In the first picture, Ada was biting her nails down while staring at two huge caterpillars on the hydrangea leaves. It wasn’t the size of these wiggling creatures that got her attention, she told me, it was the eyes, like a pair of human eyes set on two sides of one giant green head. Once Ada noticed it she said she couldn’t stop thinking about it. The human-like eyes seemed to bestow a strange kind of intelligence on the caterpillars as if they had a hidden plan to conquer the world one day. But for now, the caterpillars just clambered clumsily over each other, slowly moving towards another branch.
She named them Ms. and Mr. Swirl. “They are not the real names,” I texted back when she sent me the pictures. She didn’t argue back. Instead, she sent a picture of her dog in the middle of acupuncture treatment. The little crossbreed’s face was gently lifted towards the camera, the thin needles sticking out of its side shining in the sunlight. The dog looked both petrified and as if it knew that what was happening to it was absurd. If it could talk, it might have been saying: “Fuck this shit.”
Ada had a lot of pets. I remembered that she had a Chihuahua, which had passed away several years ago. After that, she got herself a rabbit, but the rabbit escaped in the middle of the night. I remember Ada wondering if the full moon had had something to do with it. Out of sorrow at the loss of the rabbit, she got herself a tiny fish in a huge fish tank. One day, her mom noticed the water in the tank was getting cloudy. Concerned, she poured the water directly into the sink, and the poor tiny fish slipped down the drain. Maybe it found its way to the ocean and lived a happy life, forever. Although come to think of it, if it were a saltwater fish it probably wouldn’t have survived the journey. The crossbreed dog had been rescued by Ada a year ago. It had been found abandoned in the woods in a cardboard box, she brought her back home and named her Miss. Flower. “It’s not a real name,” I had said at the time. “She likes to sniff flowers,” she argued back.
Ada is a self-taught doctor of Chinese medicine. She has no license, she never went to any school, and her former job was being the UX designer in a top creative agency. She learned the acupuncture skills by practicing on herself and her parents.
“You know if you needle it in the wrong spot, you might instantly become retarded. I saw it on TV,” I texted her. “I already needle it in the wrong spots,” she texted back. “So, you like okay? Everything is normal?” I asked, “ I am fine, all the mistakes happened during the time I was practicing on my dad, he just won’t lay down still, now he has to shit 5 times a day, I think I got the digest spot right.”
She thinks the fundamental qualities of sleeping, eating, and shitting are the three key indicators of physical health. Exchanging our daily shitting information was one of the key topics of our friendship. Ada insisted that by knowing the color and shape, you can definitely tell the level of your physical wellbeing.
Ada looks very young. She’s in her late 20s, but she looks like she’s 16, she has this round baby face and always wears this tidy hairband, which makes her look younger than she is. I think that’s a bit creepy. So does Ada. “You know, I often get pulled into a conversation that I shouldn’t belong to, like a 10-year-old boy sitting on my porch complaining about his homework. This morning, a 6-year-old little girl just stopped me in the middle of the road and introduced herself and her 4-year-old sister. You don’t think it’s strange?” she texted me. “Are you sure it is not because of the mutual attraction of similar IQ level?” I texted back. I was being mean. She sent me back a middle finger emoji.
Ada and I had a relentless text discussion about wanting to maintain youth at any cost. “ Asians look younger before the middle age, but when they hit middle age, their face suddenly drops, I mean like really drops, there is no bone structure in it, like a flat piece of meat gravitating towards mother earth,” she wrote once. “ How can you look so young? did you eat some luxury shit behind my back?” I complained to Ada. “ Just don’t throw away the rice water! Wash the face two times a day with it, no one needs SKII,” she texted me back. In my head, I could see Ada narrowing her eyes the way she always did when she told you a secret. (COMMERCIAL TIME: SKII is a famous Japanese skincare brand famous for its unique formula, Pitera, which keeps skin tight and bright.) “Pitera is really just the rice water, fuck those brands.” We both agreed on that. Later on, I introduced the rice water to my mom. Now we look more or less the same age. Ada was right.
Even though we haven’t been seeing each other for 4 years now, her face has never blurred in my head, the small, cartoonish eyes hidden behind the gold-framed glasses, narrowed almost to two thin lines, and through the crack of the eyelids radiating some secret wisdom. What was she thinking when they watched the caterpillar slowly moving on the branch?
