Hey everybody
where do I begin? My name is Cyren Wong, I am 21 years old and I am from Kuala Lumpur. I suppose I should count myself lucky that the area that I live in, though in the heart of Bangsar, is still rather quiete and abundant with plant life. I cannot be sure but I believe that my love for nature and all its little denizens was cultivated from a rather young age. I would not say that I grew up in an especially nature-loving environment (how could we when our first house was devoid of any plant life safe for the lalang which grew like crazy on our lawn, choking out every other plant-life that we tried to grow there. Living in a small house, I was never allowed any pets, although I would beg and plead with my parents for hours on end. I remember, until I was about aged seven or eight, my birthday wish every year would be to have a hamster or some other little animal equivalent. As such, the first animal under my care was a little worm I found one day whilst playing in the lalang. It was black, had a segmented body, with rows of spines lining its sides.
So I raised the little worm, brought it food and watched it grow, until one day to my astonishment, it curled in upon itself and seemed to dry up. For a few days I was mortified, having thought that I had killed it. But my mother had reassured me. She said to me that the little worm in my peanut-butter jar was not dead, but it was simply growing up. Of course I did not believe her, not then but out of curiousity I kept the peanut-butter jar anyway, with the little chrysalis hanging off the top when one day, lo and behold the worm had become something so unlike its previous self. It had the most beautiful wings, orange with vibrant eye-spots (Junonia Almana I think) and as I let it crawl on my finger to dry its still-expanding wings I was filled with a new sense of wonder, that sometihng so small and insignificant something most people would look at on the sidwalk and squish and say "eeew, worm gross!" could become something that everybody loved. And truly that was my first real connection with the process of metamorphosis and the event that would set me off on the road which I am on now.
So that's my story, hope you enjoyed it.
