ONE
It is roughly 1990. We are living in Hong Kong. My mother wakes up in the middle of the night to nurse my baby brother and sister, as people with recently born infants often do. She is sitting up in bed, in the dark. She is breastfeeding Luke. She feels a weird....feeling on her left shoulder, just below her collarbone. It's like something is brushing up against her skin. Oh, she thinks, it's my necklace. Then: wait, she thinks. I'm not wearing a necklace. She puts her hand to her neck and cups it around an enormous cockroach. She screams bloody murder. She turns the light on. The cockroach is at least four inches long. My dad runs in, certain she is being decapitated or garotted or something equally as gruesome. "COCKROACH!" she shouts. "Oh, thank god," says my dad. "I thought there was something wrong with the baby."
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