Cicadas In the Forest

“Is that it?” my cousin whispers.

Curious, I turn around.

Giant furry wings are shoved in front of my face, its feathery skin brushes against my nose, sending shivers down my spine.

Recoiling back, I smack my cousin's hands away from my face, shuddering in fear. His dark eyes glint mischievously at me. Setting the moth back into the wild, he points his glaring phone light into the growing nightfall and starts walking deeper into the woods, chuckling to himself along the way.

Huffing in annoyance, I follow right behind him, a little more wary of my surroundings.

A sharp pain stabs the bottom of my foot. My cousin turns back around, spilling the phone light onto the edge of my feet. Squinting, I can see the outline of the prickly pest that takes the form of a pointy pine needle bush. Its prickly shape reminds me of another prick I know. I look up to see my cousin’s face, confused at my glare pointed towards him.

Opening my mouth to speak, I suddenly halter and close it quickly, averting my eyes to the ground. The tips of my ears burn slightly out of humiliation. My cousin, used to this by now, turns around again to walk again.

My feet, which are used to soft tennis shoes, can feel every speck of dirt, stick, and stone I step on through the thin soles of my blue rubber boots. It feels like walking barefoot through a pile of legos. Each step meets with a jerk of a limb. These boots are clearly made to walk atop of wet squishy mud and pick rice crops from a big field. They didn’t even have any soles on them.

I can’t tell my cousin that either, however. Not because I don’t want to, but because I don’t know how to say the word, boots, in Chinese.

My ears aren’t burning anymore, but I can still feel embarrassment linger inside me. My cousin is well aware of why I couldn’t speak. I might be Chinese on the outside, but I’m still Americanized on the inside.

Too insecure to speak, I force myself to push through, thin boots and all. Frustration stirs within me as I stumble clumsily through the terrain while my cousin, adept to the thick greens since he was seven, navigates with nimbleness. Wherever he strolls through easily, I tumble back awkwardly. Thankfully, he didn’t pay much attention to my clumsiness.

Today my cousin is taking me into the forest to collect cicadas. Apparently, it’s a sort of tradition that my mom’s family does. However, I think my fear of bugs sends enough signals towards my cousin about my opinion on catching bugs.

Every so often, we would hear a chorus of cicadas rise, filling the air with its vibrating buzz. It isn’t necessarily loud, but its resounding sound bares deep through the bottoms of our feet and fills up our chests, drowning out our heartbeats.I have no idea if cicadas are always this powerful or if there’s just an enormous number of them in the forest.

In the distance, I hear my mom chatter loudly with my other aunts. They talked noisily, yapping on about everything from so and so’s children to the differences between American and Chinese politics. Even as we walk further and further away from them, their noisy banter stretches across the whole forest. So much so that I swat at my ear a couple of times, thinking I hit a mosquito, only to realize it’s just their high-pitched voices.

Several long minutes later, we walked a great distance from my grandparent’s village. I can almost make the outline of a few houses next to the long fields through the tall trees. Suddenly, I’m reminded of my mom’s childhood stories at this place. It was almost nostalgic, in a way. I had never visited this place before today.

My cousin suddenly points excitedly to a tree, telling me to come over. Curious, I slowly walked to where he was standing and peered closely at the trunk. Squinting, I make out an outline of something scaly and brown. My cousin points his flashlight directly on the spot, and peering right back at me is the roaring insect itself. A cicada.

I jerk back in surprise and a small yelp escapes my mouth. Shuddering in disgust, I back away immediately. Just as I make my escape, my cousin snatches my wrist and jerks me back forward. Before I can comprehend, he swipes the cicada and places it right on top of my palm.

Eyes fixated on the bug in front of me, my joints lock tightly into place. I’m frozen in fear. Physically, I’m immobile, feet planted on the cursed ground that enjoys poking me in a dense forest coated with the warm humidity of the summer night, wrapping a thick coat around my shoulders as another round of cicadas rise to sing their bone-rattling hymn. I’m surrounded by their choir once again as I stand in the center of it all, holding one of their own in the center of my palm like a holy ceremony.

For a brief moment, my mind entered a sort of paradox. I could hear myself telling my hand to just drop the thing, but years of bug-related fear added more than just a few layers to the simple solution. Simply dropping it or throwing it into a bush meant acknowledging its existence; it meant confirming the fact that I’m touching a literal cicada, and it’s something my mind can’t seem to come to terms with. So instead, my mind tells my body to choose the next best option; passivity.

I basically stood there like an idiot while my cousin snickered.

Suddenly the cicada’s tiny little legs started to wiggle around, trying to find a grasp on its new terrain. I stare at it in fear, and maybe some curiosity. It struggles around a bit, it’s prickly little arms toss and tumbles all over the place until it finally gives up and lays on its back, defeated.

I look up at my cousin’s face. He waits for me to speak.

“...It’s kind of cute, actually,” I say in Chinese.

The words had fallen out so naturally, it took several seconds before my cousin’s stunned face started to make sense. He had never heard me speak in Chinese before now. He stares at me, mouth open. I stare back in confusion.

I feel a strange jumble of happiness and relief in my own chest. The trees suddenly step back, giving us comfortable breathing space. For the first time, I could see the moonlight peaking through the darkness, making the glistening sweat on our faces glow. My feet, sore and aching, feel unusually rooted atop the choppy ground and the steady hum of the cicadas soften into a soothing melody.

The corners of my mouth started to lift up. My cousin points at my mouth, eyes peering suspiciously at me as if I were a stranger. “Did you just…?” he asks.

I nod my head slowly.

He stares and slowly grins. “Let’s see who can catch more than,” he says and bolts off, leaving me alone with the little cicada. A split second later, I spring into action. We waste no time searching tree trunk after tree trunk, plucking cicadas off and into our jar. I could feel my muscles ease slightly as I started to memorize the forest’s blueprints, releasing some aching from my feet. No longer did it feel foreign, but instead, it began to feel familiar, like my own mom’s stories of running through these same woods.

Thirty minutes later, we’re out of breath, and we open our jars to count the bugs. Not surprisingly, my cousin has more than I do. After all, this was my first time doing it. I turn to him, ready to tell him something, when my words jumble out in a mix of what was supposed to be English and messed up Chinese characters. We burst out laughing.

Jars in hand, we race to join the rest of my family. Their voices grow louder as we near them, and with grins on both faces, we proudly hand them our cicadas.