A Funny Encounter with ROUSs

My grandmother had a jungle in her backyard. Well, not really, but she had enough plant and animal life back there to make one. My mom used to say it was because she was a little old lady from the countryside of Japan, and when many of them move to the States, it’s almost a requirement for country Japanese ladies to have some form of garden/miniature farm in their backyard. Well, my grandmother had a very wide variety of vegetation in that backyard. Seriously. She had grapes, tomatoes, roses, cucumbers, eggplants, more roses, tangerines, even more roses and once I even found a giant orange pumpkin out there. But the most “jungle-y” part of her yard was the fenced in corner where an orange tree and two giant avocado trees reigned. She had fenced this part of the yard off (complete with a lockable gate) in order to keep the wildlife, which included my brother, cousins and I, from climbing the trees and eating her precious produce. While this homemade wood and wire fence worked on the obedient children, the other critters weren’t as compliant, and there were quite a few of them too.

There was Buddy, the golden retriever-lab mix, who used to dig his way under the fence and then dig more holes in the little tree enclosure, holes which my poor grandmother would later trip on due to the fact that they were hidden beneath a layer of dead leaves. Then there was Hard-Hat, the desert turtle who is probably over five hundred years old by now and despite his age, would dig under the fence or use Buddy’s ready-made paths and then bury himself beneath the leaves to sleep, which would also cause my poor grandmother to trip. After many happy years of digging holes, Buddy passed away and eventually a beautiful feral calico cat hopped the fences into my grandmother’s yard, mewing for food, which my grandmother gave her, believing that calico cats are good luck, and then named her Mii. And it was Mii that helped bring to my attention the other critters that crawled around in that jungle of a yard and from whom this post is named after.

I discovered (or became aware of these creatures) one very late evening when my mom and I paid one of our nearly daily visits to my grandmother. On this visit, my grandmother had lost her timorous and strictly indoor cat, another calico named Miki who had been a kitten during Buddy’s time. Even though this cat is terrified of her own shadow and runs anytime anyone opens any of the doors that lead outside, my mother thought it might be a good idea for me to check outside to see if she had possibly ventured out when my grandmother was watering. So armed with a flashlight, I headed out into the backyard to search through the jungle. Immediately after I stepped onto the porch area by the back door, Mii came running up to me, mewing and purring. I bent down to pet her and nearly jumped smack into the back door when I did. Most, if not all, of her nose had been torn off, so you could see her front teeth and her mouth, making her look like a deranged “zombie cat.” She was fine, but to further describe how scary this cat now looked, my uncle told me later that when his ten-year-old niece stopped by something along the lines of this occurred:

Little Niece: KITTY!

Mii (who resembles one of these creatures):

Meow!

Little Niece *runs away screaming*

Anyway that’s how terrifying Mii looked, poor thing. Back to the original story, so I saw her face, figured she had just gotten into a messy fight with another cat not even considering that something else might have done that, and continued on my search with Mii mewing from the safety of the porch and its light. I stumbled in between my grandmother’s rows of vegetation, scanning with my light and stupidly crying out, “Miiiiiikiiii! Here kitty, kitty!” when my light finally caught a pair of eyes staring at me:

Me: Miki! There you are, you silly kitty! Come on, let’s go back inside!
Pair of Eyes:………
Me: Come on, Miki! Come here, you silly kitty!

In response to that last statement, the pair of eyes lifted a rather long white nose that sniffed the air.

Me: Well….you’re certainly not Miki. *nervous laughter* I’m just going to slowly back away now.

At this point, I had begun to turn to start my sprint towards the back door, when my light fell upon a giant furry rear with a long hairless tail hustling into one of my grandmother’s vegetable patches. Now when I say giant, I mean, as I tried to explain to my mother after I ran back into the house screaming my head off, giant. The one I saw that night had to have been at least the size of an eight-year-old child on steroids and equally as terrifying. In fact, the creature I witnessed was so large and frightening that I am inclined to believe that it was not a possum but in fact, an ROUS.

What is an ROUS you might ask? ROUS is an abbreviation for “Rodents of Unusual Size,” and these creatures are most famous for their appearance in William Goldman’s novel The Princess Bride (and eventually Rob Reiner’s film adaptation seen below).

Basically, an ROUS is a fearsome, brodingnagian rat that (due to its size) is capable of devouring a human being as well as brutally maiming adorable cats.

And my grandmother was inadvertently breeding these creatures in her backyard.

Now, I know you must be rolling your eyes in disbelief at this point. Particularly since I do not have any evidence other than my somewhat ridiculous story. At some point, when I have gotten over my new fear of that jungle of a backyard, I will brave it again and take some photos of these beasts. But in the meantime, I would simply like to say I think my grandmother’s neighbours might want to consider building higher fences of a rather sturdy material.

Being Half 'n' Half & "Wait...You're ASIAN?!"

"Hapa is a Hawaiian term used to describe a person of mixed Asian or Pacific Islander racial/ethnic heritage."
-from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapa

So this one time at band camp, during one of our longer water breaks, a group of woodwind players were sitting around chatting about our family and inevitably the topic of "the strange behaviour of our grandparents" came up. An Asian saxophonist then described one of his grandmother's incredibly Asian habits, which I want to say had something to do with serving rice at every meal, and I piped up with how my grandmother does exactly the same thing and proceeded to launch into a story about it. I was no more than sixty seconds into the story when the saxophonist stopped me with, "Wait...you're Asian?!" When I responded with a "Yeaaah?", he then turned to tap a clarinetist on the shoulder and informed him of my ethnicity and then the clarinetist turned to me to say, "Wait...you're Asian?!" Other band members began to overhear the little commotion and then before I knew it a train of "Wait...you're Asian?!"'s had started and continued even after our break had ended and we were running to our positions on the field.

This was the first time I had ever encountered such a reaction, and seeing a football field full of about a hundred or so band geeks sequentially crying out "Wait...you're Asian?!" was pretty strange yet highly amusing. The only other time I've ever experienced something like this was when my younger brother started high school (we both went to the same school) two years later. Quite a few people were pretty convinced that I had suddenly gained the ability to turn into a boy at will but that's a story for another day. Anyway, I discovered that I wasn't the only one to encounter such a reaction about my "half 'n' half" ethnicity. One of my cousins told me that this scenario generally happens to him:

Person My Cousin Knows: "Wait...you're Asian?!"
My Cousin: "Yeah, what'd you think I was?"
PMCK: "I thought you were Mexican!"
My Cousin:...

At the time, I had never had an exchange exactly like this (although I did have a few friends who later admitted that they did wonder if I was Mexican and/or French), but while I was studying in England this past year, I had one exchange that ran something like this:

My Super Philosophical Junior Dean: (after I finished telling a story about the Asian side of my family) "So you're half Japanese then?"
Me: "Yup. On my mother's side."
MSPJD: "Ah, that makes more sense. See, I thought you were Native American."
Me:....*where on earth did he get that from?*

I was later informed that my soft leathery fringe boots, feather earrings and braided headbands might have helped my Junior Dean reach that conclusion.

Anyway, growing up with a Japanese mother and an even more Japanese grandmother while not looking Asian at all (it’s amazing how many people have asked me if I’m adopted) has certainly added many interesting (to say the least) aspects to my life and has in all likelihood coloured my perception of the world. Don’t ask me to explain how being a “hapa” does this, because I really don’t think I could. All I know is that whenever I meet or run into another “halfer,” there always seems to be this breath of relief and an unspoken “You understand” sort of thing. I suppose you could call it a “halfer thing.” And not too surprisingly, we’re able to recognise or spot each other pretty easily. To put it another way, when I first met this one half Thai, half white guy, he told me “I know you’re a halfer, because it’s like looking in a mirror and seeing myself…only as a girl.”

Well, to get back to the point (if there even was one), this blog isn’t specifically about being a “hapa.” As I said before, my ethnicity has had a lot of inadvertent influence on my life, and so I think “hapa” is one of the better terms to sum me up. And thus, this blog is about a “hapa” and her random adventures, nonsensical thoughts and just general silliness. Make sense? I hope so, because I’m not entirely sure I understand this last bit.

So if this sounds at all interesting, feel free to read on. If not, well, I recommend flying a kite if the weather permits you to. It’s quite a lot of fun. =)

Note: I know the word “hapa” used to be (and might still be) a derogatory term. I don’t use the word in the derogatory sense at all. I simply use it to mean the definition above (a person who is half Asian or Pacific Islander).