Anthropomorphizing Wild Animals
By Andrew Lam

Whenever I visit my nephew, Eric, who is 6 years old, inevitably he entices me to play with his stuffed animals. In a game OF pretend they go on a wild adventure. Eric, a consummate director, constantly chastises me for not getting the right tone and phrasing.

That’s perhaps because I was not born in America. When I play with Eric my mind often veers back to my Vietnamese childhood. In that tropical world wild parrots fought over every ripened star fruit in our garden. I, unlike my nephew, knew no Bugs Bunny, no Donald Duck and, certainly no neurotic clownfish or chatty donkey. When my brother and sister spotted an alligator in the river, we gathered on the bridge and screamed and watched with delight, fascination and fear.

And once, a wild peacock was trapped in the neighbor’s yard. The mournful sounds it made at night gave me vivid and phantasmagorial dreams.

Wild animals didn’t exist for me then as human-like characters. They didn’t sing and dance, nor did they do slapstick on television, like “Tom and Jerry.” They were strictly and specifically themselves—that is to say, awesome and mysterious.

That world, alas, is fast disappearing. The new Vietnam, like most of Asia, has become very urbanized and modern, and its young are more likely to spot a tiger on National Geographic channel on TV than in the wild.

These days, with the exception of the ability to entertain, wild animals seem to have lost their power over us. Think of whatever happened to the tiger, a species near extinction. That “fearful symmetry” that William Blake immortalized in his poem. Or think of the lion, that once fearsome king of the jungle The tiger has long since been replaced by Tony, a child-friendly version who peddles cereal on TV with the innocuous jingle, “It tastes Grrrrreat!” And the king of the jungle is now but one of my nephew’s favorite Disney characters, Simba, a plush and cuddly stuffed animal with big round, puppy eyes.

So, like everyone else, I am thoroughly entertained by movies like Finding Nemo and Shrek and Shark Tale. Yet, I cannot help but feel that somewhere along our modernizing way, something sacred has been lost.

For my nephew Eric then, who was born in America and who has never seen a wild animal in its natural habitat, I have this fond wish: may you hear the roar of the wild tiger someday, and dream of a world where stories are still told by firelight, and where awesome experiences could still be had in the deep forests of the night.