In both this instance and that of the three million urine-quaffing Chinese, I didn’t know whether the reports were true, partially true, or instances of bald-faced Chinese-bashing. Aiming to find out, I contacted Sandy Wan, a Chinese interpreter and researcher who had done work for me before in China. As it turned out, Sandy used to live in Shenzhen, had heard of the clinics mentioned in the article, and still had friends there—friends who were willing to pose, bless their hearts, as fetus-seeking patients. Her friends, a Miss Wu and a Mr. Gai, started out at the private clinics, saying they’d heard it was possible to buy fetuses for medicinal purposes. Both got the same answer: It used to be possible, but the government of Shenzhen had some time ago declared it illegal to sell both fetuses and placentas. The two were told that the materials were collected by a “health care production company with a unified management.” It soon became clear what that meant and what was being done with the “materials.” At the state-run Shenzhen People’s Hospital, the region’s largest, Miss Wu went to the Chinese medicine department to ask a doctor for treatment for the blemishes on her face. The doctor recommended a medication called Tai Bao Capsules, which were sold in the hospital dispensary for about $2.50 a bottle. When Miss Wu asked what the medication was, the doctor replied that it was made from abortus, as it is called there, and placenta, and that it was very good for the skin. Meanwhile, over in the internal medicine department, Mr. Gai had claimed to have asthma and told the doctor that his friends had recommended abortus. The doctor said he hadn’t heard of selling fetuses to patients directly, and that they were taken away by a company controlled by the Board of Health, which was authorized to make them into capsules—the Tai Bao Capsules that had been prescribed to Miss Wu.
Sandy read the Express article to a friend who works as a doctor in Haikou, where the two women live. While her friend felt that the article was exaggerated, she also felt that fetal tissue did have health benefits and approved of making use of it. “It is a pity,” she said. “to throw them away with other rubbish.” (Sandy herself, a Christian, finds the practice immoral.)
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?
My communications with the Hainan Webmaster had led me to believe that Haikou was a small, compact city, almost more of a town, and that most people spoke some English. The Web man did not have the address of the crematorium, but thought I could find it by asking around. “Even just ask a taxi driver,” he wrote.
It took a half hour to even just ask a taxi driver to take me to my hotel. Like all taxi drivers and almost everyone else in Haikou, he spoke no English. Why should he? Few foreigners come to Hainan, only holiday-making Chinese from the mainland. The driver eventually telephoned a friend who spoke some English and I found myself in the midst of a vast, urban sprawl in a modern high-rise with huge red Chinese characters on its roof spelling out, I supposed, the hotel’s name. Chinese big-city hotel rooms are modeled after their Western counterparts, with triangulated toilet paper ends and complimentary shower caps; however, there is always something slightly, ever so charmingly off. Here, it was a tiny bottle labeled “Sham Poo” and a flyer offering the services of a blind masseuse. (Oh, madam! I’m so sorry! I thought that was your back! You see I’m blind….) Exhausted, I collapsed on the bed, which made a shrieking, assaulted noise, suggesting that it could as easily have been the bed that collapsed on me.
In the morning I approached the reception desk. One of the girls spoke a little English, which was helpful, though she had an unsettling habit of saying “Are you okay?” in place of “How are you?” as though I’d tripped on the rug coming out of the elevator. She understood “taxi” and pointed to one outside.
The night before, in preparation for my journey, I had drawn a picture to give to the cabdriver. It showed a body hovering above flames, and to the right of this I drew an urn, though the latter had come out looking like a samovar, and there was a distinct possibility that the driver would think I was looking for a place to get Mongolian barbecue. The driver looked at the piece of paper, seemed to understand, and pulled out into traffic. We drove for a long time, and it seemed we might actually be headed for the outskirts of town, where the crematorium was said to be. And then I saw my hotel go by on the right. We were driving in circles. What was going on? Did the blind masseuse moonlight as a cabdriver? This was not good. I was not okay. I motioned to my merrily revolving driver to pull over, and I pointed to the Chinese Tourism Agency office on the map.
Eventually the taxi pulled up outside a brightly lit fried chicken establishment, the sort of place that in the United States might proclaim “We Do Chicken Right!” but here proclaimed “Do Me Chicken!” The cabdriver turned to collect his fare. We shouted at each other for a while, and eventually he got out and walked over to a tiny, dim storefront next to the chicken place and pointed vigorously to a sign. Designated Foreign-Oriented Tourist Unit, it said. Well, do me chicken. The man was right.
Inside, the tourist unit was having a cigarette break, which, judging from the density of the smoke, had been going on for some time, years possibly. The walls were bare cement and part of the ceiling was falling in. There were no travel brochures or train timetables, only a map of the world and a small wall-mounted shrine with a red electric candle and a bowl of offerings. The gods were having apples. In the back of the office, I could see two brand-new shrink-wrapped chairs. This struck me as an odd purchasing decision, what with the ceiling collapsing and the very slim likelihood that more than two or three tourists a year came in and needed a place to sit.
I explained to the woman that I wanted to hire an interpreter. Miraculously, two phone calls and half an hour later, one appeared. It was Sandy Wan, the woman who would later help me track down the truth about the abortus vendors. I explained that I needed to talk to someone at the Haikou crematorium. Sandy’s English vocabulary was impressive but, understandably, did not include “crematorium.”
I described it as the big building where they burn dead bodies. She didn’t catch the last bit and thought I meant some sort of factory. “What kind of material?” she asked. The entire staff of the designated foreign-oriented tourist unit were looking on, trying to follow the conversation.
“Dead people…material.” I smiled helplessly. “Dead bodies.”
“Ah,” said Sandy. She did not flinch. She explained to the tourist unit, who nodded as though they got this sort of thing all the time. Then she asked me for the address. When I replied that I didn’t know it, she got the crematorium phone number from the information operator, called the place to get the address, and even set up an appointment with the director. She was amazing. I couldn’t imagine what she had told the man, or what she thought I needed to talk to him about. I began to feel a little sorry for the crematorium director, thinking he was about to be visited by a grieving foreign widow, or perhaps some glad-handing retort salesman there to help him cut costs and maximize efficiency.
In the cab, I tried to think of a way to explain to Sandy what I was about to have her do. I need you to ask this man whether he had an employee who cut the butt cheeks off cadavers to serve in his brother’s restaurant. No matter how I thought of phrasing it, it sounded ghastly and absurd. Why would I need to know this? What kind of book was I writing? Fearing that Sandy might change her mind, I said nothing about the dumplings. I said that I was writing an article for a funeral industry magazine. We were outside the city proper now. Trucks and scooters had gone scarce. People drove wooden ox carts and wore the round, peaked sun hats you see in rural Vietnam, only these were fashioned from laminated newspaper. I wondered if someone, somewhere, was wearing the March 23, 1991, edition of the Hainan Special Zone Daily.
The taxi turned off onto a dirt road. We passed a brick smokestack, issuing clouds of black: the crematorium. Farther down the road was the accompanying funeral home and the crematorium offices. We were directed up a broad marble stairway to the director’s office. This could only go poorly. The Chinese are wary of reporters, especially foreign ones, and very especially foreign ones suggesting that your staff mutilated the dead relations of paying customers to make dumplings. What had I been thinking?
The director’s office was large and sparsely furnished. There was nothing on the walls but a clock, as if no one knew how to decorate for death. Sandy and I were seated in leather chairs that sat low to the floor, like car seats, and told that the director would be in to see us shortly. Sandy smiled at me, unaware of the horror about to unfold. “Sandy,” I blurted out. “I have to tell you what this is about! There was this guy who cut the butts off dead bodies to give to his brother to…”
It was at that moment that the director walked in. The director was a stern-looking Chinese woma
n, easily six feet tall. From my humbled position near the floor, she seemed to be of superhuman proportions, as tall as the smokestack outside and as likely to belch forth smoke.
The director sat down at her desk. She looked at me. Sandy looked at me. Feeling seasick, I launched into my story. Sandy listened and, bless her, betrayed no emotion. She turned to the director, who was not smiling, had not smiled since she entered the room, had possibly never smiled, and she told her what I had just said. She relayed the story of Hui Guang, explained that I thought he might have been employed here, and that I wrote for a magazine and that I hoped to find him and speak to him. The director crossed her arms and her eyes narrowed. I thought I saw her nostrils flare. Her reply went on for ten minutes. Sandy nodded politely through it all, with the attentive calm of a person being given a fast-food order or directions to the mall. I was very impressed. Then she turned to me. “The director, she is, ah, very angry. The director is very…astonished to have these facts. She never heard of this story. She says she has known all her workers, and she has been here for more than ten years and she would know about this kind of story. Also, she feels it is a…really sick story. And so she cannot help you.” I would love to see a full transcript of the director’s reply, and then again I wouldn’t.