Young Asian Men, alcohol, and dog eating, and the time I ate dog meat. Part 7 and last in a series.

Yes, I ate dog meat once.

Greetings,

This will be probably the last piece by me for about a week. It’s time to focus on other things. The experiment with daily pieces is over and this is not the time for it to be made permanent. It’s been fun, but my schedule just won’t allow it.

Next week, I will come back with something completely different. Thoughts include Chinese calendrics and all those cycles of correspondence that are so important in Chinese metaphysics or proto-scientific thought. I find these fascinating and they are widely misunderstood.

I have also been thinking about the issue of adoption in or from Asia both today and in history ( a lot of things are being exposed about the way International Adoptions were done in Korea in the past, and there’s a lot to be said about it. Also China just stopped providing children for international adoption. Additionally, most Americans have no idea at all that American adopt children at a higher rate than most cultures of the world. Instead, they assume, in typical American fashion, that everyone does things the way they do. And then there’s the when and why adoption took place in traditional China, a lot could be done on that, but I would want to spend the time to do it right and, honestly, to write it slowly and carefully keeping an eye out for cynical asides.)

Or I was thinking about Vietnam War era tunnel warfare. It’s a fascinating but ugly subject, but it’d bring out the dark, cynical side in me, and I feel like I have shared enough of that this week.

Therefore. what I am seriously thinking and leaning towards is a series of pieces on Peking Opera starting Sunday. Yesterday the local Chinese Community Center, a group for people of Chinese descent, had a little show from their children’ Peking Opera class at a local public library with half a dozen kids of about age 5 to 14, I think, four racially Asian, one White, and one mixed, performing Chinese opera in full garb. It was cute, it was fun, it was fascinating to see.

In the meantime, take care, share these writings, and feel free to leave likes or comments or even upgrade to a paid subscription.

That’s me in May of 2022 in Vietnam. I am proud to say I have lost about 5 to 10 pounds since then and am working on losing more. You can see the bowl in the middle of the table? Dog Meat.

Dog Meat, Testosterone, and Alcohol -Welcome to East Asia

This is the last in a series. The purpose of the series was to debunk the ugly rumors that Chinese secretly serve dogs and cats to unsuspecting customers in restaurants and get at the truth of such matters. Although there was no proof of this ever happening, the rumors continue. In fact, we learned that such rumors date back to at least the late 19^th Century, and that in 1883, a Chinese American newspaperman and human rights activist named Wong Chin Foo offered a $500 reward to anyone who could provide proof that Chinese were eating cats and rats. I also shared some history about a late 19^th Century Australian poet who, among other things, wrote racist, anti-Chinese poems. And then yesterday, I sort of turned around and got into the actual history and context of actual, historical reports of dog eating today in East Asia. In fact, as the photo above shows, I’ve even eaten it once myself. Why did I do that? Read below.

In the meantime, some more on when and how dog eating occurs in modern day Asia,

SOCIO-ANTHRO-CULTURO-PSYCHO-POLY-MONO-WHATEVERO-SCIENTIFICO-CONTEXT FOR THESE BEHAVIORS

First, when we discuss dog eating in East Asia, there is one thing that is very important to understand, and it is a human universal. No matter what race, culture, ethnicity, or country, young human males are often very stupid people who often behave in a very stupid manner and do very stupid things.  No matter what their IQ or level of intelligence may be, they tend to do very, very stupid things.

Biologically speaking, if everyone is willing and ready, then you actually only need a couple of men to impregnate a huge amount of women ,[i] and thus the species can survive without most of them. They are kind of disposable, which is good because they are also self destructive beings. Therefore, hundreds of thousands of years ago, when our ancestors were wandering the world in small bands of prehistoric hunter gatherer types, carrying stone and bone tools and such, what do you think our ancestors did if they saw a lion or saber tooth tiger or something that was considering attacking them? Well, I wasn’t there, but what I strongly suspect is that they looked at one of the young males (we will assume his name could be “Uck-uck” because it sounds prehistoric), and said “Hey, Uck-uck, look! A saber tooth tiger. If only we had someone heroic who knew what to do. Do you know what to do about this, Uck-uck?”

And Uck-uck would cry, “Oh you bet I do,” and run off to try and club the saber tooth tiger with a rock and a stick. Really stupid thing to do, but in the meantime everyone else could run away and hide, guaranteeing their safety from the predatory creature, and then come back a half hour later to see if Uck-uck was dead yet, and either give him his last rites or thank him generously for his heroics.

That is why our species and cultures have survived. Because young men with little common sense thought it would be fun to knowingly put themselves in danger or do stupid things.

I know these things.

I read a lot.

I watch people.

I also say this as both a historian and as an experienced Emergency Medical Technician with years of ambulance response work under my belt. I also say this as a former young male.

So, please keep that in mind, young men are instinctively programmed by nature to do stupid things. This is a universal throughout all of humankind. Now my friends and I did a lot of stupid things, when we were all young, White American men, but, and trust me on this, having lived in East Asia for over six years of my life, there are a lot of stupid young men on that side of the world too. [ii]

And in East Asia, one of the things that stupid young men do to show just how naughty and wild they are is that sometimes they will eat a dog.

DOG EATING IN CLASSIC CHINESE LITERATURE

Chinese civilization is, as noted, an old and literate civilization that prides itself on the breadth and depth of its literature. There are several Chinese classics that all Chinese have some familiarity with and like Robin Hood or King Arthur or the Biblical tale of David and Goliath, virtually every Chinese person has some awareness and connection with them. These stories are featured, even in modern times, in comics, television, and cartoons and elsewhere.

One of these is a novel called  the “Shui Hu Zhuan” ( 水滸傳 ) which has been translated into English under the titles, “The Water Margin,” “All Men Are Brothers,” and “Outlaws of the Marsh.” Like most classical Chinese novels, it is long with a complex cast of characters and plots, and it focuses on the adventures of 108 “Robin Hood” type bandits who work together to help the poor and fight oppression while stealing from the rich. [iii]

Of course, many of the characters tend to be manly macho hero types in this novel, and at least one of them, Lu Zhishen ( 魯智深 , also written as Lu Chih-shen in the older Wade Giles system) , enjoyed dog meat as one of his favorite foods. (p.242 in “Food in Chinese Culture,”the same source I cited extensively yesterday.)    In Ming dynasty (1368-1644 AD) , hot-headed characters with wild animal passions, including Lu Zhishen, often enjoyed dog meat and it was a common literary trope in that time and place. (again, p. 232 in “Food in Chinese Culture.”) Like almost everyone and everything these days, Lu Zhishen, of course, has his own Wikipedia page as do many of the other characters in this novel. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Zhishen

THE TIME I ATE DOG MEAT

I have eaten dog meat once in my life, and that was in Vietnam. I have been to Vietnam several times over the last 15 years or so. Generally speaking, I have found it a nice place to visit with reasonably low prices for lodging, good food, reasonably friendly people, although like everywhere else, you need to get out of the tourist track places where the predators wait to prey on the tourists in various ways , and nice beaches and interesting things to see,

One day, I decided I would go see the town of Son Tay, site of at least two historical events that interested me. The first was a battle between the French and the Chinese in the 1880s (yes, the French and the Vietnamese fought each other in Vietnam). The second was the site of the Son Tay POW Camp, site of a famous American War era commando raid that attempted to rescue imprisoned American air crews. ¹

While the Citadel where the French and Chinese fought is preserved in a park (although it has no museum or explanatory signs), the ruins of the POW camp are not preserved as a historical site at all and located on the fringes of town out near some farmers’ fields. I literally had to get directions at least twice on the street, using my horribly limited Vietnamese and google translate and a picture of the camp to make my desires known, and then a local pointed me down a side street, and I had to climb through a hole in a chain link fence to wander through the undergrowth and rubble of some ruined buildings. Again, some day I will have to write about it.

At the end of the day, on my way home, after walking many miles and even more kilometers (Vietnam, like most of planet Earth, uses the metric system) for several hours, I was hot and thirsty. I walked past a nice, open- air café and ordered myself a nice cold beer. It was wonderful.

At the next table were a few drunken Vietnamese men.

Now if you are a rarely seen racial minority in a place, no matter what place or what racial minority, you are going to attract attention. Sometimes this can be positive attention, sometimes this can be negative attention, and if you are dealing with drunks, well, the type of attention you receive can shift back and forth without notice or warning and seemingly for no reason at all. And since, honestly, I don’t think I’d seen any non-Vietnamese all day, the local Vietnamese hadn’t seen any Whites either, so I got attention from the drunks.

And it was positive attention, and they invited me over to their table, asked me a few questions in very broken, drunken English. The usual questions like “what is your name?” and “where are you from?” and were thrilled to death by the fact that I understood them and answered. Drunks, generally speaking, all over the world, are easily amused.

They bought me a second cold beer, which I accepted despite my plan to have only one beer that afternoon, and then they offered me some of their food. It was fried pieces of meat in a bowl. The meat looked a bit dry and stringy, and I didn’t quite recognize it.

When I asked, using English to maintain their “face” and Vietnamese to make sure I was understood, they said it was dog.

Now I had seen roasted dog for sale in Vietnam before, and it was always in a place where excited, boiserous, rowdy, usually young men might go out for a wild night on the town and this was no exception, despite it being a quiet little place at 4:00pm in the afternoon.

Now this was not a bad experience, so far, but it seemed like time for me to leave, go home, and be gone before it became too late and before the mood shifted and these drunks decided they were upset with me for some reason or for no reason at all. Not that there were signs that that was about to happen, but it sometimes does when hanging out with drunks you don’t know, particularly if there is a language or ethnic barrier of some kind.

So, while I have never had any desire to eat a dog, being as dogs have generally been better to me than people, I drank their beer, very visibly sampled their food so that they could see I was pleased by their hospitality (I mean the poor dog was already dead so it wasn’t going to hurt him any at that point), spit out when they weren’t looking because it tasted dry and overcooked and I did not like to think I was eating dog anyway, and then cheerfully said “Hey let’s all take a selfie together,” as if this was the greatest thing anyone could possible do, and we all posed for the selfie (shades of the Alice Guo story from three days ago), and with a great smile and excessively emotional good byes, I left the table and made my way home.

And that is the story of how I ate dog meat.

Again, we have the combination of youngish males, alcohol, and testosterone.

Urban Survival Tip of the Day: If surrounded by boisterious, ebullient yet unpredictable drunks, pose for a selfie to indicate that you must go instead of just rudely fleeing. It worked. (and, yes, I just used the word “ebullient” -aren’t you all impressed?)

RICK LIN’S STORY OF EATING DOG MEAT

In the early 1990s when I was in Taiwan living and teaching English for about two and a half years, I had the good fortune to establish a relationship with the management and staff of a machine tool factory there. This came about through a chance encounter with someone needing English lessons and grew from there.

And one of these machine tool engineers was surnamed “Lin,” which is actually the most common last name in Taiwan, but that was his last name. (Lin or 林 means “forest.” See how it looks like a couple trees?) I have changed the first name of his English name for reasons of privacy, but it rhymed with “Rick.”

I liked Mr Lin a lot. He was an engineer about 20 or 30 years older than me and was always very helpful to me when I needed it. He was born and raised in Taiwan and a member of the Hakka Chinese sub-group. The Hakka are basically a sub-group of Chinese with their own dialect, cuisine, and occasional other differences from the other Han Chinese sub-groups. Unlike most Han Chinese sub-groups, they never really had their own homeland though and instead always lived as a minority among the other Han Chinese sub-groups.  

One day, we were talking and Mr Lin told me the following story. Many years before, he had been doing his mandatory Taiwanese / “Republic of China” [iv] military service obligation.

It was a cold winter day, at least by Taiwanese standards although definitely not by upstate New York standards, and he and the members of his unit decided that a great thing to do would be to have a cook out and eat some dogs. The only problem with this is that they didn’t have any dogs to eat.

So they set out to catch some feral dogs, at least I hope they were feral. He did not actually say, come to think of it.

So they dug a big hole in the ground, that was step one of the plan.

Step two was to get a mortar, this was a military unit after all, so they did have at least one mortar, and pre-target it on the hole in the ground.

Now, step three was to catch a female dog, a genuine bitch in heat, and catch her alive, and put her in the hole in the ground so that she could not get out.

Then, step four was to sit back and watch while male dogs would sniff the bitch in heat and then approach her and climb into the hole so that they could, you know, spend time with her. Eventually there were several dogs in the hole.

At this point, step five, they fired a mortar round or two into the hole, killed the dogs, collected the pieces, and had their awesome cook out, a cook out that provided all present with fond memories for the rest of their lives. I mean, all present except the dogs, of course.

And he thought this was a hilarious story, and to be honest, I did too. And some of you out there also think it’s funny, and if you do, you are probably a male who is either young or used to be young.

If you don’t think it’s funny, well, then you are probably a female person.

It’s basic biology.

But again, we can see the presence of young men, testosterone, alcohol (an event like that must have alcohol, surely), and dog eating.

A TALE OF WORLD WAR TWO DOG EATING

This comes from an American friend of mine.

Peter,

     As your blog may be around for decades, I want my portion of it to be balanced and correct.  Use it, but mention no names.  Feel free to edit, but you should let me see your changes.   

     My Father served in China as a liaison officer, training their troops on our lend-lease weapons, approving their requests for supplies, and generally “smoothing things over.   He was in almost daily contact with the officers and troops of the Chinese Nationalist Army.  He had many stories of this unusual experience, including eating dog. 

     I have more than once heard him tell myself, and his friends that he was at a banquet with Chinese officers and American "Advisors."   Among the ample food a dish was presented, the diners took what they wanted, and the meal was consumed.  At this point my Father would reveal that somehow, the Americans learned that the meat was dog.  

     He professed to be surprised and shocked.  He said that the word used to describe the meat was from a northern dialect, and that it sounded very much like a southern word for duck.  Or similar.

     He also described seeing Chinese eating rice that had pebbles in it.  Adulterated or improperly cleaned.  He said when the diner bit on a pebble he simply spit it out on the carpet. 

     I have heard him tell these stories several times.  I did not grill him on the veracity of his story. Indeed, he had a fund of stories, and eating dog meat was far from the most bizarre. 

     Peter,

     Above is perhaps too long for you, but it does explain more fully why he was dining with Chinese officers.  Unlike most American officers in the CBI who were of the air corps or engineers building infrastructure, and serving with large groups of other Americans, my Father had to learn basic Chinese phrases and cultural “minefields” to avoid. Some were taught him on the sea voyage overseas, some he had to learn by hard experience. 

And with that we end this week’s experiment in daily offerings and put a stop to the subject of eating cats, dogs, and rats. Next time something completely different.

In the meantime please feel free to enjoy the 1998 Chinese Television Series based on The Water Margin available on YouTube.

There are 43 episodes in the series, each about 45 minutes or so long.

1998 CCTV Chinese Television Series based on The Water Margin

REFERENCES

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[i]   If a scholarly source is needed to support this claim, a standard one in the field is the classic film, “Hell Comes to Frogtown,” featuring the great sage Roddy "Rowdy" Piper.

[ii]  One of the big complaints I get about this publication is wordiness and excessive length. With that in mind, please be aware that I just cut over 700 words describing dumb misadventures of my own American youth.

[iii]  Oh darn, another Wikipedia reference, but a very good and thorough one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Margin

By the way, a tip. If you are going to try and read this sort of literature, or even some non-fiction on complex events in Asian or non-Western history, it cannot hurt to keep notes on who is who in case of confusion later on.

[iv]  Oh, don’t get me started on the whole “What exactly is the Republic of China these days?” question. These days it’s not exactly Taiwan but something much more complex. Perhaps some day.

1. Basically the Americans tried to raid the camp and rescue the prisoners, but the prisoners had been removed from the camp prior to the raid. The end result was that the raid went technically well, but no prisoners were rescued. Perhaps someday I will write more on that.