Laowai Comics: Where Are You From?

Just asking. Where are you from?

This week from our friend, Laowai Comics. Keep it crazy!

Do Asians Eat Dogs?

Illustration by motobus

“You’re Asian, can I ask you something?”

“Asian-American, yes, go ahead.”

“Have you ever eaten dog?”

I blinked in surprise and stumbled through several uhs and ums before I could respond to my (white) colleague. The question was genuinely curious, but not without a gleam of hostility. The answer was: No, I haven’t. But how is one supposed to answer this barbed and accusatory question?

What else do we eat, which we should question?

By the facts, yes: Asians eat dog meat – stewed, steamed, boiled, and barbequed. Some Chinese eat dog for its medicinal qualities, believing it to be good for metabolism and warmth. In Korea, poshintang, “tonic soup,” is a common dog stew known for its stamina and virility-increasing potency. Dog meat has been a part of Southeast and East Asian cuisine for thousands of years.

What then, is the controversy over dog meat? The answer is a visceral, disgusted churning in the Western appetite. In America, dogs are known as “man’s best friend.” They’re companions and members of the family – definitely not dinner. To see a dozen dogs cramped up against one another in a single cage, awaiting their grisly fate at a slaughterhouse, very reasonably inspires animal-welfare activism.

What makes dogs more special, than say, pigs? Pigs are far more intelligent, but our relationship with dogs is rooted in a symbiotic evolution. In exchange for food and security, friendly wolves served as hunting aids, warning systems, garbage disposals, as well as defenders and guardians of children. According to a DNA study, humans’ sense of smell was reduced because our alliance with dogs rendered it unnecessary. In a significant sense, dogs made us human, our affinity towards them. However, in hunter-gatherer times, thousands of years before refrigeration and crop storage, “when times were tough, dogs could have served as an emergency food supply.”

Hence, biology does not fully explain our taste buds. Western outrage toward dog-eating remains primarily a feature of a high-minded, well-fed culture, whose convictions betray a certain industrial privilege. Western cultural superiority does not necessarily understand how Chinese and Korean people have suffered from famine brought on by authorities. In the context of Chinese rural culture, where dogs compete with humans for resources, “eating dogs appears to be a compensatory adaption to material deprivation and the lack of reliable sources of other meats,” writes Frank H. Wu, Dean of University of California Hastings College of the Law.

Meat vendors in Asia today generally make a distinction between the dogs raised at home – pets, and the kind raised for eating – food. There’s no doubt, however, that the cultural superiority of the United States has influence. Under international scrutiny, when the Olympic Games were held in Seoul, Korea in 1988 and in Beijing, China in 2008, both countries vigorously banned and regulated dog meat. In the absence of a moral argument for giving up dog-eating, these countries wish to maintain their image in the face of worldwide opinion.

In the United States, narratives of Asians and dog-eating reduce the people of Asia to a minor aspect of their diverse ways of life. This allows stereotypes to abound, and form the basis for a belief that Asian people are inferior. As Wu says, “dog eating becomes an excuse to make Asians the butt of jokes and ultimately to disrespect complete culture as primitive.”

“Do Asians eat dogs?” The gaze of the question, curious and blaming, weighs upon me.

I feel vulnerable, but there is a dignified response that illuminates prejudice: “Why do you ask?”

A Morning Swim in North Korea

I swim because I love the sense of freedom I feel in the water. This sensation of unboundedness, of unrestrained fluidity, is even more pronounced when at the water’s edge lies a fenced-in land of captivity. The Yalu River separates the hermit kingdom of North Korea from China, and it was in the Yalu that I swam, just upstream of the crane-sprouting Chinese city of Dandong, on a clear October morning.

Yalu River swimmers with North Korea on far shore

(Photo: Victor Robert Lee)

As I spat into my goggles a few steps from the water, to my surprise, nine men and one woman walked down the embankment in their swimsuits, put on fins and high-tech hand paddles, and started to slide into the river. A few smiled at this stranger in trunks, and one of them, short and muscular, with a clutter of teeth and circular fire-cupping imprints across his back, signaled for me to get in the water next to him. He later told me his name was Yi Hong Fung.

Most of the swimmers gradually dispersed in the direction of the far shore, about 500 meters away. But Yi and I swam together, alternating between freestyle and breaststroke, occasionally testing each other’s speed. I felt light and fast, and probably could have quickly outdistanced him despite his paddles and fins (much of my youth was spent in competitive swimming), but this was not a race. And I didn’t know if the swimmers were going to pass the river’s midpoint, the official boundary, or veer back toward the Chinese shore.

Answer: We stroked all the way to the far bank and landed a bit downstream because of the current. Yi stood in the North Korean mud and warmed up in the sunlight. I needed the sun, too. You can imagine the water was cold, yes, but it was bearable because of our exertion, and to my surprise, it seemed clean—no litter, suds, turds or taste of diesel. We stood next to a four-meter-high fence of ragged netting held up by poles that looked like scavenged tree branches—North Korea’s protection against invading swimmers and escaping citizens.

North Korean shore of Yalu River at Dandong

(Photo: Victor Robert Lee)

The riverbank was a gradual rise of swamp grass; twenty meters from where we’d landed there was a small white shack—a North Korean guard station. There were no visible gun-toting Democratic People’s Republic of Korea soldiers here, as there had been the day before at the upstream trickle of a Yalu branch at Tiger Mountain. There, Chinese minders and the DPRK personnel threatened gunfire at anyone trying to take a picture of the soldiers. Here, no one. Silence.

Yi and I had been the first of the group to reach the far shore; others smiled at me as they arrived. Their skin glowed with the orange color of the early sun. I punched Yi’s shoulder and said, “hun hao” (very good), to praise his strength. He made a similar gesture to acknowledge mine.

After we plodded through the mud for a while, I motioned to Yi for us to swim back to our starting point, now upriver. “Bu shi.” This meant no, and with a sweep of his hand he indicated that the current would be too strong, we’d have to aim for a downstream point. It was all part of his regular circuit, I supposed.

Here we are: Yi and I, planted in the shallows of arguably the least free country in the world, a fenced pen holding in millions through a combination of despotism, punishing violence, and enforced mind-control ideology.

Yi was free, free to do this whenever he wanted, although I guess he didn’t recognize the mockery he made, with every swim, of the hermit tyrant ruling the far shore. But Yi lives in China. The West would say he is not really free either, that he is a citizen of a country controlled by an illegitimate, information-suppressing party; a self-engendered corrupt network of pseudo-communists.

But on this morning, with Yi’s toothy smiles and exuberance, the simple freedom of swimming seemed the only concern of both of us.

As we swam back to the Chinese shore, Yi turned his head now and then to make sure I hadn’t been swept too far by the current. We sprinted the last 100 meters, perhaps racing, perhaps just trying to beat the current to our mark on the other side— a stretch of riverside stone steps where clothes were being washed by a group of women.

Yi and I shook hands on the steps. He seemed as energized as I was, with a robustness bordering on joy. “Xie xie,” I thanked him. He replied the same.

I walked about a kilometer up-river to where I’d left my clothes. I strolled slowly, to give myself more time to think about freedom.

Train crossing Yalu River to North Korea at Dandong

(Photo: Victor Robert Lee)