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While passing a feeding frenzy in Little Saigon, I noticed for the first time in my life, a life that has been spent in the human-dense cores of cities, that the thick throats of seagulls, the kings and queens of the synanthropic birds, bizarrely, horribly distend when swallowing.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...