Cullen: Okay, so we were at our town's open market the other weekend in search of dumpling wrappers (this is where the best ones are located). Now, every single time we enter this place (that stinks with the moist stench of death), we have no choice but to witness animal slaughter. And it's not just any animal that's being abused, imprisoned and slaughtered before our eyes. It's countless stray dogs. Usually when we go, we see skinned and gutted dogs hanging from hooks through their mouths with their fur and guts splattered on the concrete below. Also, we are witness to these poor dogs being imprisoned in filthy cages. However, when we went on this specific occasion, it was like it was the day before some sort of Chinese Thanksgiving that serves dog as the main dish.
Melissa: We'll spare you the gory details, simply because we want you to continue to come back and visit our blog without losing sleep at night or waking up screaming if you do get any sleep, but I'll just tell you that it was like nothing I have ever seen in my life, in person or PETA video. It was a week ago or so and the images and sickening cries are still fresh in my mind. Mind you, not a single person at the market winced, let alone seemed to notice, aside from us. This is simply a cultural divergence that we will of course respect and perhaps accept in due time. Yet it rekindled in us an urge to re-explore our inner vegetarians, as we agreed that simply avoiding dog's meat would only quell our conscience as far as we could see, but not what we know to be true: that whatever abuse we were seeing here against dogs was happening around the world, including in our own country, to cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and any other animal that humankind sees fit to eat. As you may know, and as Cullen will never be able to forget as I remind him constantly, I was a vegetarian for five years starting in high school and throughout the entirety of college. When I traveled to Ecuador and lived in Armenia, cultural norms and call for sensitivity overwhelmed my instincts to avoid meat, and so I broke my vegetarianism to avoid offending my hosts. Now seemed like the perfect opportunity to take it up once again, given the inspiring scene at the market.
Cullen: And take it up we did, but before doing so, Melissa told our liaison about what we saw and that it bothered her. I remember Melissa getting off the phone with her and worrying that she took her the wrong way. Melissa told me that she kept apologizing for her people, which was not what Melissa was getting after. Her whole point was not that the mistreatment and slaughter was being conducted by Chinese people, but that it was being conducted at all. In any case, we started eating vegetarian, which really isn't difficult for us to do, as we almost always cook for ourselves. However, a couple of days ago, our school told us that we needed to give a class to about two hundred Junior students from all over the county and judge their oral English competition. This entailed a dinner at a restaurant with some of the school's teachers and a few of the organizers.
We just got back from the dinner and the classes. The dinner had a good number of vegetarian dishes, which was arranged by our liaison and our head teacher. We were surprised by this and are grateful for their accommodating menu. The dinner went fairly smoothly, although they did expect me to pack away beers like a fridge right before my class (about magic, of all things...) to the young Junior students. The oldest teacher was also at the table, and he kept egging me on to eat some of the meat dishes. I think that by not eating meat, it may have been seen as a disrespect towards the purveyors of our meal, as meat dishes tend to be the most expensive. I can also see that vegetarianism is seen as a weakness to some Chinese people, as they took satisfaction in watching me eat a little bit of bacon that they placed in my bowl. So, eating vegetarian at a Chinese restaurant tends to be awkward when eating with Chinese people.
Melissa: After dinner, we gave our "lectures" to about 200 junior students from around the county in one of our school's lecture halls. Cullen, as he mentioned, spoke about magic, and I gave a presentation on ecosystems. One of the English teachers in our school, Mr. Li, followed by thanking us for speaking and illuminated virtues of each lesson: first, he described what he would do with the magic hat Cullen spoke of in his lesson. Then, he added to my lesson that it is our responsibility to protect the environment. Both were welcome and constructive additions to our lectures, I thought to myself at that point. Then, Mr. Li proceeded to discuss our recent conversion to vegetarianism, which went a little something like this:
Cullen and Melissa have decided to become vegetarians after seeing the meat market in our own Rong Jia Wan. They found the treatment of animals in the market to be cruel. Yet Americans are killing Iraqi people in the Iraq war. Americans are in Iraq, fighting and killing Iraqi people. I don't understand why Cullen and Melissa would be vegetarians.
I don't believe that this statement warrants commentary on my part, especially because I wouldn't know where to begin in describing how offensive, uncalled for, and inappropriate those audacious remarks were, not only within the context of this forum, but at all, considering the fact that Mr. Li never broached the subject with us before coming to his own conclusions on the matter. I will say that for as intoxicated as Mr. Li claimed to be, he spoke with astonishing clarity, eloquence, and extent on the topic of our dubious moral code.
Cullen: Melissa really nailed that quote. As he said it, my face lit up with the heat of embarrassment, and I could not bring myself to take my eyes away from the floor. That thought belonged in the heat of argument instead of in our introductions to two hundred young Chinese students. Not only did he spread a great deal of misinformation about us, but he insulted us in front of everybody. After fuming about this for a few hours, my thoughts keep coming back to the way our liaison responded to Melissa the first time she told her about the mistreated dogs. She reacted as if we condemned China; as if she were expected to apologize for the traditional customs of her great and many countrymen.
Melissa: Following Mr. Li's lovely speech, Cullen fielded questions during a Q & A session, and Mr. Li attempted to make small talk with me. Being the type A personality that I am, I found it impossible to smile and nod and ignore the obvious. I asked him if he knew that I was a vegetarian in the United States as well, to which of course he responded that he didn't. Some of Cullen's type B personality found it's way into my subconsciousness and told me not to take it any further than that, although the urge to fully confront him has not been satiated. Stay tuned for further developments, as I contemplate getting all up in his grill.
