Cicadas

The bugs here are incredible. 

Cicadas, specifically. When we arrived in Shanghai midsummer, the cicadas were so loud that I often couldn’t hear what Susannah or Julia were saying when we were walking down the street. 

Of all the ideas I had in anticipating Shanghai, this wasn’t one of them. 

It has me thinking of the first time I learned about cicadas: I’d moved from a beach town in San Diego to Annapolis, Maryland, which, with a population of around 30,000, was smaller than my hometown. 

While Annapolis has water on eight sides of it and is a state capital, you don’t have to go far from the steps of the Capitol building to reach working farms. In the time I lived there, I’d associated the summer hum of those dinosauric insects with the combo of summer humidity and small town life. So, I was quite surprised to get to my new home here in Shanghai – with a population of 28 million give or take – and have the constant sound of this city by the deafening cicada shrieks.

I’m thinking too about the unexpected sounds of the three other places I’ve lived since moving abroad. In Chennai, the early morning sounds were dominated first by the crows; in Bucharest, it was seagulls who cackled at sun up, followed by a lazy rooster in the neighboring courtyard; before the sun rose in Abidjan, bullfrogs ribbetted at each other in the deep concrete trench across the street from my apartment building. After the sun was up, a rooster up the street who thought he was a peacock showed off his vocals.

The sounds of international cities: crows, seagulls, roosters, bullfrogs, cicadas.