Mourning a Firefly | Grandma Kouzi
I. My Story with Fireflies
I was the one who got “fireflied”—passively swept along to the renowned firefly haven of Ren’ai Township. At first I could not fathom why we simply had to stay at a homestay in the village. It was a field visit arranged by a conference, but accommodation came out of my own pocket, which stung a little. Had transport been convenient enough for me to leave the village on my own, and had a certain social reluctance not held me back, given the choice I would have opted out.
After dark, I stumbled out of the village with the rest of the group, not the faintest idea what was going on. Once off the main road and onto a narrow track, the streetlights vanished. The lane grew ever thinner, flanked by ditches on either side, their banks thick with dense, tall grass. Gradually, tiny pinpricks of firefly light began to flicker among the blades. Where would a northerner have seen anything like this? I was shouting and exclaiming at the sight. The others were much the same, southerner and northerner alike, whether or not they had seen fireflies before, whether or not they had known what the evening held.
Pressing on, the closer we drew to the hillside, the narrower the path, the denser the foliage, the heavier the air with moisture. Fireflies swelled in number until, at the forest’s edge, I was brought to a standstill by the oncoming tide—tens of thousands, perhaps more, a veritable “tide of fireflies” surging and rolling in waves. Stand perfectly still, and you might find yourself engulfed within them.
My companions and I fell utterly silent—overwhelmed beyond words.
A firefly’s life, after a long period of diapause, allows only three to seven days of glowing flight. And I was fortunate enough to encounter, in that brief span, tens of thousands at once.
At first light the next morning, I returned alone to the foot of that hillside—not for the shimmering sea of light, but to give thanks to this place that had conjured such a breathtaking sight, and to bid it a quiet farewell. Such an encounter is a rare gift, one a lifetime may hold only once.
Halfway through, the leader stopped and asked everyone to switch off their head torches. The rain-soaked dark was absolute, then the air stirred with pinpricks of light—hundreds of them, drifting. A band of city-dwellers, strayed into the wild on a rainy night, stood in long silence.
During my two years farming in Yilan, I walked the night fields countless times. In early summer I even sought out damp, marshy patches of reeds and weeds, hoping for a chance encounter with firefly light. No luck. Fellow farmers nearby told me that fireflies demand extremely pristine conditions: behind every one of Taiwan’s celebrated firefly-watching spots lies a long process of environmental restoration. By all accounts, my own village of Shengou in Yilan is home to Taiwan’s largest community of smallholders practising eco-friendly farming, and yet, for the fireflies, it seems still not enough.
Fireflies are sensitive not only to chemical fertilisers and pesticides but also to human presence. As people advance, fireflies retreat: where settlements are dense, fireflies are never seen. Du Mu wrote, “With a fan of lightest gauze she swats at drifting fireflies”—that garden must have been vast indeed, and far enough removed from the madding crowd.
Three years ago I finally got my Outlaws’ Valley. Rural village lanes have no streetlights; to others that is a regret, but to me it is a blessing—far enough from light pollution to breathe. On quiet nights I sit alone in the dark, half-aware that I am simply a figure between heaven and earth. In early summer, a few drifting fireflies will sometimes flicker, and a special gratitude fills me—far beyond anything I had hoped this land would give.
II. Battling the Yellow Gourd Beetle
The first year, fate honoured my carefree creed: sure enough, nothing to show. The second year, after sowing, I could not even see a single gourd or bean sprout. As a “seasoned old farmer,” I could only puzzle: where had all those seeds gone?
This is the third spring. Armed with two years of hard-won experience, the carefree attitude was no longer an option. From the very first stirring of spring, I drew up a detailed plan: early-spring crops would get tender loving care, climbing plants would get trellises, and the gourds and beans on the field margins were each assigned their patch. I love pumpkin, and last year I saved seed from every delicious variety I grew—sorted and labelled, packet after packet, adding up to over a pound in total. Anyone seeing that haul of pumpkin seed would have laughed: with seeds like these, you could plant acres!
This spring brought generous rain. The seeds sprouted soon after going in. Walking my fields and seeing every sort of shoot breaking through the soil, I actually began to worry: “What am I going to do with all this food?” But the good news lasted barely. Just as in the two years before, the gourd and bean shoots “disappeared.” Only after careful observation did I realise they had been eaten—not nibbled gradually, but wiped out within days.
Seeds were plentiful; on to round two. All this fiddling had eaten into over twenty days—it was already late March. This time I deliberately sowed extra seeds in each hole, thinking: surely, with this many, a few must survive. But after they germinated, it happened again—wiped out, every last shoot.
The tender shoots had been eaten by a swarm of yellow flying beetles. I have no photos—partly because they are highly alert and hard to photograph, partly because I hate them so much that the moment I spot one I swat it flat, and taking a picture simply never crosses my mind.
The third sowing came in April. This time I searched online first and identified the culprit: the yellow gourd beetle. A name to strike dread into any farmer’s heart: evil yellow insects, just sitting there, waiting for my gourds to sprout.
I had heard wood ash worked, so the moment a seedling broke the surface I dusted my shoots with a thick coat of it, like giving them a heavy smoky-eye look. Useless, as it turns out. This blurry picture shows a yellow gourd beetle chewing away at a leaf dusted with wood ash.
Before I knew it, spring had yielded to early summer. After three rounds of this struggle, over a pound of saved pumpkin seed had been scattered into the soil and vanished without a trace. Eventually I appealed to local friends for help and managed to get another pound of pumpkin seed to sow. This time I left nothing to chance. I bought fine mesh netting specifically and rigged insect-proof covers over every gourd bed. The survival rate of the shoots inside the netting did improve, but I had not reckoned on what came next: wilt.
I steeled myself and dug into the Yellow Gourd Beetle’s pedigree, back eight generations, only to learn that this insect “causes pest damage to all manner of gourds, hitting watermelon, pumpkin, sweet melon and cucumber hardest, but also damaging Brassicaceae, Solanaceae, Fabaceae, sunflower, citrus, peach, pear, apple, hackberry, mulberry and more…” This is no “Yellow Gourd Beetle”—it is a “Yellow Guards Me” Beetle, plain and simple. It knows I will not resort to pesticides, so it keeps watch over my little patch, gnawing whatever I sow.
Even more terrifying: “both the imago and the larva cause pest damage—the imago favours gourd leaves and petals, while the larva feeds exclusively on gourd roots underground.” As for me, I plant everything under the sun, and every last crop is an all-you-can-eat buffet to which the beetle turns nothing away—truly, it conquers me on every front. And its active period stretches on so long I could collapse in tears in the Outlaws’ Valley: it overwinters in my fields, emerging from diapause in early spring at 6–10 °C, perfectly timed to the first sowing, free to run riot through my plots at will. In warm regions like Fujian, apart from a brief dormancy, it can raise two or three generations a year—imago and larva taking turns to lay waste the year round.
When I was bemoaning my woes to local friends, I heard them also call it “firefly.” A casual word—and my entire worldview lay in ruins. I searched online: “The Yellow Gourd Beetle is also known as the Yellow-Legged Yellow Gourd Beetle; colloquially, it goes by Huang Ying or Gua Ying.” I had assumed the Ying in its name was the Ying of “firefly”—surely the same word.
All at once, the fireflies of the night lost their enchantment—no longer the fairy of drifting fireflies, but a heart-piercing will-o’-the-wisp. Last night, returning from a swim, I saw firefly light flickering in the grass beside the quail coop. I charged over and kicked. The firefly stopped moving, yet a faint glow still clung to it—one kick, and another, and another…
The reason I write this little piece now is that, after carefully researching the Yellow Gourd Beetle and consulting my local “encyclopaedia” friends, I finally learned that this Ying—meaning “lustrous”—is not the Ying of “firefly.” Locals call the beetle “firefly” simply because the two look alike; in truth, the Yellow Gourd Beetle emits no light whatsoever. And the firefly is not merely the legendary fairy of firefly light from tales—it is a beneficial insect whose larvae feed exclusively on Oncomelania snails, garden snails and other pests.
Oh, I am sorry, firefly. I was wrong.
I dedicate this piece in mourning and in apology. Alas!
Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations in this article are by the author
Editor: Wang Hao