#THE HIDDEN MOVIE COCKROACH DRIVER#
#THE HIDDEN MOVIE COCKROACH SERIES#

вЂWhy all this self-flagellation?вЂ™ she asked. We were sharing a green-pea guacamole at our favourite rooftop bar in Surry Hills on a Monday night. My sister, Grete, a precocious young writer, became impatient with my dithering. I was therefore wary of how my own white identity, and particularly my white-supremacist leanings, might skew the narrative of how I journeyed to understand what life is like for a much-maligned insect. Like Donna Chang in the US television sitcom Seinfeld, I had always-due to my surname-been mistaken as an individual of Chinese descent. I was, of course, conscious of the fact that I am a white, straight, cisgender, middle-class woman of the Anthropocene. Could I overcome my terror of the cockroach? And what could this creature teach me about resilience in the face of personal despair?ДЇirst, however, I needed to address a preliminary question: who was I to tell the story of the humble cockroach? I was curious about whether this encounter was a sign that my life journey was meant to have some relationship with this lowly creature, said to be able to survive an apocalypse. I asked myself why I had always been so fearful of the cockroach. I was Emma Thompson in that Christmas movie, whose husband Snape turns out to be infatuated with that bobbed woman who opens her legs. I was suddenly Bridget Jones alone in her flat, being eaten by Alsatians. There I was, lying on the floor, drug-addled, alcoholic, dysfunctional and possibly barren (I hadnвЂ™t checked). I had arrived at my own Eat, Pray, Love moment. It dawned on me that in despising the cockroach, I was really projecting onto it my self-hatred, accumulated over so many years. I had let my living space fall into such neglect that it had been overrun by this cockroach, which proceeded to swarm around me on the marble floor.ДЄs the roach went berserk checking out my upmarket apartment, I began to examine my revulsion. Paralysed with terror, I lay there for an eternity as the horrid thing parked itself on my forehead and began to chew on my left eyebrow. I could see its antennae swaying over my eyes. This continued for some time, until one morning I woke up at two on the kitchen floor with something crawling across my face. Every CBD landmark within view closed in on me вЂ“ cackling, distorted. I lay about the apartment weeping and downing Bacardi Breezers, and consuming all manner of drugs while draped over the balcony railing. Things got what one might call вЂquite badвЂ™. I accepted this nature-essay commission, for instance, despite my conviction that nature is overrated. I began to piece together freelance gigs that did not interest me. No longer a kept woman, I had been forced to return to my writing career. By the time I got home on the night of the procedure, the love of my life had already vacated our shared apartment in Potts Point and taken up with Lenton in our second home in Mosman. A celebrity dentist, he had fallen in love with a close friend of mine, Patrick Lenton, who had come to him for a root canal, and obviously much more besides. In the years preceding my trip into remote China, I had been accused of murder, survived a fire, and had finally been dumped by my fiancГ© вЂ“ via Snapchat. Thirty-four years old, I had recently endured a run of terrible luck.

#THE HIDDEN MOVIE COCKROACH SERIES#

The series of events that have led me to this place can be described as calamitous but not unheard-of for a woman of my age. She and the bird look at me with disgust. Overcome with nausea, I throw up all over the shrivelled woman on my right, who has been plucking a live chicken on her lap. The toadвЂ™s hind legs hang limply from the snakeвЂ™s jaws. As I stare out the window to steady my stomach, I catch a glimpse of a disturbing scene unfolding by the roadside вЂ“ a cobra is in the process of swallowing a large toad.

#THE HIDDEN MOVIE COCKROACH DRIVER#

The driver is swerving all over the place, seemingly for his own entertainment. I am on a crowded bus heading into the wilds of China. Read the other essays in the New Nature series here. WeвЂ™ve asked critics, essayists, poets, artists and scholars to reflect on nature in the twenty-first century and to grapple with the literary conventions of writing nature.

This essay is part of a new Sydney Review of Books essay series devoted to nature writing titled the New Nature.

The hidden movie cockroach