“They die. They not good guys,” my daughter Marigold says solemnly.
I nod.
“We put them in the soap,” I tell her and her sister, Juniper.
Marigold is 2, and at times her speech is hard to decipher. She forgets verbs. When she wants to be picked up, she shouts, “Carry you!” And when I ask her to do anything, she almost always replies with a resounding “WHY?” — as she does now.
“They eat our plants, Gogo!” exclaims Juniper, nimbly picking up a shiny beetle and plopping it into her bucket.
All summer and into autumn, our evenings had a kind of order. The girls ate dinner, and afterward, we had popsicles on the deck. While they ate their sticky treats, I filled two small beach buckets with dish soap and water. I handed them their buckets, and they would each take an end of our shrubby cinquefoil, picking off Japanese beetles and dropping them into the bubbles. They moved from plant to plant, and I always hoped the activity would stretch the time between dinner and bed.
Juniper, at 4, is intrepid: She picks beetles off leaves with gusto. Marigold points them out and asks me to put them in her pail. In the sun, the beetles are a metallic coppery green. They are easy to catch. I begin to feel badly about the murderous task I have given them, then I look at the wheel-shaped yellow cinquefoil flowers — like lace now, a skeleton of former leaves and petals.
We pick them off by the dozens.
“But why we kill them?” Marigold asks. She points to a daddy longlegs resting on a nearby planter. “We get him?”
“No, Gogo, we leave Mr. Skinnylegs alone,” Juniper says. “He’s a good guy!”
I point out the honeybees and swallowtails on the sunset hyssop and coneflowers, the ladybugs on our penstemon and goldenrod — the other good guys.
“The Japanese beetles aren’t native.” I say. “They kill our plants!”
“But why?” Marigold asks.
“They’re not from here. They don’t belong here. They moved here from. …”
“We move Colorado!” was her reply.
WHEN I FIRST SAW a bumper sticker that proudly read WYOMING NATIVE, I asked my mother if I was one, too. I was 11 and reasoned that I had taken my first steps as a baby in Wyoming. I thought of a 20-mph wind as a breeze, knew jackalopes weren’t real, and understood that out West, distance isn’t measured in miles but hours. I called a Coke a “pop.”
“No, no, native means you were born there,” she explained.
I thought of Singapore, the land of my birth, a place full of orchids and warm air. A place I knew nothing about. That night, I looked it up in the large atlas on our coffee table. A small island in the South China Sea.
Soon after, I began to hang National Geographic maps around my room. I loved lying in bed and looking up at other worlds, imagining being a child somewhere far away from Wyoming. On a map of ancient Egypt, I traced my finger over the Nile and, later that year, my parents took me to see the Ramses II exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. I asked my mother if I could get a trinket from the gift shop, a necklace with a small scarab on it. She said no, and instead, I bought a postcard of a scarab. Later, I read that the ancient Egyptians considered scarabs — or “fancy beetles,” as I called them — to be a divine manifestation of the morning sun. They signified rebirth and transformation, and people wore them for good luck and protection.
I wasn’t a kid who grew up visiting my parent’s homeland. My dad was a petroleum geologist, and we spent most of my childhood in an oil bust, counting pennies, occasionally venturing to Denver for a long weekend at a hotel with a pool. I was 23 when I took my first trip to India. That first morning, as I stood on the sidewalk, I saw a woman making Kolam designs outside her house. I saw a rickshaw driver sleeping in the seat of his auto. And people walking to work, to school. It was all the stuff of life. I realized it was the first time in my life that I was not in the minority. That morning, on a street in India, was the first time I could remember being surrounded by people who looked like me. The first time I didn’t feel othered.
But my elation was short-lived. A Wyoming girl through and through, I was startled by the sound of car horns and a mosque blaring a call to prayer. The noise and crowds sent me running back into my aunt’s house. I needed silence and emptiness. I realized that I was more comfortable in a bar in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, than on that street in India. I was accustomed to quiet and open space. I may not be a Wyoming native, but I didn’t know what to do with a city.
They signified rebirth and transformation, and people wore them for good luck and protection.
OF COURSE, the Japanese beetle isn’t a pest in its native Japan. There, it has natural predators. It traveled to America by boat on an iris bulb around 1912. The insects spread rapidly, partly because they have no natural enemies (my two toddlers being an exception). When you look at the list of invasive terrestrial invertebrates from the National Invasive Species Information Center, so many of them are exotic: Africanized honeybee, Asian citrus psyllid, Asian jumping worm, Asian long-horned beetle, Asian tiger mosquito, Mexican fruit fly, and our new bedtime ritual, the Japanese beetle. All of them othered by their names. All decidedly not from here.
But how do you explain invasive species to a toddler? That they are not welcome here? This country — and our own family, with its Irish and Indian roots — is about being able to pull up the stakes and move for a better life. Only Indigenous peoples are truly native. For everybody else, that bumper sticker, the word “native,” seems factually incorrect. The rest of us are all from somewhere else. Some came by wagon, others by ship or planes — and some by clinging to the roots of an iris.
Some evenings, I reach for a beetle to knock into the bucket, and it flies away. Instead of falling into the bubbles, it escapes.
“He fly!” Marigold exclaims with glee.
I respect that beetle. I still don’t want it to eat my plants, but I begrudgingly admire something with a thick skin that can adapt to difficult circumstances, thriving though no one wants you.
We are all invasive, all visitors, on this Earth, I tell Marigold. We are all doing our best to survive. Maybe there are no good guys or bad guys. Maybe there’s just a great big branching family tree of species, all clinging to what is beautiful, always adapting and living the best way we know how.
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This article appeared in the October 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Origin stories.”
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