“They deserve it!”
On 4 July 1999, right on the Shanghai promenade with the spectacular view of the financial district with its futuristic and exuberant architectural silhouette along the Huangpu riverbank, my ex-wife and I had a big fight. It was not the weariness of the trip which had started from Osaka airport after a highly successful business trip to the Sanyo factory in Niigata with the promise, and the premise of building 1mb EEPROM devices, a precursor to the flash drives, which are now given away free. It was the lengthy walk I had taken her in Hong Kong the day before with so many weird and unusual etchings in her brain of the sites and tastes and smell she had experienced. Yes indeed, they were unusual and even scary, but what a husband to do to please his wife on this respite trip away from our daily lives and careers in California.
The day started with a pleasant train ride up to Victoria’s peak and we marveled at the spreading city of Hong Kong below. We took photos; I think we each ate a hot dog or something we know and accustomed and held hands and kissed. Then we came down to take the recommended itinerary in the travel book I had bought just for this trip so I could impress my wife, travel expert par excellence. After all the entire trip so far had been a bombastic success, and she was proud to have me as her husband with so many luncheons and dinners and accolades being showered at these occasions. I looked smart and professional; she looked gorgeous, and a Japanese colleague eager to speak the new English words he had learned on me called her the bombshell.
The first few sites on the itinerary we passed through were non-descript. A teashop and then a small temple until we came to a big three story extensive building which smelled bad. As it turned out it was the so called the wet market with each floor dedicated to different species, chickens on the ground floor, and then you walk up the ramp to four-legged animals, beef and mutton. The top floor is dedicated to pigs. The pungent smell enveloped all kinds of unfamiliar parts of the animals, intestines, balls, chunks of meat, carcasses on display, chicken feet and heads, all in a cacophony of sights we had never seen before. Top floor had freshly butchered and decapitated pig heads with their tongues lashed out in large buckets waiting to be bargained by the customers. There was more to stroll in the narrow lanes between the stalls as I was taking pictures with my Kodak camera I felt a tuck on my shirt and she was heading out to the exit disturbed and disappointed with a white face. And that was the beginning of the end, a long drawn out lull in her attitude towards this long sought and well researched and planned trip to the east.
Still having no clue what was so upsetting, we continued our stroll in the midsection of downtown Hong Kong according to our itinerary passing by shops catering to unique choices of customers, spice shops, tea, porcelain, medicinal shops selling mushrooms, what not. I could see from some maybe four or five meters away in front of us a shop with a bunch of cages stacked on top of each other resting solidly. As we were passing by, she screamed as if she had seen a ghost as I spotted the cages nested different species of snakes, some small crawling over each other, some big ones motionless. This was the medicinal snake shop which had the walls all covered by drawers lining its walls. I snuck in as I observed the proprietor pull out a drawer, reach in, grab a snake out of the box and putting on the counter doing some kind of operation by pushing his thumb on the belly of the snake. As it turns out, he was extracting the gallbladder later to mix with white wine to sell the potion to cure rheumatism for a 60-ish woman almost half my size and I am not tall, heartily chatting away as the extraction continued smoothly. The snake returned to the drawer, happy to have had the operation successfully done minus the gallbladder but to an unknown future. The Chinese girl at the cashier having me follow this entire thing with awe and bewilderment with my ex-wife with a pissed off face visible some feet away from the store said, ‘you want to make her happy. Let me give you some snake blood and gall’. Gall as it turns out is the snake bladder and in Chinese, it means courage and sexual prowess. Viagra in today’s times but not as conveniently taken then.
So making the story short, after that sighting of the snakes, it was downhill when she exploded on the Shanghai promenade on the 4th of July, the independence day of our country of residence, America with fireworks and fanfare, a celebratory day normally, and accused me of being such a self-centered and egotistical son of a bitch with shouts and tears coming down on her now pinkish cheeks.
Now we are coming to the end of the pandemic after having learned terms like how to flatten the curve, exponential growth, how to test the facemasks, and how long the virus travels when you are talking, shouting or sneezing. In the early days of the pandemic, in late February or early March when we started hearing that the pandemic started in Wuhan in these wet markets, which I had some kind of inkling because of the story I told you above in Hong Kong, there were all kinds of stories about whether the virus came from the bats. There was even a story it came from some weird creature that I had never seen and or even heard that it existed, a pangolin. Social media was abuzz with all kinds of the videos showing some grotesque pictures and photos of rats, lizards, snakes, bats skinned to be sold and later to be consumed in wet markets in China. The death toll was climbing in China and my instant and reflexive comment was, having that vivid memory of that stroll through the wet market in Hong Kong, was almost this cruel verdict on the Chinese habits of eating fresh meat supplied only in these wet markets, ‘they deserve it.’ How could anybody skin a live bat and throw in the broth to make a soup?
The pandemic took its course just like the sun starting from the east heading to the West as the Chinese and the South Koreans and the Taiwanese taking control of their populace using science and unabashed dictatorial means survived this pandemic with much less impact than what we had seen in the West. Italy and Spain suffered the most with the highest number of deaths and Germany could control the pandemic with their no-nonsense medicinal and scientific intervention. Sweden took a unique approach, almost becoming an international outlier in this response to the pandemic. Very few restrictions were implemented and unlike most of the other countries, schools remained open, concerts went on and working continued uninterrupted. This was almost like an experiment in the making and time will tell if the chief medical people in the country were right.
Response in the USA has been disastrous and as I am writing this in Istanbul numbers are still climbing and the psychological threshold of a hundred thousand deaths happened last week. Remember what the president Trump said that it was only a flu and it will go away soon. Although the number of deaths is devastating, and it just is overwhelming that the richest and most powerful nation in the world across from the Atlantic is still struggling with the basics of what the medical people are and have been suggesting that the best cure to avoid the spread of this virus is a strict social distancing. However, I was stunned and almost embarrassed and angry at those people who were crowding the beaches and the pools over the memorial weekend last week with very few people wearing facemasks in sight. For whatever the inner instincts of the American middle class are, be it free and restless, they are shaming themselves and staining the exceptional nation and world leader reputation the country has enjoyed since the Second World War. It is with sadness that I watch miles long food lines with unemployment reaching 30 million people and counting, I cannot help but say as history will record the nation with the highest number of deaths in the world, an embarrassing and debilitating and devastating shameful title, I say, ‘you deserve it.’
