the fish tank and disappeared, only to be discovered weeks later behind the couches; desiccated little mummies of despair.  In Malaysia, there was more animal life than we were prepared to handle.

The embassy gave us a lovely large home to live in, with a housekeeper (amah, who we always called Ayii) and a gardener.  Marble floors downstairs, wooden parquet upstairs.  The entire living room downstairs could open up onto our marble patio with sliding doors the length of the room.  Not that we ever did that. You see, there were snakes.  Not just any snakes; poisonous snakes.  Snakes that you see in horror movies — 6 foot cobras just taking strolls through our garden.  Our gardener was a very large Indian man named Gabon.  He was a giant, but he was gentle; so gentle that his religion forbade the killing of any living beings.  So these cobras would be throwing a party in the back yard, and my mom would call out, “Gabon!  Please kill the cobra over there! “And he would smile at her, nod his head, then pick up the cobra by the tail and fling it over the garden hedge.  For all I know, it could have been the same damn cobra coming back into our yard day after day, with Gabon throwing it over the hedge over and over again.

When Gabon was off, my mom would take matters into her own hands.  She’d be talking on the phone with my dad in the middle of the day, gazing out on the patio, see a snake slithering in the grass, say, “excuse me, Dave, I’ll be right back,” put down the phone, go upstairs and get my father’s gun that was hanging on the bedpost (we’ll talk about my dad later), come back downstairs, pick up the phone and say, “what were you saying?” while she took aim and shot at the snake.  It got to where I didn’t even look up from my book at the sound of gunfire.  Just another day at the Hess Residence. 

The snakes seemed to live on the philosophy that what was theirs was theirs, and what was ours was theirs too.  We would be eating dinner, hear a soft “plop” sound of something falling out of the honking big plants my mom insisted on displaying all over our house, someone would yell, “SNAKE” and we’d all jump on top of our huge round dining table, screaming for Ayii to come kill the snake with a broom. 

And it didn’t end with our house.  We lived about 30 minutes from our school, the International School of Kuala Lumpur.  It was 30 minutes if you walked on the road with the other civilized people.  Someone in my family came up with the Brilliant Plan to send my sisters and me through a local rubber tree plantation as a shortcut.  Yes, the walk would take only 15 minutes.  But those would be 15 minutes of weaving around smelly rubber trees with sticky sap oozing into grimy harvesting cups, slapping ourselves silly through swarms of malaria-ridden mosquitoes, and shuffling through underbrush SEETHING with poisonous snakes.  Forget about the modern worries of pedophiles and serial killers that could be lurking in jungles, lying in wait for 3 tasty little girls walking to school…that never crossed anyone’s mind in 1978. 

My sisters and I did our best to protest this dangerous idea: why couldn’t we ever be like other normal kids and have our parents drive us to school???  My father’s response was, “You are not normal, nor will you ever be.”  This sentence went on to forge the 3 of us girls into the absolute raving lunatics we are today.  My mom’s response was, “LOOK!  I found these perfect little snakebite kits.  They have a razorblade and a little rubber suction cup, and directions showing you how to slice open your snake bite and suck out the venom.  Also, here are 3 large wooden walking sticks.  Beat the bushes – that will scare away the snakes.”  Well, there you go.  Problem solved.

15 minutes of terror and dozens of mosquito bites every morning, followed by 15 minutes of terror and more mosquito bites in the afternoons.  The moments when we would burst out of the jungle onto our school soccer field felt like we had reached the Promised Land.  Going home, the jungle would spit us out onto a paved road, and we would silently say a prayer of thanks for one more journey survived.  We knew that the rest of the walk to the house would be safe.

Well, relatively safe.  There was a large Monitor lizard that lived in the coconut trees in the grassy area between our house and the main road.  When the herds of sacred cows were grazing there, he kept to the treetops.  Actually, when the sacred cows were there, we all had to steer clear.  We were forbidden to shoo them away.  We were forbidden to even talk to them disrespectfully – after all, any one of them could have been somebody’s grandma or grandpa, according to the Hindus.  They just wandered all around the city, pooping and eating wherever they pleased.  ANYWAY, the monitor lizard must have been resentful of his house arrest and one day came running towards my big sister like he wanted to eat her for dinner.  This thing was at least 5 feet long, big and green, and his mouth was open as he aimed for her.  Of course we all screamed (and when Hess Girls scream, we make a sonic boom), so he veered off course right before he hit her, and ran up another coconut tree.  The 3 of us shakily wobbled our way home, grateful for the opportunity to live to see another day.

The wildlife was out to get us, the heat and humidity were out to get us, and at times it seemed our own mother was out to get us.  She had some weird ideas.  First of all, the 3 of us girls came to that country with waist-length beautiful hair.  The first thing my mother does is sit us down, put bowls on our heads, and cut off all of it.  I kid you not.  And these were not just haircuts, they were butchering.  She kept muttering, “Oh, that’s crooked.”  Snip snip.  20 minutes later my hair was above my ears, and it was STILL crooked.  A truly awesome look for the first day of school as the fat new kid.  One night, she sat us all down at the dining table and said she had a surprise for dinner.  She told us we had to close our eyes and take a bite.  We were all wary of this.  My parents used to tell us to do that every time they wanted us to try things like sheep’s’ brains and pig intestines, “just try it first and THEN we will tell you what it is!” – With evil grins on their faces.  Anyway, we were gullible (still are) and took big bites and chewed.  And chewed.  Funky meat, tasting slightly ammonia-like…”what is this, Mom?” (even my dad didn’t know).  Her bright grin and the word, “TIGER!” shocked the hell out of us.  Apparently our amah’s family had hunted a tiger (yeah yeah, I know – illegal, horrible, etc) and had presented my mom with some of the meat.  It was a great honor.  However, as my big sister and my dad pointed out, it was also full of feline parasites so we should all “SPIT IT OUT SPIT IT OUT!”  That was another moment when I wondered, “Why can’t I just have a normal family?”

One night our house was robbed while we were sleeping.  The robbers left knives next to my little sister’s bed.  The very next day, while my dad rigged the house with an advanced alarm system, my mom went to the local SPCA and came home with 7 dogs.  SEVEN, yes SEVEN dogs.  Aw, cute, you say?  Guess whose job it was to be the family pooper scooper?  Sue Lin Freaking Hess.  And when I pointed out that I was in danger from snakes in the garden while I was doing my vile job, guess what my mommy did for me?  She came home with 5 full-grown geese.  Not just any geese.  Attack geese.  But did they attack snakes?  No, they attacked fat little girls with crooked haircuts.       

Malaysia was not all terror-filled and deadly.  Well, other than that time when there was a riot and people were chopping each other’s heads off with machetes and we were forbidden to leave our house for days…ummm, where was I?  Oh yes.  There were rambutans – a heavenly sweet juicy fruit that resembled furry lychee.  And there were gentle orangutans.  And ditches next to the roads that were filled with gloriously colored guppies – the kind of guppies that you would pay hundreds of dollars for from fancy breeders in pet stores in North America. We just scooped them up in our hands and ran all the way home to plop them into our fish tanks.  And there was Christmas in the Raffles Hotel in Singapore (the cleanest place on earth), and once a week there was Little House on the Prairie on our tiny little black and white television in our kitchen; commercial-free except for the 5 o’clock Muslim prayer that we would happily sing along to, having no clue as to the meaning of the words. 

For one hour a week, I could pretend I was Laura Ingalls Wilder, living far far away from the poisonous snakes and the dreadful heat, living in the kind of wilderness where the only wild animals were bears and wolves and coyotes and HEEEYYYYYYY, I guess you can call me Laura, y’all.