“I never had stink bugs before I met you,” my partner James told me recently. When we were replacing the walls in our house last winter, the stink bugs had a field day, flowing between the ancient clapboards to shelter in the sheets of plastic we were temporarily using in lieu of interior walls. They came through every tiny opening, every seam, and every hole. We began by squishing them in tissue, but the smell overpowered us. If brown marmorated stink bugs (Halyomorpha halys) have not yet made it to where you live, you may not know their pungent and nauseating cilantro odor, which sticks to skin even after repeated washing. When picking them up, no matter what part of them I grabbed, I got “stunk.” James filled jars with soapy water, and we made rounds several times each day, knocking the bugs into their watery deaths. This, too, filled the house with a sickening odor, and it made James feel bad for the bugs. We resorted to the vacuum, which hid their demises and muted the smell.
Stink bugs, once unknown here in the mid-Atlantic U.S., are now part of daily life. Articles about stink bugs call them “immigrants,” “invaders,” and “terrorists.” People use the reverse comparison, likening immigrants to insects, to express a hatred of both. It is true that introduced species like stink bugs can wreak havoc and spell destruction for endemic songbirds and rare plants, particularly in delicate ecosystems like Hawaii, where I grew up. At the same time, I identify with introduced species because I myself am introduced. Hawaii is a state in which so many cultures, including my own, took root, displacing native Hawaiians in the process. Words used to describe invasive species were also used to describe my ancestors and, by extension, me. We were the yellow peril, we were coolies, we were chinks, we were pakes.
My last name means river person. My ancestors came from Guangdong Province, China, to Hawaii because my grandfather’s parents could not immigrate to America. They were forbidden by the Chinese Exclusion Act, put in place in 1882 and not lifted until 1943. The act was a response to an influx of Chinese laborers who came to mine California gold, then to build half of the transcontinental railroad, which united the eastern and western halves of the country. But Hawaii, not part of the United States until 1959, welcomed my grandfather’s parents. My grandfather was born in what would later become America, and would work his way through college, obtain a degree in civil engineering, and go on to serve in the U.S. Army, building hospitals for the wounded in the Asiatic-Pacific Theater during World War II. When he came home from the war, he built roads and bridges throughout Hawaii. He laid water mains and sewer lines, creating the infrastructure tourists see and use today, though they will never remark on his efforts as they drink from water fountains, flush the toilet, or drive to scenic beaches.
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My name, halys, is a river in Turkey. I don’t know why it was given to me. My ancestors did not choose to come here from China. Someone packed their home in a load of cargo. The journey was long and dark. There was nothing to eat. My ancestors had no idea where they were going or what life would be like when they got there. They knew only home. After what may have been weeks, they made landfall in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1998, and began to move westward, southward, and even northward from there, searching for a place like the one they’d come from. The new world was both familiar and different. Many of the foods my ancestors had eaten in China were here also: cherries, peaches, soybeans. The highways reminded them of home because they were lined with ailanthus and paulownia trees. Kudzu. It was colder in the new place. Though there were few predators to harm them, the cold kept my family from multiplying as quickly as they had in the humid subtropical climate they were used to. Six broods a year became two. They found refuge in the sheathing of houses, in closets, in coats. They stowed away in cars, in packages sent through the mail. They hitched south to Florida, parting from family, becoming diaspora like many other insects who were brought to America.
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When my grandfather was a child, Formosan termites (Coptotermes formosanus) were not common in the islands. By the time he was a father of four, the insects were literally eating his home, floor and beam, and, at the time of his death, Formosan termites were one of the most destructive species in the state. In my grandfather’s lifetime, then, the whole ecological balance of Hawaii shifted, with this insect morphing from curiosity to pest to scourge.
The termites plagued my childhood. I often sat cross-legged on my bed, doing homework by flashlight, hunkered under a tent made out of a sheet. The soft thwap thwap of termites hitting the sheet punctuated the steady scratch of my pencil on paper. Even after I turned off the flashlight for the night, the termites flocked to me. I woke to find the bed littered with those I’d rolled over and killed in my sleep.
The Formosan termite, despite its name, probably originated in southern China before migrating to Japan, stowed away on ships. My grandfather, born in Hawaii, did not know the termite until later in life. He may have aided in its dispersal because one of its main routes to America was in the crates and pallets used to bring matériel back from World War II operations in the Pacific. As an Army captain, perhaps he supervised the unloading of ships whose holds housed thousands of termites, quiet in their wooden apartments.
Formosan termites and brown marmorated stink bugs did not cross oceans on their own six legs, on their own delicate wings. Our global trade, our invasions and wars, our capitalistic tendencies, and our modern construction practices allowed these insects to spread, to proliferate, and perhaps even to evolve.
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People have plagued me all my life. They spend what seems like a great deal of time designing traps to entice me—or to repel me. They use clove, lemongrass, spearmint, and ylang-ylang. They spray me with chemicals. They give me only green beans to eat. In one lab, the scientists glue me like a tetherball to a small piece of metal attached to a flight mill. They want to see how wind affects my flying ability. They turn on fans. They stare at me through magnifiers, their giant eyes roving over me. They bring dogs to smell me. The dogs understand the scent of my anger, but all the poems I write in the air, no one feels them.
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In Asia, stink bugs have some natural enemies, but no creature in the U.S., aside from an occasional spider, wants to eat them. Some humans celebrate the eating of stink bug tacos, but even I, happy to eat crickets, snails, and frogs, do not want to put stinky bugs in my mouth. Stink bugs are a good source of iodine, but so are sea scallops. Scallops do not have the gall to hide in my socks, in my jeans pockets. They do not fly into my face as I read at night, as I work at the computer during the day. They do not spray me with stinky fluid or poop all over my house.
In the quest to save our homes—and our crops—from stink bugs, scientists all over the world design stink bug traps. They plant decoy crops to distract stink bugs from the economically important crops growing nearby. They subject the bugs to a variety of temperatures, foods, and wind conditions to see how these variables affect feeding habits and reproduction. They train dogs to detect the odor of stink bugs so that the dogs can inspect farms, buildings, and international cargo. They are trying to find a predator who might control the stink bug population.
“What are you doing?” James asked me one day when he came downstairs.
“I’m photographing stink bugs,” I said.
“That seems like a perfectly normal and ordinary thing to do,” he said, and went on doing what he was doing, used to my weird endeavors in the name of research, used to finding me crouched on the stairs, seemingly photographing the Tyvek holding the house together.
I thought that if I got up close with the stink bugs, if I looked at their faces, I might hate them less. I had been thinking about all the scientists who work with stink bugs, how they must, at some point, admire the bugs, empathize with them. And how strange it must feel, then, to go to the lab each day to glue the bugs to machines.
After uploading the photos to my laptop, I zoomed in until I could see the stink bug’s expression. I zoomed in more to see the texture of its exoskeleton. It did seem like the bug was frowning, or afraid, wondering what I might do to it.
In 2005, some scientists from Delaware traveled to Asia in search of a predator they could possibly introduce to the U.S. to control stink bugs. They brought back one of the stink bug’s natural enemies, the samurai wasp, to study it in the lab, in controlled conditions. But nine years into the research, while the biologists were still wondering if it was possible to influence ecological balance and population dynamics, they discovered that the wasp they were thinking of introducing was already here. The wasps had entered the country under the radar, maybe packed in a crate of oranges, maybe smuggled in by a frustrated farmer. We may never know. Only time will tell if the wasps will restore the system to equilibrium, or if they will be their own disaster.
In 1965, President Johnson pushed the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) through Congress. As Tom Gjelten writes in Nation of Nations, North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin, a Democrat, opposed the legislation, arguing that it would allow immigration from countries that had not built the nation. “I don’t know of any contributions that Ethiopia has made to the making of America,” Ervin said, as justification for restricting immigration from Africa. As he spoke these words, Ervin was probably standing on a floor laid down by someone from Africa. Fifty years after Ervin’s words, Michelle Obama observed the significance of living in the White House, which was built by enslaved people. And I, living in the south, daily enter buildings, use roads, and see towns that would not exist if not for the many Africans dragged to America against their will.
The INA put in motion a fundamental shift in patterns of immigration to the U.S. because it took away strict national quotas from many Asian, African, and other non–Western European countries. The INA instead put more emphasis on family-based immigration, job skills, and providing asylum for refugees. At the time, the thought was that white Europeans who were already in the U.S. would bring relatives and thus increase the Anglo-Saxon makeup of the country. But trying to control immigration patterns is like trying to control ecological change: Western Europeans no longer wanted to come to the U.S., and instead people from other regions brought relatives.
I often think about how many events had to take place so that I could be an American. It wasn’t simply a matter of my ancestors immigrating to America. They had to immigrate to exactly the right place outside of America. And then Hawaii had to become a state. I could so easily have been born a citizen of a different country.
One of the immigration policy changes considered in 2018 proposed a points-based merit system, rather than family ties, as the primary basis for allowing people to immigrate. In theory, this doesn’t seem like a terrible idea, but supporters of the changes bore much in common with those, like Sam Ervin, who wanted to favor Western European immigration in 1965. When I took the merit test to see my score, I did not qualify for admission to the U.S. I was not even close. Since 2017, the government has routinely denied citizenship even to asylees and to highly educated, highly skilled labor. It is estimated that by 2021 the number of legal immigrants arriving in the U.S. will be half what it was in 2016. Even the generally conservative Wall Street Journal thinks proposals like the merit-based system are a good way to increase illegal immigration, no matter how big a wall we build.
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It is hard to learn the ways of a new place. The wind smells different, and the rain. Different flowers grow, and on them different bees. Different grasses, and above them different trees. I have discovered I love the heat of summer, the okra whose young pods are so tender, the smooth skin of tomatoes, and the juice of the peach as I reach in with my stylet to drink. As summer winds down, the pinot noir, the fuzzy leaves of hazelnuts, the nuts themselves. I feel joy in the apples, joy in the squash, joy in the blueberries, joy in the corn.
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As a person who tries to grow most of my own food, stink bugs fill me with fury. They are the worst agricultural pest in decades. During the 2010 growing season, stone fruit farmers in the mid-Atlantic lost entire crops from stink bug damage. Stink bugs not only destroy fruits and vegetables, but they can also spread pathogens that harm the trees themselves. In response to this crisis, the Environmental Protection Agency temporarily eased its pesticide regulations. Senator Casey of Pennsylvania announced the formation of a “scientific SWAT team” to learn about stink bugs. Congressman Roscoe Bartlett compared the stink bug to a terrorist. As I stood out in my own little orchard, staring at cherries with dimples of rot where stink bugs had pierced the fruits, I felt like there was actual steam coming out of my ears. There is something cartoonish in being so thoroughly pwned by a tiny insect.
The Formosan termites created a similar panic in the early years of their settlement. At first we used chlordane to kill them, but the chemical was so powerful it made us sick too. Duncan Murrell, in a Harper’s essay about the termites in New Orleans, suggests that introduced insects could be divine punishment, citing the possibility that the mosquito may have come to America in the holds of slave ships. Murrell concludes, however, that the mosquito was inevitable. If not a slave ship, then a cargo ship. If not a cargo ship, then a war ship. In some senses, the termite and the stink bug did not come to the U.S.; the U.S. expanded to where they lived.
Some ecologists argue that the presence of invasive species reflects conditions that have allowed those species to thrive. My house is located near a highway blasted out of the side of a mountain. The soil has been bulldozed, compacted, and soaked with runoff full of road salt and motor oil and garbage. Ailanthus trees, an introduced species from China, are one of the few trees that can tolerate these conditions, and they cover the scarred land by the highway. The Virginia Department of Transportation stabilized the steep slopes with kudzu, a vine from Asia. When it was first introduced, kudzu seemed like a godsend because it too could grow in the barren soil created by progress. It is now considered a curse because it takes over the mountains and strangles everything under it, but it also does what it was brought to do: it stabilizes slopes. James and I spend many hours looking for kudzu, pulling up the ailanthus marching toward our yard.
These introductions were ways to fill needs: for wood, for soil stabilizers. Immigration happens when we need labor, when we need skills, when we need population growth. But immigration is not unlike scientific discovery or ecological change in its unpredictability. Outcomes we see as negative may turn out to be positive. Perhaps stink bugs will make us increase agricultural diversity and ecosystem and soil health. Perhaps they will unite the scientists of the world. Or perhaps they will make us spray so many chemicals that we make ourselves sick.
Though we often talk about termites and stink bugs as invaders, at a certain point, they are simply species who have become part of our ecosystem. We cannot send them back to their native land. We cannot ban them with legislation. They are residents, citizens, shaping the landscape and the cityscape just as much as we do. Perhaps the question is not whether we can control stink bugs and termites but whether we can adapt to coexist with them, or even grow to appreciate them. The termitologists trying to save New Orleans from being munched to the ground by Formosan termites admit that they nonetheless admire the insects for being organized, for fumigating their nests with naphthalene, nurturing fungal gardens, digesting wood and paper, and surviving Hurricane Katrina.
Stink bugs, like humans, are mobile. Like humans, they can expand their range by taking advantage of transportation and construction. Like humans, they have a tremendous impact on agricultural practice and ecology. None of these things are necessarily admirable, but an article in the Florida Entomologist reports that stink bugs find mates through “duetting vibrations,” a description that makes me long to be a stink bug.
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They look at me with their huge faces. Their human odors assault me. They don’t understand me, though I send out pheromones and odors. I stomp on leaves and on the ground, sending my vibrations. All the others of my kind understand these messages, but the humans only look at me in fury, spewing meaningless noises, making earthquakes as they stomp around the house. They can’t hear the songs I sing with the others of my kind, duetting vibrations, antenna to antenna, songs so quiet they can only be felt in the tips of the feet, in the delicate feelers. These rhythms and patterns are ancient, a language coded in my DNA.
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Nathan Lo, a biologist reporting on Australian termites, writes that Formosan termites and other species in its genus (Coptotermes) arrived in Australia about twelve million years ago, perhaps floating across the ocean in an arboreal nest—they were tree-nesting termites when they arrived. Over time, they began to build mounds on the ground instead. This happened only in Australia, probably because there were too few trees to support the population of termites. Lo, pondering evolutionary change, compares the insect to humans, whose ancestors also once lived in trees. Yet, now, like the termites, we construct giant cities on the surface of the planet. We modify our environment with engineering and construction. Lo ends his article by saying that Australian termites (both Coptotermes and another genus Nasutitermes) were able to become dominant species due to their ability to “adapt and survive in the face of significant environmental change.” In the past, people could not chart global ecological change in the span of their lives, but we have accelerated the pace of change. I wonder if we will be able to follow the example of the termites who depend upon one another and the existence of the colony in order to survive.
Ed Bordes of the New Orleans Mosquito and Termite Control Board said in a 1998 interview that, essentially, if New Orleans had had more research and information from China and Japan, or even Hawaii, the city would have comprehended the scope of the Formosan termite problem. Officials would have known what was awaiting them decades down the road. The same is true for the stink bug, which people first saw as a localized problem in the U.S., but if they had been up to date on stink bug research from Asia, they might have foreseen where we are today, twenty years after the stink bug’s arrival.
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When we arrived in Allentown, we searched for others of our kind. We are not social in the entomological sense of the word. We do not have castes and defined roles in our society the way termites do. But we are gregarious. We enjoy companionship. Sometimes I send out olfactory signals: There is danger here! or There are ripe cherries here, come join me. Where there are others, I feel safe. I belong. I speak, and someone hears me.
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In the early 1900s, many Chinese immigrants came to Angel Island, California, to be admitted to the U.S. They were forced to wait, sometimes for months, before the government decided their fate. While they waited, they carved poems onto the walls of their detention cells. Twice I have passed through the blue ocean, experienced the wind and dust of journey. Confinement in the wooden building has pained me doubly. Here are memoirs, here are words, here are laments in a language the officials working on Angel Island didn’t understand. It was just noise.
Last autumn, my grandfather’s half-sister, Hang Fa, died. She was born in Pahoa, Hawaii, a town of orange groves and lava flows. She was one of so many children that some of her siblings were adopted out to other families. One repeatedly ran away from her adopted home, crossing the entirety of the island to return to her biological family. This was the world Hang Fa came from—rural and poor and immigrant, a rock in the middle of the vast ocean. After Hang Fa died, her daughter compiled a montage of photos of Hang Fa’s childhood in Hawaii, her marriage and adulthood in California. Thousands of miles away from the funeral, thousands of miles from my family, I watched the montage on YouTube. I watched the photos change from black and white to color. I watched Hang Fa’s family expand, first with children, then grandchildren. I took in huge gatherings in Chinese restaurants, proud graduations from college. I was filled with a sense of the distance Hang Fa had travelled, and how our family had spread and multiplied, how we had contributed to our country during World War II and afterward.
Because I settled in a part of the country where very few Asians live, I was overcome with a feeling of missing out on this network of people and relatives and history. I felt like a lone Asian, far from my kin. Then I remembered: I live with many Asians. It’s just that they are stink bugs, not humans. Perhaps they recognize that we are from the same place, that we have undertaken the same journey. Perhaps that is why they are drawn to me and did not show up in my partner’s house until I did. Perhaps we are more similar than different. If I learn to speak their language, will they understand me? Sometimes I stomp at James, sending vibrations through our old wooden floor, and he stomps back at me: I never had stink bugs before I met you! Tremor of words. I listen. I feel. Here come some poems light as air.