This is the story of a half-fried fish and how it made me desperately angry. Not at the people who picked it, cooked it halfway to death or even the ones who ate it. This is directed as the sheer idiocy, baiting and racism that has been exposed.

***

The following transcript is my own as are the errors in translation.

Young woman: ...Shouldn't it move?

Older woman: Rap it on the head.

*laughter then shocked yells*

Old man 1: It just opened wide!!

YW: (I'm) so scared! Why is it like that?!

Young man: It's hideous.

*unintelligible muttering*

YW: Woah! *Old man 2 starts chuckling* Ooh! *more muttering* (I'm) so scared. Eew, it's really hideous!

OW: Son. *YM starts picking it up and gives it to OM2* Son, go for the tail.

YM: Here, have some.

OM: Thank you.

OW: ...They just splashed it on...

OM2: Looks like they fried it with oil. (With OW) Just poured it on until it was done.

***

Like most people, I was initially digusted by the cruelty. Even then I made a nervous tittering noise while they prodded the head with their chopsticks because you aren't expecting it. They didn't take what they ordered seriously either, the reactions are more of disbelief, bravado and directed at each other. When they calm down, they can't exactly save the fish and set about eating what they paid for. And being the doubtful sort they make sure it's not some fluke. There is no "socializing" or disregard for the fish, if anything they're a bit curious about it. Anyone would have reacted the same way if their food gave them a phantasmagoric show when served.

All they can do is change the topic to more practical discussion about how it was done. Neatly avoiding thinking about the possibility of it still being alive.

None of them, except for maybe the older woman, expressed any desire to be violent or to inflict more pain. Even then she tells the son to avoid the head when serving. It would have been unlikely that it could feel anymore with all its nerves and pain receptors overloaded and well-done. The glaze in its eyes is that of dead fish and the rest is a few leftover nerves in reflex. If it isn't clear, I'll reiterate: it's DEAD.

***

On the many pages I've seen the clip featured, some commenters mention how it is a cultural difference and they are right in part. I can't count how many times I've seen heated oil and soy sauce directly poured on cuts of scored fish on its serving platter. All done with the same air of routine as a stir-fry, a crustacean boiled or a steak being grilled. It's fast, fresh, wastes little and, like the oft cited whole chicken with its head, emphasizes a social value of wholeness.

The culture, like many neighbouring ones, fetishizes the idea of direct and fresh. Sashimi underlines an almost clinical purity. Some nightmarkets serve still-writhing pieces that are so fresh, they haven't quite realized they're dead. Some just serve the whole thing as is. It is the apparent extremity of it being exposed is what seems to take people over the edge. We expect it to be a ploy and that it should be completely unresponsive, and the whole point is that they made it seem to do the contrary.

Most of the responses seem to be rooted in projected shame spewing out as anger attached with outright misconceptions. The laughter is construed as amusement and delight when they repeatedly state their horror in the clip or aren’t sure how to react otherwise. While it is unnecessary to cook it live and protect the head for a spectacle, there are people actively changing the genetics of livestock, our pets, plants, and even wild animals. We pin collect tropical fish for tanks, pin insects in boxes, stuff loved pets and hunting spoils, kidnap animals for study. The fact is cruelty is part of our humanity, and how we control it is part of how we socialize. The most obvious outcome is how we differently we can define that boundary. Humans can do worse to living things, forcing them to be dependent on us because of the grotesque and efficient-for-us forms we give them with breeding and drugs. Crowding animals in complete squalor that are wide vectors for fast mutating viruses like swine and avian flu. Debeaking, declawing and sterilizing animals for fear of the madness they achieve under our "stewardship". Some simply die of no other cause than the inability to survive in the controlled spaces we provide. We steal their young, their natural products, and take over their lives and bodies for our food and even entertainment. Play with them to make giant vegetable contests, glow-in-the-dark pigs and potatoes, and processed food that is barely recognizable from its ingredients possible.

The thought of your pets and woodland creatures being food is unthinkable only because we maintain it as unthinkable. Once condoned it's sport, even a game or refined taste. To think that somehow getting down and personal with what you're skinning and cooking is below you is a defense mechanism. Don't kid yourselves that the farms you imagine your food is from are perfect and humane, or that animals aren't suffering long before, during and for a time while being butchered. A lot of us don't even have the decency to look our food in the eye. That isn't the magic of ingenuity or convenience; it's the hidden terror of gluttony and obsession with keeping truth at an arms length.

So many decry the moments it may or may not have had in pain, yet these other creatures we've made are living their entire lives as monstrosities, waiting to be slaughtered. Even our own bodies aren't allowed to escape from chronic disease to hormone replacement to genetic faults from IVF. It’s becoming clear our knowledge is far from what we think it is; let alone enough to be trying some of the stuff we're doing in our constant rush forward. We are scarred with with tortures and crimes that we inflict even on ourselves and our own. As much as a crazed few would have us believe there is a cult of natural selection, we are doing everything in our power to circumvent it and apply our own hand.

Yet, repeatedly it's as if someone else has the monopoly on morality while others on the darker parts of human life. We similarly can't remove the convenience and ease of fast, new, exotic and devil-may-care cheap products from our own lives. The very things piling up the island of garbage in the North Pacific, the leaching heavy metals and leftover crude on someone else's soil, or the junk that will be reproduced and sold back to us for a quick buck, en mass. It certainly isn't just one group's fault.

It's always Asians this, Chinese that. They didn't just intuit bad business practice or even have to sell it to outsourcing, profit-mongers. They're following in the path of least resistance of traditions, weak regulation mixed with existing industrial models; they’re trying to beat the West at their own game, the same one they lost last time around. I’m not denying that it seems insidious with their carelessness and secrecy, even to me. There’s a succession of egotism, cold calculation and unneeded elaboration (see: this entry), however sadism isn’t a cultural constant that I’m aware of, while it can seem that way when motivations are concealed. And they certainly aren't the first or only to make food, entire sports or entertainment out of the dead and dying. No more or less evil, sick or twisted than anyone else or the people they are descended from. Many are just treating ethnic, national, social and political history as one. The Communists aren't the historical Chinese. Just as the Han or any dynasty aren't, nor the migrating tribes, or the peasant. Meat once played little into the regular diet due to expense and limited availability. The war-time scavenger eating what they can, middle-class eating culturally-sanctioned food items or the voracious demand on edible exotic luxuries; each one is a product of their time and place. This isn't some epidemic of mental illness, defect or cultural backwardness (itself an oxymoron), which seem like lofty accusations considering its persistence. This isn't confirmation of their human and animals rights abuse, it's a respinning of the original (culture) shock value that preys on rashness and instant gratification. That’s a particularly easy way out, to blame them and not consider our own personal and perpetuated faults weighed in comparison. Yet another self-congratulatory pat on the back for not even comprehending the situation, just to reaffirm moral superiority.

Their monstrosity is reflected just as ours is at them. I can't say either side is justified, nor that I am at all qualified or unbiased enough to make such a call. The pretense of civilized society is as tainted as using biological mechanisms to throw mortality in the face of your patrons and expect applause. The reality of live food is too often swept under the table. We're all culpable for our general ignorance, insensitivity and self-righteousness.

They're simply eating their fish, one that is healthy and normal, edible. Even with the intent of making it appear alive. There's no glib judgement about some cheap theatrics as a symptom of a diseased culture or barbarity. They get it, and part of me likes to think there was a tempering in the laughter and the unsaid. They moved on and made the most of what couldn’t be helped at the moment.

***

Even after 24 hours, it still grieves me that I let it get to me. I'll admit to having a thin skin, especially over things I have little control over like my hair. I must not lash out unless it is justified. I'm not kidding myself that I won't do it when anyone crosses the very solid and bold line in the sand.

He just gets ever closer. And so do a few others. I don't have time or energy to entertain purely caustic or childish personas, it's not my job especially when I'm trying my hardest to keep my end receptive, positive and as authentic as possible.

I haven't met the real you, and if he's anything like the ones I have met, I don't want to.

Keith