The Monkey Scratched Me and My Mother Said I Might Start a Plague: A Memoir

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Here’s the thing about being disliked by a monkey: it’s weirdly personal.

Like, I get it when humans don’t like me. Humans are complex. We have reasons. Maybe I said something weird at a party, maybe my face just pisses them off, maybe we’re incompatible on a molecular level—these things happen. But a monkey? A monkey named Barok who lived on my aunt and uncle’s farm and whose entire job description was basically “exist, eat fruit, occasionally pick lice off people’s heads”? That monkey took one look at me and decided, with what I can only describe as pure primal certainty, that I was The Enemy.

This wasn’t casual dislike. This was vendetta-level hatred.¹

The farm was where I’d spend chunks of my summer vacation, sometimes weekends when my mom felt like reminding me that rural Philippines existed beyond our moderately urban life. You know the setup—relatives with land, various animals with unclear purposes, the smell of things growing and also things decomposing, that specific soundtrack of roosters and someone’s radio playing too loud in the distance.

Barok was just… there. Part of the landscape. Like the mango trees and the carabao and my cousin’s obsession with catching frogs. Nobody questioned why there was a pet monkey. This was the 90s in provincial Philippines. People just had shit. Someone had a monkey. Fine.

My aunt—bless her chaotic heart—had this theory that Barok loved picking lice from people’s hair. “It’s bonding,” she said, like this was a completely normal recreational activity and not something that made me question everything.² She gestured at a spot near Barok’s perch. “Go, sit. He’ll find the lice in your hair.”

I sat.

Barok approached. I could see it in his monkey eyes—the calculation, the assessment, the dawning realization that my head was a lice-free zone and therefore I was USELESS to him.

He pulled my hair.

Not like a gentle “oops wrong strand” pull. Like a “fuck you specifically” pull.

It hurt. I jerked away. Barok chittered—I swear to god it sounded like laughter—and retreated to his perch, satisfied that he’d established dominance over this lice-less interloper.

And that’s when I knew: Barok and I were enemies. Mutual dislike. The kind of relationship where you cross the street to avoid each other, except I couldn’t cross the street because this was a farm and also he was a monkey who lived there.

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My aunt, witnessing this declaration of war, did what any reasonable adult would do when a child and a monkey are beefing: she tried to broker peace through food.³

“Here, give him this,” she said, handing me a piece of freshly harvested sugarcane. “Barok loves sugarcane.”

I looked at the sugarcane. I looked at Barok. Barok looked at me with what I can only describe as pure malicious intent.

“He’ll be nice,” my aunt assured me.

Narrator (ehem Morgan Freeman voice): He was not nice.

I stretched out my hand—slowly, because even at 11 I understood this was a terrible idea but adults were telling me to do it so surely it would be fine—and Barok grabbed my arm.

Not the sugarcane. My arm.

GRABBED it. With his weird little monkey hands that were stronger than they had any right to be.

Then he SCRATCHED me.

Like, deliberately. With intent. While maintaining eye contact. It was personal.

THEN he grabbed the sugarcane and fucked off to eat it while I stood there bleeding and crying and learning important lessons about betrayal and the fundamental unfairness of the universe.⁴

I cried. Of course I cried. I was 11 and a monkey had just assault-and-battery’d me for the crime of… existing near him? Not having lice? Being human? The reasons remained unclear.

My aunt bandaged my arm. Everyone agreed that Barok was “playful” and I should “try again later.”

I did not try again later.

Barok and I maintained our cold war for the remainder of that summer. I avoided his corner of the farm. He chittered mockingly whenever I passed. It was fine. Everything was fine.

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Months passed. Maybe half a year? Time does weird things in childhood—could’ve been three months, could’ve been nine, who knows. The scratch healed. I forgot about Barok, mostly, except in the way you forget about minor traumas that surface at random moments for the rest of your life.

Then my mom and I watched Outbreak.

You know Outbreak? The 1995 Dustin Hoffman vehicle about a deadly airborne virus that turns people into hemorrhaging disaster zones? The one where a monkey—A MONKEY—is the original carrier of the plague that threatens to wipe out an entire American town?

Yeah. That one.

I watched it at 11 years old, sitting next to my mother on our couch, eating whatever snack we were eating, completely unprepared for what was about to happen to my psyche.⁵

The movie ends. Credits roll. I’m processing images of people bleeding from their eyeballs, of containment failures, of the general apocalyptic vibe that was very popular in 90s disaster cinema.

My mother turns to me.

This is important. This moment. The turn. The casual rotation of her head in my direction. The way her face held this expression of… sudden realization? Mild concern? The faintest hint of “oh shit”?

“Weren’t you scratched by Barok a few months ago?”

…

I’m sorry, WHAT?

“The monkey,” she clarified, as if I didn’t remember the monkey. As if Barok hadn’t been living rent-free in my trauma bank for months. “He scratched you, right?”

“…yes?”

“Hm,” she said. Just “hm.” Like she’d noted something mildly interesting about the weather.

And then she just… moved on with her evening.

But I COULDN’T move on.⁶

My brain, my beautiful disaster of an 11-year-old brain, immediately made the connection my mother had so helpfully illuminated:

Monkey scratch + plague movie = I AM PATIENT ZERO.

Not “might be.” Not “probably not.” I WAS.

For YEARS—and I mean multiple years, not weeks, YEARS—I walked around with this low-grade apocalyptic anxiety that I was going to start an epidemic. Not in a “this is a real medical concern” way, because even child-me understood that was probably irrational. But in a “what if though” way that lived in the background of my brain like tinnitus.

What if I sneezed wrong in class and suddenly everyone started hemorrhaging?

What if the virus had a really long incubation period and was just waiting?

What if Barok wasn’t just a asshole monkey but a PLAGUE VECTOR asshole monkey?

I’d be in school, taking a test, and suddenly think: “Is this how it starts? Is this the fever?” Every headache was suspicious. Every time I felt tired I was like “is this fatigue or is this THE VIRUS?”

I never told anyone because how do you explain “hey, I’m worried I might accidentally kill everyone because a monkey scratched me once and then my mom said a thing”?⁷

The rational part of my brain—the part that was already forming, already learning to cope with the chaos—knew this was absurd. Barok was just a regular asshole monkey on a farm in the Philippines. The scratch had healed. I was fine. Everyone was fine.

But the other part, the part that had watched Dustin Hoffman trying to contain an outbreak while my mother casually connected dots between my lived experience and fictional bioterrorism, that part wasn’t so sure.

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Here’s what I think about now, decades later, sitting in my 40s with the perspective of someone who’s survived both the monkey scratch and the casual psychological warfare of Filipino parenting:

We’re all just making this up as we go along.

My aunt didn’t think “maybe don’t encourage the child to interact with the aggressive monkey.” She thought “sugarcane will fix this.”

My mother didn’t think “maybe don’t traumatize my 11-year-old by connecting her minor injury to a fictional plague.” She thought “huh, interesting parallel” and said it out loud.

And I, in my child-brain, didn’t think “this is clearly irrational and I should dismiss it.” I thought “oh god oh fuck I’m going to kill everyone” and carried that for years.

Nobody was trying to cause harm. Everyone was just… existing. Making decisions that seemed fine at the time. Creating little chaos ripples that would propagate forward through time.

Barok didn’t hate me because I was inherently hate-able. He probably didn’t even hate me. He was just a monkey doing monkey things—social grooming expectations unmet, sugarcane opportunities seized, personal space defended with violence. It wasn’t personal.

Except it felt personal. That’s the thing about childhood. Everything feels personal because you’re still figuring out where you end and the world begins.⁸ You haven’t learned yet that sometimes monkeys just scratch people and it doesn’t MEAN anything beyond “this is a scratch.”

The thing is—and here’s where it gets recursive, where the spiral tightens—I don’t actually know if I was weird before this happened or if this made me weird.

Like, was I already the kind of kid who would turn a monkey scratch into existential dread about being an epidemic catalyst? Or did the sequence of events CREATE that kind of thinking?

Did Barok’s hatred reveal something essential about my character, or did it BUILD my character?

Did watching Outbreak at 11 break something in my brain, or did it just activate something that was already there, waiting?

These questions don’t have answers. They’re turtles all the way down.⁹

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I’m 40-something now. I haven’t thought about Barok in years—or I HAD’T, until I started writing this, until the memory surfaced with that specific clarity of childhood trauma that never quite goes away, just gets filed under “formative experiences that explain why I am the way I am.”

I never started a plague.

Obviously. I mean, I’m here writing this, and as far as I know, nobody I went to school with in the years following the scratch incident died of mysterious hemorrhagic fever. The epidemic existed only in my head, which is where most of our apocalypses live anyway.¹⁰

Barok is dead now. Monkeys don’t live that long, and it’s been decades. I hope he had a good life, full of lice-picking and sugarcane and terrorizing other children who didn’t meet his standards.

I don’t hate him anymore. I don’t feel anything about him, really, except this weird gratitude for being such a perfect embodiment of chaos. For teaching me, at 11, that sometimes the universe just hands you absurd situations—monkey hatred, parental commentary, irrational fears—and you just have to… live with them. Carry them. Turn them into stories eventually.

My mother, now in the great beyond, probably would’ve laughed at this essay. Or maybe rolled her eyes at my dramatization of a single comment. That’s the thing about the people who shape us—they’re gone before you can ask them “hey, did you know you did this to my brain?” before you can get the full context of their intentions.¹¹

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe there is no point. Maybe it’s just: monkey scratched me, mom said a thing, I got weird about it, years passed, here we are.

The universe isn’t teaching lessons. It’s just throwing monkeys at us and seeing what happens.

Sometimes the monkey scratches you.

Sometimes your mom connects it to a plague movie.

Sometimes you spend years thinking you’re Patient Zero.

And sometimes, decades later, you write it all down and realize: oh. OH. This is why I’m like this.

This is why I expect chaos. Why I find absurdity everywhere. Why I can’t take anything too seriously because I spent formative years worried about a fictional epidemic. Why I watch the world spiral and think “yeah, tracks” instead of being surprised.

Barok scratched me and I learned that the universe is random and cruel and funny all at once.

Thanks, Barok.

You asshole.

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P.S. I just googled “can monkeys carry diseases” and now I’m worried again. Some things never change.

P.P.S. If you’re reading this and you have a pet monkey, maybe don’t let it scratch children? Just a thought.

P.P.P.S. Barok, if you’re haunting the farm from whatever monkey afterlife exists, we’re good. Water under the bridge. I understand you now. You were just being a monkey. I was just being anxious. We were both doing our best.

P.P.P.P.S. But seriously though, fuck that sugarcane betrayal. That was cold.