It seems to me that the Chinese, relative to Americans, have a vastly more practical, less emotional outlook when it comes to what people put in their mouths. Tai Bao capsules notwithstanding, I’m with the Chinese.
The fact that Americans love dogs doesn’t make it immoral for the Chinese of Peixian city, who apparently don’t love dogs, to wrap dog meat in pita bread and eat it for breakfast, just as the Hindu’s reverence for cows doesn’t make it wrong for us to make them into belts and meat loaves. We are all products of our upbringing, our culture, our need to conform. There are those (okay, one person) who feel that cannibalism has its place in a strictly rational society: “When man evolves a civilization higher than the mechanized but still primitive one he has now,” wrote Diego Rivera in his memoir, “the eating of human flesh will be sanctioned. For then man will have thrown off all of his superstitions and irrational taboos.”
Of course, the issue of taking fetus pills is complicated by the involvement and rights of the mother. If a hospital wants to sell—or even give away—women’s aborted fetuses to make them into pills, they owe it to those women to ask for their consent. To do elsewise is callous and disrespectful.
Any attempt to market Tai Bao Capsules in the United States would be disastrous, owing to conservative religious views about the status of all fetuses as full-fledged human beings with all the rights and powers accorded their more cellularly differentiated brethren, and to good old-fashioned American squeamishness. The Chinese are simply not a squeamish people. Sandy once told me about a famous Chinese recipe called Scream Three Times, in which newborn mice are taken from their mothers (the first scream), dropped in a hot fry pot (second scream), and eaten (third scream). Then again, we drop live lobsters into boiling water and rid our homes of mice by gluing down their feet and letting them starve, so let us not rush to cast the first stone.
I began to wonder: Would any culture go so far as to use human flesh as food simply out of practicality?
China has a long and vivid history of cannibalism, but I’m not convinced that the taboo against it is any weaker there than elsewhere. Of the thousands of instances of cannibalism throughout China’s history, the vast majority of the perpetrators were driven to the act either by starvation or the desire to express hatred or exact revenge during war.
Indeed, without a strong cannibalism taboo, the eating of one’s enemy’s heart or liver would not have been the act of psychological brutality that it clearly was.
Key Ray Chong managed to unearth only ten cases of what he calls “taste cannibalism”: eating the flesh or organs of the dead not because you have nothing else to eat or you despise your enemy or you’re trying to cure an ailing parent, but simply because it’s tasty and a pity to waste it. He writes that in years past, another job perk of the Chinese executioner—in addition to supplemental income from human blood and fat sales—was that he was allowed to take the heart and brains home for supper. In modern times, human meat for private consumption tends to come from murder victims—cannibalism providing at once a memorable repast and a handy means of disposing of the body. Chong relates the tale of a couple in Beijing who killed a teenager, cooked his flesh, and shared it with the neighbors, telling them it was camel meat. According to the story, which ran in the Chinese Daily News on April 8,1985, the couple confessed that their motive had been a strong craving for human flesh, developed during wartime, when food was scarce. Chong doesn’t find the story far-fetched. Because starvation cannibalism was widespread in the country’s history, he believes that some Chinese, in certain hard-hit regions, over time may have developed a taste for human flesh.
It is said to be quite good. The Colorado prospector Alfred Packer, who, after his provisions ran out, began lunching on the five companions he was later accused of killing, told a reporter in 1883 that the breasts of men were “the sweetest meat” he’d ever tasted. A sailor on the damaged and drifting schooner Sallie M. Steelman in 1878 described the flesh of one of the dead crewman as being “as good as any beefsteak” he ever ate.
Rivera—if we are to believe his anatomy lab tale—considered the legs, breasts, and breaded ribs of the female cadavers “delicacies,” and especially relished “women’s brains in vinaigrette.”
Despite Chong’s theory about Chinese people’s occasionally acquiring a taste for human meat and despite China’s natural culinary inhibition, instances of modern-day taste cannibalism are hard to find and even harder to verify. According to a 1991 Reuters article (“Diners Loved Human-Flesh Dumplings”), a man who worked in a crematorium in Hainan Province was caught hacking the buttocks and thighs off cadavers prior to incineration and bringing the meat to his brother, who ran the nearby White Temple Restaurant. For three years, the story went, Wang Guang was doing a brisk business in “Sichuan-style dumplings” made with flesh from the nether regions of his brother Hui’s customers.
The brothers were caught when the parents of a young woman killed in a road accident wanted to have a last look at her before cremation. “On discovering that her buttocks had been removed,” wrote the reporter, “they called the police.” A second Reuters story on cannibalistic crematorium workers cropped up on May 6, 2002. The article detailed the escapades of two Phnom Penh men accused—but not prosecuted, for there was no law against cannibalism—of eating human fingers and toes “washed down with wine.”
The stories smacked of urban myth. Sandy Wan told me she’d heard a similar story about a Chinese restaurant owner who sees an accident and rushes over to slice off the buttocks of the dead driver to use them as filling in steamed meat buns. And the Hainan Reuters article had questionable elements: How would the parents have seen their daughter’s buttocks? Presumably she was on her back in a coffin when they brought her out for a final viewing. And why would the original article, from the Hainan Special Zone Daily, supply the names of the men but not their town? Then again, this was Reuters. They don’t make things up. Do they?
Supper on China South Airways was an unsliced hamburger bun and a puckered and unadorned wiener, rolling loose in a pressed aluminum container. The wiener was too small for the bun, too small for any bun, too small for its own skin. Even for airline food, the meal was repugnant.
The flight attendant, having handed out the last of the meals, immediately about-faced, returned to the front of the plane, and began picking them up and dropping them into a garbage bag, on the just and accurate assumption that no one was going to eat them.
If the White Temple Restaurant still existed, I would be able to order an equally off-putting meal in about an hour. The plane was landing shortly on Hainan Island, alleged home of the buttock boys. I had been in Hong Kong and decided to hop over to Hainan to look into the story. Hainan Province turns out to be relatively small; it’s an island off China’s southwest coast. The island has only one large city, Haikou, and Haikou, I found out by e-mailing the Webmaster of the official Hainan Window Web site and pretending to be a funeral professional (a journalistic inquiry had gone unanswered), has a crematorium. If the story was true, this had to be where it happened. I would go to the crematorium and try to track down Hui and Wang Guang. I would ask them about their motives. Were they cheap and greedy, or were they simply practical—two well-meaning fellows who hated to see good meat go to waste? Did they see no wrong in their actions? Did they themselves eat and enjoy the dumplings? Did they think all human cadavers should be recycled this way?