When my family arrives in Thailand on my father’s second overseas assignment, my mother buys a book of Thai folktales. A sun rises on the cover under the title “The Land of a Thousand Smiles.” I run my fingers over images I’ve never seen before. Thai dancers, their fingers bent back in graceful curves. Garuda, a red and gold God with kite-like wings. Women in chut thai, traditional Thai dress with fabric belts and jeweled sashes. My favorite pages tell a story about a monk and a cobra.
A monk on a spiritual journey goes to an isolated cabin. While meditating, he opens his eyes and sees a giant cobra in front of his open door. There is no other way out. The cobra’s neck is raised, its eyes on the monk. Trembling in terror, the monk cannot move, cannot escape. For hours, he does not take his eyes off the snake, its neck swaying as it remains on his doorstep. They continue to stare at each other for some time until, exhausted, the monk gives up the fight. He bows to the cobra, collapses on the floor, and falls into a deep sleep. As the sun rises, he wakes up. The cobra is gone.
I read this story over and over as a child. I don’t have the book anymore, but the tale never leaves my mind.
We must all bow to what we are scared of, the tale whispers to me still. It is the only way it will let us pass.
My father works in Saraburi, approximately three hours away from Nonthaburi, a northern suburb of Bangkok where the rest of us live. My parents make sure we live close to an international school, which means my father is only home on weekends and every other Wednesday night. When he’s not home, my sister and I sleep on piles of blankets on the floor of my parents’ bedroom — something we love to do.
I am on this makeshift bed when we are gearing up for our third move, this time to Holland. I dream that I am at the foot of a row of gigantic water slides watching cobras writhe their way toward me. Their hoods flare and they sway as they rush downhill, a wall of slithering bodies. Their eyes are on me, and there’s nothing I can do but wait.
I wake up, terrified. My mother tells me that people dream of snakes during periods of change. “Because they shed their skins in order to grow,” she says, returning me to the foot of her bed.
Pulling the covers over my chest, she adds: “I dream about snakes before each move.”
Before returning to the States for college, I will shed my skin the seven times my father’s job demands, so it follows that snakes curl up in my unconscious, dream-like apparitions that manifest in times of distress.
In Thailand, I encounter snakes outside of my dreams, too. In our gated expat community, snakes curl up in lampshades, give birth in pool filters, and slip into shoes.
One day, my mother opens the front door, home from tennis, and lets us know the guards have captured a four-foot snake. “You can go see it before they kill it, if you want,” she tells us. My sister and I walk across the street. The guard holds the snake up by its tail and head, a thick semi-circle. He holds its jaws between his thumb and index finger. He shakes his head.
“Bad,” he says.
Someone encourages me to touch the snake’s immobile body. My fingers flutter against its muscles, downward so as to not disturb its scales. For some reason, I’m upset. “Do they have to kill it?” I ask my mother when we return.
“It’ll just come back,” she says.
When my classmates and I visit the Bangkok snake farm where antivenom is made (which is a good thing, they tell us during the presentation, since every single employee has been bitten at least once), I peek into cramped cages where vipers hide, defecate, and lay eggs.
In the farm’s museum, I pause to look at snakes’ heads, embalmed and displayed for visitors. When I see their flattened necks floating in blue liquid, I imagine the museum employees decapitating them. During the snake handling demonstration, I watch as spitting cobras are pulled from wicker baskets, silver hooks wrapped around the two pale bands at their throats. The handlers provoke these snakes to spit, as schoolchildren cheer. They squeeze the sides of their heads so their mouths gape open and their fangs jut out. The handlers drain their venom before shoving the snakes back into small baskets.
The baskets shake.
I would be angry too, I think.
The last time I am in a king cobra’s presence, it’s at the Metro Richmond Zoo in Virginia, the state where I now live with my partner and child. When I ask my daughter if she wants to visit the reptile room, she says no — she wants a cone-ice. But on our way out, I convince her to visit the snakes. The line stretches out the door as our bodies move in a circle around the various transparent cages. The walls have signs on them that say, “Don’t tap on the glass! It causes the snakes stress.”
I see at least three people ignore this rule over the course of a minute.
“Look, it’s a snake!” my daughter exclaims, pointing at a Gaboon viper. We continue to march forward, passing cages that seem empty, cages with snakes bundled tight in a corner, wound around an obscured branch or camouflaged under some wood or leaves. Reluctant exhibits, the snakes don’t care that we are there to leer. Only a tree boa runs its body against the glass, knocking its head to the side after it bounces off the clear pane. It looks at us. I’m heartened by how lively it seems, disheartened by its clear desire to breach its confines.
Then I see the king cobra. Its white-grey body is curled up. Its tail juts out, a rough, pointed strip. Its body is visible yet lifeless in the enclosure — its face is turned away from us, toward the back of a hole in a log.
“Is it sleeping?” my daughter asks.
“Yes, baby,” I respond. But I’m not sure I believe myself.
When I exit the zoo, holding my daughter, I wonder when I’ll tell her that snakes represent change. I wonder when she’ll learn that snakes conjure curiosity, enticing us toward worldly pleasures instead of holy austerity. I wonder when to tell her she’ll never meet a snake by mutual choice, that snakes are far too easy to grab hold of and render immobile for an animal so feared. I wonder how many snakes she’ll meet on trails covered by autumn leaves; on pavements during evening walks; on walls in her grandparents’ garage.
I wonder if it’ll ever mean as much to her as it does to me that snakes’ venom creates antivenom, that when they strike us, only they can save us. I wonder if I can, as my mother did for me, teach her to meet snakes — to meet fear — at the door with respect.
Alicia Andrzejewski is an assistant professor of English at the College of William and Mary.