Our hour-long tutoring session usually starts with textbook dialogues and devolves into the kids drawing pictures on the whiteboard saying, "Teacher, what's this?", Anna using new vocabulary to insult Sam, Sam getting annoyed with Anna and trying to overtake everyone else's turns to speak, and Anna turning any conversation into one about her rabbit, who then must make an appearance. Our first lesson couldn't begin until Anna had shown me her rabbit (who is either incredibly tolerant or has learned that resistance is futile), turtle, fish, and silkworms. One week there were tadpoles. She tried to give me some, until Jinlin's mother convinced her that this was impractical since I live in a hotel.
I usually can't make it out without some sort of gift. The first two weeks Anna wanted to play songs for me on the piano after class. Her mother has often sent me home with snacks, including a Chinese donut thing, various candies, an entire bunch of bananas, and two lemons. Last week there were no snacks, but Anna gave me a silkworm pupa.
Yes, a silkworm pupa. Her worms, whose weekly progress I had been monitoring as they grew and munched mulberry leaves, had all spun their cocoons and gone into hiding. Anna handed one to me and told me to put it in a container with a napkin on top when I got home. I tried to ask her if I needed to feed it eventually, but every time I asked "What does it eat?" she answered "Yes." So I put it in a bowl with a napkin on top, and waited to see what would happen.
A few days later when I checked on my silkpod, there was a creepy silkmoth standing next to it, and a weird trail of something that looks like blood coming out of the cocoon:
Research reveals that it is not blood, but enzymes that the moth uses to make a hole in the cocoon. Research also reveals that silkworms are pretty fascinating creatures. They aren't actually worms at all. They are caterpillars, and are perhaps the most domesticated creature, since they are now completely reliant on humans for survival. Each cocoon is made of a continuous thread of silk almost a kilometer long, and the annual world production of silk filament could make more than 300 round trips to the sun.
Unfortunately for silkmoths, research also reveals that adult silkmoths cannot fly or eat; all they do is reproduce and die within two weeks. Sad life. Even sadder: If I had wanted to harvest the silk, I should have BOILED the silkmoth to death inside the silkpod so that it wouldn't cut the fibers on its way out.
Instead, I got a sad and lonely little pet. When I lamented to Lily about his loneliness and inability to perform his only remaining function, she recommended that I ask Anna for another silkmoth, but I wasn't quite sure how to go about telling a 10-year-old, "Hey, my silkmoth is horny and needs a woman."
Luckily, Anna is wise to facts of silkmoth life, and after class tonight she told me that I actually need two silkmoths. I took a lady silkmoth, in the hopes that my guess about the sex of the original was correct. And I'm pretty sure it was, because he perked up immediately upon the arrival of his new companion and began flapping his wings nonstop and trying to figure out how to do what he was supposed to do.
Hopefully I'll have silkworm babies someday soon.
(If you're interested in learning more about the mating habits of insects, I recommend checking out Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno, a series of short films in which she wears hilarious bug costumes and demonstrates their bizarre sexual practices. I can't watch it yet from China, but I've heard good things. And don't worry Grandma, it's not really porno, just a funny Italian lady pretending to be an insect!)
No comments:
Post a Comment