Dr Ling Hsiao May watched the jagged trails of raindrops making their way down her windscreen, separating, joining, separating again. The vehicle was vibrating slightly around her under the force of the water, and she began to feel afraid. It was getting cold, and she was tired and hungry. Already she had missed dinner with her sister Lulu, a farewell dinner put on especially for her. At this rate Lulu and Ricky would be asleep by the time she arrived, if she arrived this evening at all; and as her plane was leaving early the following morning, she ran the risk of not seeing them at all before she left. Anyway, if the traffic didn’t move by the morning, she’d be going nowhere. Did her travel insurance cover eventualities like this? But if she missed the conference, no amount of compensation could change that.
Should she take the invitation from the professor seriously? She never knew if people said these things in earnest or not. Oh, she could do with a cup of tea, and, unusually, felt a need for human company. But dare she go and impose herself like that? Her pulse was quickening just thinking of it. The rain was dreadful now too. Surely it would be foolish to brave such weather as this just for the sake of a cup of tea in the camper van of a colleague? No, she’d wait for the rain to blow itself out. Then she’d see.
She tilted back her seat, testing the possibility of sleep. The voice of her mother was, as ever, loud and clear. So she hit traffic, so what? So it was a particularly bad traffic jam; so it wasn’t moving at all; so what? She shouldn’t mind waiting. She should be a patient girl; she shouldn’t be in hurry. (Since she was a child she always liked to hurry, and it had never done her any good.) She could arrive at Lulu’s any time this evening – her flight wasn’t leaving until tomorrow, was it? – and she had already written her lecture. The main thing? Make the most of the wait. That was the main thing. She could easily get work done in the front seat of the Prius, which was comfy. After all, she loved her new Prius, didn’t she? When she bought it, the first thing she had done was to drive it round to her mother’s house and take her on a spin, showing off how it fell silent when idle. Wasn’t one of her arguments for buying the new car that she could work more efficiently? So.
Hsiao May reached into the cool bag on the front seat and prised open a Diet Coke, indulging a habit of which her mother was ignorant. Put quite simply, there are times when the correct gesture – like a punctuation mark in the paragraphs of life – was a Diet Coke. Cigarettes? Never. Diet Coke. Feeling, as she always did, a small frisson of rebelliousness, she sipped. The can wasn’t as cold as it should be, which cheapened the experience. She turned on the overhead light. The silver cylinder showed no trace of rime. A bad sign. She turned off the overhead light. Trying not to read too much into it, and focusing on the taste, the familiar stinging bubbles, she drank.
When she saw the rows of cars, vans and lorries, all frozen in the act of teeming around her, all resisting the rain with their hard bodies, it was impossible for her not to think about insects. It was experiences like these that made her feel closer to the creatures she studied, and she liked that. She could feel what it meant to be one in hundreds of thousands, and being inside a car was – she imagined – similar, to some extent, to having an exoskeleton. Generally, she spent her life so absorbed in the minute details – the wing construction, the breeding habits, the adrenaline production process, the aggression instincts – that she rarely had the time to consider what attracted her to insects in the first place. But here, in this stationary swarm, she could allow herself to enter their scuttling, teeming, burrowing, feeding world. She could imagine that she was a cricket, or a caterpillar, or a mealworm, or a grasshopper. She was particularly fond of a grasshopper, with that inertia masking the pent-up energy, that dignified, almost statesmanlike bearing, those powerful legs, powerful jaws, beautiful proportions, elegance.
She slipped the can into the holder on the dashboard, taking a little pleasure at the snugness of the fit. The drink had eased her anxiety, but not much: this was a big trip. Finally, an invitation to present a paper at the annual conference of the Entomological Society of America! She had just completed her Ph.D. on the escape behaviour of the Oedipoda caerulescens, a rare blue-winged grasshopper found in the Channel Islands. It had taken her five years. During that time she had built up a body of published work in journals, and had presented papers at various conferences around the world. She was becoming known as an emerging authority on the subject. This was a male-dominated world at the higher echelons, and she, as a Chinese woman, was, ironically enough, at an advantage on account of her disadvantage; departments wanted to demonstrate their ethnic diversity, and a face like hers helped no end. (Relatives called her a ‘banana’ – yellow on the outside, white on the inside – though she thought that her insides, if they were any colour at all, would be not white but a sort of pale yellow, not custard, but lemon curd perhaps. To be exact, the shade of a Hymenopus coronatus, which she had once seen in its natural habitat during a field trip to the Malaysian rainforests.) Her mother would have said, though not in so many words, that if British discrimination allows certain Chinese people – in certain circumstances – to have a marginal advantage, why not make the most of it?
Hsiao May knew that if she hadn’t become a doctor, her mother would quite possibly never have spoken to her again. She was covered in shame as it was. Thirty-three years old, no married, no children. And bugs? You study bugs? For this you can become doctor? Why not you become a real doctor, one that help people with broken leg? With cancer? Why bug doctor? You crazy? She had tried at length to explain, and her mother had, in the end, fallen into a sullen silence. A doctor was a doctor, even her mother grudgingly had to admit. But if she were to have studied bugs and not become a doctor? It didn’t bear thinking about. Aiyah.
Hsiao May was not overjoyed, of course, about being thirty-three years old, not married, with no children. But she had her work. Her real passion – and the subject of the paper she was on her way to deliver in New York – was, in her view, one of the most important fields of study around. As much as she loved studying the Oedipoda caerulescens, that was just one tiny piece of the vast puzzle of the universe. The sick would not be healed, the poor would not be elevated, the incarcerated would not be freed, as a result of her studies of a blue-winged grasshopper from the Channel Islands. No, her real interest lay in something bigger, something with profound sociological implications, something that cast her – a slightly built, bespectacled academic from Slough – as a prophetess who would save mankind. Something that could hold the answer to the very biggest questions of the twenty-first century. Something on which the future of the world may very well depend. The name of that something? The word that rang like music in her ears, like a string of waterdrops falling in a well? No, not entomology – entomophagy.
On the bidding of her inner mother, she turned on some Mozart – she still practised the piano, even now – reached into the slim briefcase that lay in the footwell, and drew out her lecture notes. They were enclosed in a buff folder, creaseless, perfect. Everything about them was pristine, in both form and content. Though she did not expect to need it, she took out a highlighter pen as well. Then she turned on the overhead light, reclined her seat and sat, papers poised, looking out of the window.
Night was deepening. The vast car-swarm was brooding in the deluge, the fumes from the last few engines coiling into the air like condensing breath. A feeling of unease filled her chest: we are destroying ourselves, she thought. These cars live on the lifeblood of the earth. This electricity is produced from the burning of its carbon. This paper from its trees. This leather from its animals. She snapped herself out of her reverie and returned her focus to her notes. But these she had re-read so many times that she had lost all objectivity, and no detail had been left unconsidered, so there was nothing for her mind to latch on to. It was not long before she was looking out of the window again. The Mozart bubbled around her like a child’s laughter, enveloped in the hiss of the rain . . . this, she thought, is an age of destruction.
The title of her lecture was ‘Ethnocentrism in Entomophagy: A New Approach’. The audience, she knew, would be refreshing. Unlike many of the people she was used to addressing on her evangelical lecture tours, all would have a solid science background and would already be familiar with the facts she would draw upon to form her argument. They would know that eighty per cent of the world’s population eats insects happily. They would understand that with the increased pressure on the world’s resources and climate, World War Three would likely be fought over water and food. They would know that insects, being cold-blooded, were four times more efficient at converting feed to meat than cattle, who burned energy needlessly by keeping themselves warm. She would barely have to mention that insects, pound for pound, had the same amount of protein as beef; that fried grasshopper had three times as much; that bugs were rich in micronutrients like iron and zinc; that they were so genetically distant from humans that there was little chance of contracting spillover diseases like bird flu or H1N1. They would understand that insects were natural recyclers, happily living on cardboard, manure, and food by-products. They would know how humane insect husbandry could be, that filthy, overcrowded conditions made bugs happy. Yes. They would know already that it made sense. Her job would be to give them confidence in proselytising. Insects, she would argue, were economical, clean, ecological, sustainable, nutritious, and, importantly, tasty – a gastronomically pleasing answer to the growing food shortages of the world. She would be strong. She would persuade members of the Entomological Society of America that society’s instinctive distaste towards ingesting insects was culturally specific and ethnocentric. They must take people by the hand and introduce them to the mushroomy tang of beetle larvae; the rich chewiness of the sarcophagid maggot; the mouthfeel of a lightly fried young chapulín.
They would give her a standing ovation.
She drained her Diet Coke and realised that for a long time she had needed a pee. What could she do? Panic began to spread through her. How long would this traffic jam last? Her phone rang. So she had a signal now? It was her sister. She muted the Mozart and pressed accept.
‘Hello, Lulu,’ she said.
‘Are you moving yet?’
‘No, still stuck.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘No. It’s solid. Completely solid.’
‘Still on the M25?’
‘Still the same.’
‘What? Sorry, you’re breaking up.’
‘Don’t need to wait up for me, Lulu. It’s really late. God knows how long I’ll be.’
Sorry, what? This is a terrible line. Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘This is fucking annoying. I had dinner ready and everything.’
‘I’m sorry, OK? I’m sorry. It’s not my fault.’
‘I know . . . Hello? Hello?’
‘I’m here. Can you hear me?’
‘I just don’t know what we’ll do without you for a whole fortnight.’
‘You’ll manage.’
‘The kids are going to miss you. Their favourite auntie.’
‘Mama will step in.’
‘I wish I could just swan off to the States like that. Just pack in all the housework, leave the kids somewhere and piss off. I can’t remember the last time I went on holiday.’
‘You went to Malta.’
‘Yeah, but I mean by myself. That was with Ricky and the kids. You’re lucky. In a way.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Look, I’m losing you . . . I’d better go.’
‘OK.’
‘I’ll leave the key in the red Wellie. Good luck with the traffic.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I’ll leave my phone on when I go to bed. I . . .’
The phone went dead.
Hsiao May held it glowing in the palm of her hand until the light dimmed and went out. Miracle that she got through with no signal. Miracle. If only people could see the power of the ideas contained in the modest buff folder in her hands! That was the true miracle. She closed her eyes.