| The
Expats of the Animal Kingdom |
The Beat February 2003 Among
the human beings, I was surprised to discover many enclaves of expatriates living
and working in Korea; Bangladeshi factory workers, Filipino night club singers,
Canadian English teachers, European engineers, Russian topless dancers, Nigerian
businessmen, Peruvian jewelry salesmen, American soldiers, and Mexican motorcycle
stunt riders . Their psychic trail led me up through the concrete
labyrinths to a place called the ’Children‘s Park‘ in Ch‘o-up
Dong. There at the foot of the mountains I found a quiet, breezy place where the
city and the forest become one; a place of concrete melting into boulders, scattered
dirt and pine trees. As I entered this zoo in the heart of the city, I felt conflicting feelings welling up within my breast. I knew that I had found a place of lonely beauty; a dreary outdoor prison upon which the sun shed a bright meditative warmth. The living animal smells quickly pounced upon my nostrils, charging me with the current of life running through this place. The fetid scent of manure in my sinuses drew me up the walk, where I came first to the African ostrich pen. Stretching out my neck and opening my eyes as widely as possible, I extended my cerebral antennae to taste their thoughts and feelings; and there were none except blissfully ignorant contentment! These benignly foolish beasts exist in a numb state of creature comfort within their sandy confinement; spending their days pecking at the bits of vegetable matter fed them by their captors and stomping around in the dust. ’Flightless idiots‘ I thought, and continued up the hill. Next I came to the sad sight of the Polar Bear‘s cage. This solitary arctic soul appeared to have suffered a lobotomy as he merely paced within his tiny cell, smaller than that of the ostriches. Gaunt beneath his thick yellowing coat, he gave the appearance that he was actually melting. And as I reached into the recesses of his mind, I found a charnel ice drift of penguin, seal, reindeer and dolphin carcasses; memories from days of freedom long past. In communicating with this dumbstruck polar bear, I found only the mechanisms of a weary machine, whose hopes for a return to its natural setting were long dulled. Only blood red memories of oily raw meat feasts remained. Like the mind of a dedicated killer whom no prison could ever reform, but only contain, this brutal being now merely exists; pacing, foaming at the mouth, occasionally lapping up some water and enduring the vague procession of days until it‘s empty life draws to a close. Continuing up the winding path I came to the reptiles, enclosed in a block of glass cases. There I found the Mexican crocodile, lying still in a shallow pool so small he could scarcely roll over. This predator too was bereft of the muddy killing banks upon which it was born. It‘s shallow breathing and lolling half closed eyes emitted a sense that it was only half alive and it‘s spirit long dead. To
the left was a large in-ground pool holding the North American Pacific coast Sea
Lion. From beneath the ice-caked water the pudgy beast poked his head and barked
to me; sending images of a long ago harem lounging on a rocky beach and looking
after his many pups. Swimming back and forth in the chilly water, he conveyed
to me humorously nostalgic memories of impregnating scores of females in the same
day. As if saying, ’ You should have seen me in the old days, when all I
did was hump cows and fight other guys who tried to shag my wives. But now I swim
back and forth in this tiny Korean pool trying to release my pent up sexual energy!‘ From there I carried on to the Hippo pool, where I found two individuals, as corpulent as any I‘d ever come across. These lard-asses of the animal kingdom scarcely noticed me, as they occupy themselves with only three aspects of existence: eating, shitting and sleeping. Reaching into their lazy consciousnesses I found a mother, a son and the memory of the father who died there years ago. The fatter mother, rolling over on her side and blowing a voluminous fart as if the weight of her topside had squeezed if from her intestines, shed a slow thick tear of mucus from the corner of her eye that would take weeks to reach the ground. Then she rose up and commenced to graze on a pile of her own dung. Treading up further into the zoo, I saw a community of Japanese Sika deer. These wide-eyed silent creatures were ironically traded to the zoo by the Lyon‘s club of Japan. They communicated a sense of peace, as if by living in this place they‘d actually protected themselves from would-be predators or hunters of the wild, and in exchange for their freedom to run through the forest, they‘d made a deal that would extend their precariously balanced life spans. To the right of the deer were the Barbary rams. These demonic, horned creatures with eyes set on the sides of their heads also seemed content in their captivity. Yet they beset upon each other in head butting matches that made loud resounding ’clonks!‘ of nearly hollow skulls rebounding off of one another. ’To fight! To fight! To fight!‘ their consciousnesses chanted in a militaristic manner, ’Live to fight! We live to fight!‘ Above them in another dirt pen were the American Bison. Born in Korea to American expat parents, these two siblings knew nothing of western plains their ancestors once proudly crossed. Standing upon atrophied muscles, these giant shaggy beasts exist as unlikely monuments of a once wild land. Shuffling back and forth, sticking their long black tongues up their noses, blissfully ignorant of their grand North American heritage, a subject on which they draw blank. Curving around a bend in the trail and down a hill brought me to the monkey cages. Here were various gangs of orangutans, monkeys and baboons, living in a refugee commune. Coexisting members of the sub-primate order, assembled from Japan, South East Asia and Africa, these tiny jokers continuously lament their captivity with outbursts of cage rattling, hysterical tantrum fits, blatant masturbation and food fights. Reaching through their bars, they beg for scraps of food. Denied privacy, they openly copulate on the floor of the cage. Approaching two of these exhibitionists, I caught them in a doggie-style embrace. Their faces flush with perverse excitement, they paused; the male holding his erection within his lover; they sent their messages to me, ’If you keep staring he‘s going to lose it!‘ and from him, ’Here comes the big red banana!‘ Incensed, she then slapped him out of her and screamed, ’Finish it by yourself! Stroke it with your tail you filthy son of a hyena!‘ And the perverted monkey onlookers shrieked and swung around the cage like insane Romans in the arena. Nonplussed by these public fornicators, I turned around to find another shady concrete block holding two of the zoo‘s solitary confinement cases, the African Black Leopard and the Japanese Black Bear. The black bear was another coma case. Lying there in a pile, head resting on his paws as if life had become one long day, of which he was waiting for the end. ’This concrete is not my cave and these green painted bars are not my trees, and as I‘ve awoken here, I‘ll wait until the long sleep comes that will spirit me away back to the primeval forest where I was born.‘ But the black leopard had a different look in his eyes and images in his head. Of all the beasts in this prison, here was one more resolute than ever; as if his caged sentence was just a moment in a never-ending prowl; a hunt in which the climax of the kill would come in many years time. Giant yellow cats eyes bore through me to a distant point. Waiting, watching, he stood still like a sentry at the gates of a dark shadow land far beyond the veil of this world. I could feel that the Leopard‘s mind held a secret ambition, kept inside as a singular reason to go on living. The leopard‘s eyes were aimed at something further down the winding path, the reason for which I would learn later in my inquiry. Twenty paces below
the leopard and bear‘s block was the North American English Teacher. This
tragic captive lives behind thick pink bars. I arrived to find a sympathetic visitor
feeding the wretched beggar Marlboro cigarettes. The animal‘s mind was very
easy to read, as it was weak and atrophied from years of disuse. But the contents
were sparse and unsubstantial. Another castaway, longing for the rambling days
of it‘s youth, but content to loll about in the spartan, yet life-sustaining
environment of the zoo. Happy to serve as another dull spectacle for random passersby,
this creature derives simple joys from small treats and fleeting attentions it
gets from pitying onlookers. This crate of lost souls contained three couples; two Bengal Tigers, two crossbred Ligers, and two African Lions. These formidable neighbors seem to have formed a non-aggression pact, by which they wait out their life sentences in relative silence. On the far left live the Bengal couple, the female lazing in the darkness of the back compartment and the male crawling out of a square hole to stroll around the cage. On his shoulder is a large distended pink tumor the size of a human baby‘s head. Looking into his arrogant eyes, my mind lit up with images of what he would do to me were the bars between us to instantly dissolve; the park an abattoir of predation, the gutters running red with the blood he could shed with but a few strokes of his paw. Amazingly, his muscles were still thick. Even after years of captivity, this massive cat remains as lethal as the first time he leapt down from a baobab branch onto the back of an unsuspecting zebra. ’I would but sever you neck with a single stroke, my lucky friend!‘ he purred to me. Separating the prince of murder from the king was the moronic half-breed, the Liger. Sterile imbeciles, the product of the male lions raping the female tiger, these Ligers seem to dwell in a blissful mindlessness; bastards sporting the king‘s majestic face and the princess‘s spotted coat. Incipient genitalia swinging between its legs; ’Look at me,‘ thinks the Liger, ’I‘m a beautiful joke!‘ And to the right live the King and his Queen. The Lions lay visibly entwined, paws resting atop one another in their inner sanctum. And a thought crawled from their square hole to me, although they themselves did not, ’Ah yes, another onlooker, whom neither of us would dignify with even a short visit to the front of the cage. As if these surroundings mattered, for regardless of the place we make our home, we are and always will be the supreme royalty of the Kingdom! Meow!‘ The King and his Queen, with a dignity that not even a life sentence of captivity can threaten. And then I sent a question as to the whereabouts of my large gray friends, to which the King replied, ’Ah yes, the old elephants. Perhaps you should ask the head zookeeper, as I haven‘t heard those trumpeting trunks for some time now. But I do believe I saw the zookeeper enter the restaurant just a short time ago. He wears a red vest‘. The restaurant I had passed earlier seemed to be the place where my questions would be answered. I entered and found a diminutive man in a red vest sitting at a table in the otherwise empty restaurant. ’Are you the head zoo keeper?‘ I asked. To which he answered, ’Yes‘. ’Tell me about this quiet place,” I said, “What are the animals names?” And he began, ’Ah yes, my zoo. Well, we don‘t name the animals. After all, they are only animals and we don‘t treat them as guests. It‘s usually a peaceful place, although we sometimes have problems. Some of the rowdier guests bring sticks to prod and stones to throw at the animals. And sometimes they feed them the vinyl bags in which they carry their snacks. The giraffe died from eating too many of those bags, which coat the intestines and kill them from the inside. We don‘t have any chimpanzees or gorillas because they‘re so expensive, hard to keep and there are always problems with immigration.‘ And I inquired as to if any of the animals had ever escaped or managed to savage any of the other animals or guests. He replied, ’we don‘t have too many problems. A drunken man lost a finger to the tiger, and a Russian woman who tried to feed the bear got some nasty scratches on her hand. We had a dart rifle we tried to use when we needed to sedate the animals, but the cages are too small, and the darts pierced too deeply into the flesh. So now we use a blowgun. We‘ll have to sedate the tiger when we remove his tumor in two weeks. And then there was the time two years ago, when I went to clean the black leopards cage. I thought he was locked in the back room, and I went inside. But he wasn‘t. He leapt on me and sunk his fangs into the back of my neck, tried to kill me. His teeth were in and he tried to shake the life out of me and wouldn‘t let go until another worker came in and clobbered him over the head with a stick. They took me to the hospital and the doctor couldn‘t even remember how many stitches he put in me. I spent twenty days in the hospital recovering. I‘ve forgiven the black leopard, but I think he still hates me. He watches me all the time.‘ ’I noticed him staring over here.‘ I said, ’ He must be looking for you. Even after all these years he remembers the taste of your blood.‘ And then I asked about my friend, ’What about the elephant, where is he?‘ ’Well,‘ answered the zoo keeper with a sheepish grin, ’people liked to feed the elephant bananas, but they never took off the skins, which are covered in pesticides. So he died at the age of 25. Elephants usually have a life expectancy of 80 years.‘ After which I thanked him for his time, shook his hand and left. I‘d uncovered the fate of the elephant, and decided it was time to leave this quiet zoo -- another place where foreigners come to live forever. To get to the
zoo: Take buses: 44, 53, 63, 81, 103, 112, 133, or 201. |
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© 2003 Busan Beat |