It's time to get over this fear of mine

There is really nothing I fear more than cockroaches, if you don’t include stuff like loneliness, poverty, cancer, castration, etc. I fear those things more than I fear death, and I fear cockroaches only slightly less than I fear those things.

If you’re from Vancouver and you haven’t travelled around much, you’d probably have no idea what a cockroach even is. I myself didn’t even know of their existence until I moved to Taipei in 2000. Well, actually, I once saw them in a movie called “Joe’s Apartment”, but figured, at the time, that those things couldn’t possibly be real. In case you don’t know, cockroaches are extremely tough insects that have apparently been around for hundreds of millions of years, have many legs, can climb up walls, can sometimes fly, can have bodies as long as an adult pinkie finger, and have very scary-looking shells that make horrifying “crack”-ing sounds when crushed. And they move DAMNED FAST in freaky, jerky movements. Sorry to be so vague, but I absolutely refuse to look up “cockroach”, in case I end up seeing pictures of them. The very sight of them makes me cower, shiver, and scream in fear. The one time a cockroach ever touched me, when one fell onto and crawled all over my shoulders as I was at a supermarket check-out counter in Taipei, I was frozen in fear for more than a minute and shivered for more than an hour afterwards, despite the scorching 35 degree weather that day.


Up until last week, I’ve considered myself to be quite fortunate to have seen cockroaches in any of my homes only five times (two of them in the room I’m in at this very moment) in the more than 6 of the past 9 years that I’ve been living in Asia. Even in the filthy ground floor dorm room I shared with 2 other guys that year I lived in Taipei, I didn’t see a single cockroach until my last month there.

I think it’s about time that I do something about my fear of cockroaches. They’ve been appearing in my life (specifically my residence) with increasing frequency in the last week or so. This is no coincidence: these roaches have been showing up ever since the Cambodian guy who lived next door since September (and who repeatedly told me that he saw cockroaches in his room EVERY SINGLE DAY) moved out… about a week ago.

What scares me the most is that I’ve been seeing cockroaches of varying sizes in my room. This suggests that they may be breeding somewhere in my room, most probably deep in my closet. My first thought upon realising this was to consider moving out of this damned place.


It would have been nice if I were able to have gotten used to cockroaches over time, but this simply hasn’t been the case. When I see them on sidewalks, I immediately scamper out of the way. When walking around at night, I often jump up at the sight of individual leaves that suddenly get blown around, which, for a very quick moment, can almost seem like a cockroach. When walking around with friends, I always point to cockroaches to warn everybody else, scamper out of the way as usual, and I’m told that I cross my arms over my chests as I scamper about. Yes, my friends do poke fun at me. To come to think of it, it really is quite absurd. Can you imagine the sight of a lumbering 220 lb guy, a kick boxer, who’s not afraid to take a punch, but who is frightened by a tiny little insect like a cockroach? I haven’t hesitated to call up friends and neighbours, including females, to help me get rid of these pests. Not only do I lack the courage to kill cockroaches myself, but I’m also not sure about which cockroach killing method is ideal when it comes to effectiveness and minimal clean-up. Stepping on a cockroach can be effective, but what if I miss and it ends up crawling all over my foot? Walloping a cockroach with a rolled up newspaper is another possible method, but what if I miss and the cockroach ends up flying towards my face? Yet another method would be to spray insecticide at it, and I prefer this method because it’s slightly less disgusting to dispose of an intact carcass rather than a mashed up one. The main problem with insecticide is that it could end up killing ME – my buddy Trylon said that insecticide causes insects to become neurological paralysed. If you unload a can of bug spray on a single insect, I bet it’s not just the insect that experiences neurological damage!


The recent abrupt intrusion of cockroaches into my life has made me recall a childhood phobia of mine that I have since overcome: a fear of dogs. I used to be afraid of dogs when I was very young, but got over this fear by the time I finished primary school. I can still remember the very day I overcame this fear. One day, when I was around 12 years old and my brother was around 11, a large, unleashed dog suddenly appeared as we were walking to school. This dog began to bark at us rather furiously, causing my brother, whose fear of dogs eclipsed my own, to run away in panic. The dog gave chase. I chased after my brother, caught him in a bear hug, then glared at the dog, and barked at it for good measure, causing it to saunter off. Since that moment, I was no longer afraid of dogs, unless they sniff my crotch a bit too curiously. Even when I see big, fierce-looking dogs and even guard dogs, I walk around as though I own the place, and I kind of tell them, telepathically, that I wouldn’t hesitate to beat the crap out of them. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think I could actually bring myself to hurt a dog, but please, don’t tell that to THEM.

If I can overcome my fear of dogs, it shouldn’t be impossible for me to overcome my fear of cockroaches. Just tonight, I killed 3 cockroaches: 2 tiny ones with bodies less than 1cm long, and a small one with a body that was almost 2cm long. I had no fewer than 3 chances today and 2 chances yesterday to kill larger cockroaches that have bodies that are 3-5cm long, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.. yet.