Improvements

The apartments next door to my parents’ house were built before the War. The two-story buildings experienced the fate that befalls all wooden structures in Hawaii and became a breeding ground for termites. The termites would swarm around the streetlights during warm, breezeless evenings, and a few would wriggle through the screens into our house. When I was a child I would stand on a three-legged stool and hold a bowl of water up to the light, where the termites would fall, flailing futilely in the liquid.

The warm Hawaiian humidity provides an especially fecund environment for things that go squish. The owner of the apartments planted low-growing palms next to our fence. The thick foliage housed nests of cockroaches, which plagued the neighborhood for decades.

Some of the tenants weren’t conscientious about wrapping their garbage, which attracted rats. Dad complained, the tenants said they would be more careful, and the rats became less noticeable but never completely disappeared

This week, when I visited my parents, I was taken aback to see an empty space where the apartments had been. The buildings were bulldozed to rubble, and the entire lot had been cleared. None of the neighbors is sure what will rise in their place, but all are confident that it will be better than what had been there before. Dad said that he and the other adjacent property owners have been invaded with cockroaches and vermin, now that their nests have been destroyed. As long as we’re diligent about sanitation and prevent the pests from breeding elsewhere, these problems will not be long-lasting, and the neighborhood will end up much improved.

I thought of parallels with recent international affairs and realized that I think too much. © 2004 Stephen Yuen