Curriculum Vitae

von Marcus Krug

 

One, two, three, four, five and so on. The earliest memory, you say? Let me think. Ah yeah, that’ll do just fine.

In the beginning, there was only silence. I had just been flushed out of my intrauterine panic room, and my still gummy eyes were trying to adjust to the rather intense light. Where I had been until only a couple of minutes ago, there was no light at all. And now that strange person was holding me by my shrivelled-up feet. Upside down. I could tell, even with all the light and the state my eyes were in, that the woman wanted to raise me higher, but there was the cord. So, she cut the cord and lifted me up a little bit more. The loss of connection to my previous supply system and, of course, the slap on my behind made me scream at the top of my lungs. But I suppose that was the purpose of the whole thing all along, to see if my lungs were working properly.

The second pivotal memory. I can’t really put my finger on the point in time when this happened, you see. But there was this one day when my parents set me down and never picked me up again. I’m still trying to picture when that was.

Fast forward to the age of eleven. In the hospital again. I think the second time after the earliest memory. But I could as well be dead wrong. I was in pain, you see. A grumbling appendix, the doctors said, and had the nurses put a thick layer of ice around the appendix side. The pain didn’t stop, though. The appendix’s torture only made way for some more agony due to frostbite. In the end, however, it had turned out that they better should have applied some heat to the area. Supposedly, this is how you deal with a urinary tract infection. It was also found out that one of my kidneys – the one on the right-hand side – was way smaller than the one to the left, and severely crippled. A future kidney donation for monetary benefits has never been an option for me.

As a good German at the tender age of twenty-four, I pocketed my first masters in business administration and mechanical engineering. I was also offered a fully paid PhD research position to further the studies of my thesis. But for some reason, I decided to do something completely different.

At the age of thirty-one, I found myself working as a kindergarten teacher in a pre-school in Wuhan, China. My cheeky monkeys were all between the age of four and five. They had become quite fond of the exotic and hairy creature from the West. Sometimes they would even gang up on me, tackle me down and climb around on me. On one of those occasions, numerous tiny hands were all over my face, getting hold of my beard. I had been studying Chinese for quite some time and even passed for a native speaker (on the phone where I could hide my Caucasian features), but dialects and children’s voices made me walk right into the trap of homophony. With their little fingers combing through my beard, their high-pitched giggles and mumbled words sounded like they were calling me their big ape. That was when I started to call them monkeys, as kind of a revenge and also because most of them were born in the year of the monkey. It was only later that day, sitting in the bus on my long way home, when I realised that they weren’t calling me 大猴子 (dahouzi), big monkey but 大胡子 (dahuzi), bearded.

After mastering in Chinese and Mongolian literature, a friend of mine planted the idea in my head to work for his company, which also had a couple of offices in Ireland. Mainly to improve my English, which back then was not anywhere near a position to compete with my Chinese in terms of proficiency.

Now I’m here in a city situated on the picturesque Wild Atlantic Way, doing creative writing classes and again an idea of doing something completely different came out on top. And again, the countdown has started: five, four, three, two, one …