My daughter is agitating for a zoo trip. We’ve been on every other possible excursion this summer, so I suppose the zoo was bound to come up eventually.

But the last time I visited a zoo was about ten years ago, in Hong Kong. Min and I were strolling around aimlessly, in the kind of fog you fall into when you’ve eaten too much dim sum three days in a row.

Then, as we walked past a gorilla sleeping in the sunshine, he opened his eyes.

If he were human, those eyes would have said, “I’m trapped, and I’ve given up hope that anything will improve, ever.”

And those eyes looked very, very human.

We haven’t been to a zoo since. We’ve been to a few wild animal parks, where one can marvel at rhinos from a distance, but I don’t want to see a caged primate ever again. So I don’t think my daughter’s campaign is going to be too successful.

Maybe she can reread The One and Only Ivan, instead?