Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

The following was published in the Sunday Times on 13 Jan 2007:

Sunday Times 13 Jan 2007
Henry and The Keropok of Death
by Colin Goh

Those of you who are pantang about the Year of the Rat might want to skip this column.

New York City is famous for its rats. According to some statistics, there are between 6 to 12 rats for each resident. Last year, a video of rats cavorting inside a KFC/Taco Bell in Greenwich Village turned the outlet into a temporary tourist attraction, and triggered a health crackdown that resulted in the closure of many eateries, including celebrated restaurants like Serendipity 3 and Brasserie La Cote Basque.

Two years ago, I’d also written about finding a dead mouse when we returned to our Brooklyn apartment after spending a year in Singapore – sort of a ‘welcome back’ gift from the City. And a few weeks after we’d moved in to our new place in Queens, I wasn’t surprised when another turned up, skidding about our sink like some Disney on Ice performance – after all, 2 of our neighbours were doing construction, and the weather was turning cold. “Optimal mouse conditions,” said our landlord, not particularly comfortingly. After disposing of our furry intruder (humanely), we plugged every hole we could find and set various traps, and we saw no further signs of any more pesky guests.

Until last week.

We’d fried up a batch of keropok for a party, and I’d stashed some away for (ahem) later private consumption in a Ziploc bag. The next morning, however, there was a coin-sized hole in the bag, and chew marks around some of the crackers.

The Wife and I simultaneously yelled, “Ee-yurr!” and immediately went to buy traps – glue traps, snap traps, rodent ‘hotel’ traps, you name it, we bought it. And we came home and baited all of them with – what else? Keropok.

The next morning, however, we awoke to find that our verminous visitor had not only not triggered any of the traps, he’d also managed to make off with every single piece of bait!

We figured we hadn’t been clever enough with how we’d placed the traps. We also noted that he’d ignored all the other possible sources of food in the kitchen. This meant that despite the risk, he’d ignored the bread, the cookies, the chips, and headed straight for the savoury prawn crackers – a ringing endorsement of the superiority of our cuisine.

The next night, we laid the traps in an even more elaborate fashion. I was rather impressed by one configuration the Wife devised, with a single piece of keropok ringed by a series of glue and snap traps.

But the next morning was the same result – none of the traps triggered, and all the keropok gone! “What the fish,” I said to the Wife. “Did the fella rappel down from the roof like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible or what?”

Over the week, we continued to come up with even more Byzantine trap formations, but none of them worked. The Wife had also started to refer to him, for donno what reason, as “Henry”.

“Why did you give him a name?” I groaned. “It’s more difficult to kill someone once he has a name! This isn’t ‘Ratatouille’, okay! He’s not in our kitchen preparing boeuf bourguignonne or canard a l’orange!”

But the last straw came when we returned from dinner one night and not only saw that Henry had swiped the keropok yet again, but also heard him brazenly scrunching away from somewhere behind the fridge. It felt like he was taunting us. “Henry must die,” said the Wife solemnly.

We did further research and learned that the best strategy was to bait the traps but not set them for several days. This way, the rat would get complacent. Then one night, we’d set the traps, and bingo! “I can’t believe we’re using psychology on a rat,” I told the Wife. But we did it anyway.

Night after night, we baited the unset traps, and every morning, the keropok would be gone as usual. After a while, we began to wonder if we really wanted to kill Henry after all. He was fast becoming a pet. We began toying with non-fatal traps. The Wife even experimented with one she’d made out of an old Tupperware container.

Then one evening, while leaving keropok out for Henry, we finally saw him. A mouse, not a rat, he’d fallen victim to an old snap trap we’d forgotten to disarm. It had been a quick death. We felt kind of sad, though we also noted that the keropok bait was nowhere to be found.

Sorry, Henry, it just wasn’t your year, but at least you didn’t die hungry.

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