I was born in May on the underside of a branch in Providence, one of about forty, under a coat of something like grey putty that my mother laid down in October and did not live to see open. That is how it goes with us. One generation a year. Nobody alive has met a parent.

I am told I am from China. I have never been. Neither had my mother, or hers. The first of us to reach America came in 2014, in what is believed to have been a shipment of stone, and landed in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and every one of them was dead by that winter. A dozen generations later, here I am. Every lanternfly in America was born in America. The federal definition of an invasive species turns on the introduction, meaning the trip, and the trip has to have been made by human activity. It is a definition about my ancestors' luggage. I accept it. I did not pick the stone.

I spent my childhood as a black nymph with white spots, then a red one, on a tree of heaven. The tree of heaven is also from China. It came to Philadelphia in 1784, on purpose, as a garden tree, and was planted along American streets for a century because it grows anywhere. It is my favorite food, and by the same definition it is invasive. It is two hundred and forty years older than I am and nobody is asked to kill it on sight.

I do not bite. I do not sting. The state says I pose no risk to people or pets, and I don't. I drink sap. What I don't keep comes out of me sweet, and a black mold grows on it, and the mold shades the leaves. Grapes are my weakness. I understand that this is a problem for people with vines.

The State of Rhode Island has asked everyone to kill me on sight. The instruction comes from the Department of Environmental Management's lanternfly response coordinator, who told a television station in July: if you see them, squish them. He kills thousands of us a week himself and has said he has lost count. In Providence, Pawtucket and North Providence there are so many of us that the department stopped asking for reports. A wasp is being raised at the University of Rhode Island, from the part of the world my ancestors are from, that eats us when we are small. It is not ready. Until it is, the job is everyone's.

On a Wednesday afternoon in September one of us was on a table at 195 District Park, where a man was sitting with a companion. I was on the next table. A woman came up behind him, said "I got it," and pressed her thumb down.

The man said, "What the fuck are you doing?"

She said, "We're supposed to kill them." She said, "They're eating all my vines in my yard."

He said, "In your yard." He said she had no idea who he was. He called her a fucking idiot.

She was right that she was supposed to. He was right that it was not her yard. The one on the table was dead on the state's instruction, and had been born in Providence in May, and would have died at the first hard frost regardless.

I have thought about it since, on the branch. She did not decide to do it, and he did not decide to say what he said. Nobody in that park had a choice. I have the least of anyone. I go where the sap is and I lay where the surface is flat, and my mother laid me on a branch in Providence, so I am from here.