Stiff (29 page)

Eventually the taxi pulled up outside a brightly lit fried chicken establishment, the sort of place that in the United States might proclaim

"We Do Chicken Right!" but here proclaimed "Do Me Chicken!" The cabdriver turned to collect his fare. We shouted at each other for a while, and eventually he got out and walked over to a tiny, dim storefront next to the chicken place and pointed vigorously to a sign. Designated Foreign-Oriented Tourist Unit, it said. Well, do me chicken. The man was right.

Inside, the tourist unit was having a cigarette break, which, judging from the density of the smoke, had been going on for some time, years possibly. The walls were bare cement and part of the ceiling was falling in. There were no travel brochures or train timetables, only a map of the world and a small wall-mounted shrine with a red electric candle and a bowl of offerings. The gods were having apples. In the back of the office, I could see two brand-new shrink-wrapped chairs. This struck me as an odd purchasing decision, what with the ceiling collapsing and the very slim likelihood that more than two or three tourists a year came in and needed a place to sit.

I explained to the woman that I wanted to hire an interpreter.

Miraculously, two phone calls and half an hour later, one appeared. It was Sandy Wan, the woman who would later help me track down the truth about the abortus vendors. I explained that I needed to talk to someone at the Haikou crematorium. Sandy's English vocabulary was impressive but, understandably, did not include "crematorium."

I described it as the big building where they burn dead bodies. She didn't catch the last bit and thought I meant some sort of factory. "What kind of material?" she asked. The entire staff of the designated foreign-oriented tourist unit were looking on, trying to follow the conversation.

"Dead people… material." I smiled helplessly. "Dead bodies."

"Ah," said Sandy. She did not flinch. She explained to the tourist unit, who nodded as though they got this sort of thing all the time. Then she asked me for the address. When I replied that I didn't know it, she got the crematorium phone number from the information operator, called the place to get the address, and even set up an appointment with the director. She was amazing. I couldn't imagine what she had told the man, or what she thought I needed to talk to him about. I began to feel a little sorry for the crematorium director, thinking he was about to be visited by a grieving foreign widow, or perhaps some glad-handing retort salesman there to help him cut costs and maximize efficiency.

In the cab, I tried to think of a way to explain to Sandy what I was about to have her do.
I need you to ask this man whether he had an employee who cut
the butt cheeks off cadavers to serve in his brother's restaurant
. No matter how I thought of phrasing it, it sounded ghastly and absurd. Why would I need to know this? What kind of book was I writing? Fearing that Sandy might change her mind, I said nothing about the dumplings. I said that I was writing an article for a funeral industry magazine. We were outside the city proper now. Trucks and scooters had gone scarce. People drove wooden ox carts and wore the round, peaked sun hats you see in rural Vietnam, only these were fashioned from laminated newspaper. I wondered if someone, somewhere, was wearing the March 23, 1991, edition of the
Hainan Special Zone Daily
.

The taxi turned off onto a dirt road. We passed a brick smokestack, issuing clouds of black: the crematorium. Farther down the road was the accompanying funeral home and the crematorium offices. We were directed up a broad marble stairway to the director's office. This could only go poorly. The Chinese are wary of reporters, especially foreign ones, and very especially foreign ones suggesting that your staff mutilated the dead relations of paying customers to make dumplings.

What had I been thinking?

The director's office was large and sparsely furnished. There was nothing on the walls but a clock, as if no one knew how to decorate for death.

Sandy and I were seated in leather chairs that sat low to the floor, like car seats, and told that the director would be in to see us shortly. Sandy smiled at me, unaware of the horror about to unfold. "Sandy," I blurted out, "I have to tell you what this is about! There was this guy who cut the butts off dead bodies to give to his brother to…"

It was at that moment that the director walked in. The director was a stern-looking Chinese woman, easily six feet tall. From my humbled position near the floor, she seemed to be of superhuman proportions, as tall as the smokestack outside and as likely to belch forth smoke.

The director sat down at her desk. She looked at me. Sandy looked at me.

Feeling seasick, I launched into my story. Sandy listened and, bless her, betrayed no emotion. She turned to the director, who was not smiling, had not smiled since she entered the room, had possibly never smiled, and she told her what I had just said. She relayed the story of Hui Guang, explained that I thought he might have been employed here, and that I wrote for a magazine and that I hoped to find him and speak to him. The director crossed her arms and her eyes narrowed. I thought I saw her nostrils flare. Her reply went on for ten minutes. Sandy nodded politely through it all, with the attentive calm of a person being given a fast-food order or directions to the mall. I was very impressed. Then she turned to me. "The director, she is, ah, very angry. The director is very…
astonished
to have these facts. She never heard of this story. She says she has known all her workers, and she has been here for more than ten years and she would know about this kind of story. Also, she feels it is a… really sick story. And so she cannot help you." I would love to see a full transcript of the director's reply, and then again I wouldn't.

Back in the cab I explained myself to Sandy as best I could. I apologized for putting her through this. She laughed. We both laughed. We laughed so hard that the cab driver demanded to know what we were laughing about, and he laughed too. The cab driver had grown up in Haikou, but he hadn't heard the story of the Guang brothers. Neither, it later turned out, had any of Sandy's friends. We had the driver let us off at the Haikou public library to look for the original article. As it turns out, no paper named the
Hainan Special Zone Daily
exists, only the
Hainan Special
Zone Times
, which is a weekly. Sandy looked through the papers for the week of March 23, 1991, but there was no mention of the human dumplings. She also checked old phone books for the White Temple Restaurant and found nothing.

There wasn't much more to do in Haikou, so I took the bus south to Sanya, where the beaches are beautiful and the weather is fine and there is, I found out, another crematorium. (Sandy called the director and received a similarly indignant reply.) On the beach that afternoon, I spread my towel a few feet away from a wooden sign that advised beach-goers, "Do not spit at the beach." Unless, I thought to myself, the beach suffers from nightmares, ulcers, ophthalmia, or fetid perspiration.

Anthropologists will tell you that the reason people never dined regularly on other people is economics. While there existed, I am told, cultures in Central America that actually ranched humans—kept enemy soldiers captive for a while to fatten them up—it was not practical to do so, because you had to give up more food to feed them than you'd gain in the end by eating them. Carnivores and omnivores, in other words, make lousy livestock. "Humans are very inefficient in converting calories into body composition," said Stanley Garn, a retired anthropologist with the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan. I had called him because he wrote an
American Anthropologist
paper on the topic of human flesh and its nutritional value. "Your cows,"

he said, "are much more efficient."

But I am not so much interested in cultures' eating the flesh of their captive enemies as I am in cultures' eating their own dead: the practical, why-not model of cannibalism—eating the meat of fresh corpses because it's there and it's a nice change from taro root. If you're not going out and capturing people and/or going to the trouble of fattening them up, then the nutritional economics begin to make more sense.

I found an
American Anthropologist
article—a reply to Garn's— stating that there are in fact instances of groups of humans who will eat not only enemies they have killed, but members of their own group who have died of natural causes. Though in every case, the author, University of California, San Diego, anthropologist Stanley Walens, said, the cannibalism was couched in ritual. No culture, as far as he knew, simply carved up dead tribe members to distribute as meat.

Garn seemed to disagree. "Lots of cultures ate their dead," he said, though I couldn't get any specifics out of him. He added that many groups—too many, he said, to specify—would eat infants as a means of population control when food was scarce. Did they kill them or were they already dead, I wanted to know.

"Well," he replied, "they were dead by the time they ate them." This is how conversations with Stanley Garn seem to go. Somehow, midway through our chat, he steered the conversation from nutritional cannibalism to the history of landfill—a pretty sharp turn—and there it more or less remained. "You should write a book about
that
," he said, and I think he meant it.

I had called Stanley Garn because I was looking for an anthropologist who had done a nutritional analysis of human flesh and/or organ meats.

Just, you know, curious. Garn hadn't exactly done this, but he had worked out the lean/fat percentage of human flesh. He estimates that humans have more or less the same body composition as veal. To arrive at the figure, Garn extrapolated from average human body fat percentages. "There's information of that sort on people in most countries now," he said. "So you can see who you want for dinner." I wondered how far the beef/human analogy carried. Was it true of human flesh, as of beef, that a cut with more fat is considered more flavorful? Yup, said Garn. And, as with livestock, the better nourished the individuals, the higher the protein content. "The little people of the world," said Garn—

and I had to assume he was referring to the malnourished denizens of the third world and not dwarfs—"are hardly worth eating."

To my knowledge there is only one group of individuals today whose daily diet may contain significant amounts of their own dead, and that is the California canine. In 1989, while researching a story on a ridiculous and racist law aimed at preventing Asian immigrants from eating their neighbors' dogs (which was already illegal because it's illegal to steal a dog), I learned that, owing to California Clean Air Act regulations, humane societies had switched from cremating euthanized pets to what one official called "the rendering situation." I called up a rendering plant to learn into what the dogs were being rendered. "We grind 'em up and turn 'em into bone meal," the plant manager had said. Bone meal is a common ingredient in fertilizers and animal feed—including many commercial dog foods.

Of course, no humans are made into fertilizer after they're dead. Or not, anyway, unless they wish to be.

Footnotes:

[
1]
As opposed to the mouse, horse, rat, goose, hog, sheep, mule, donkey, or dog variety. Dog turd was especially popular, particularly dried white dog turd, from which the popular Renaissance medicine Album Graecum was made. The
Chinese Materia Medica
includes not only dog turd, but the grains and bones extracted from it. These were trying times for pharmacists.

[
2]
If you could at all help it, it was extremely advisable, historically, to avoid being epileptic. Treatments for it have included distilled human skull, dried human heart, bolus of human mummy, boy's urine, excrement of mouse, goose, and horse, warm gladiator blood, arsenic, strychnine, cod liver oil, and borax.

[
3]
While I am thankful to be alive in the era of antibiotics and over-the-counter Gyne-Lotrimin, I am saddened by modern medicine's contributions to medical nomenclature. Where once we had scrofula and dropsy, now we have supraven-tricular tachyarrhythmia and glossopharyngeal neuralgia. Gone are quinsy, glanders, and farcy. So long, exuberant granulations and cerebral softening. Fare-thee-well, tetter and hectic fever. Even the treatments used to have an evocative, literary flavor. The
Merck Manual
of 1899 listed "a tumblerful of Carlsbad waters, sipped hot while dressing" as a remedy for constipation and the lovely, if enigmatic, "removal inland" as a cure for insomnia.

[
4]
You don't see the Sims position anymore, but you can see Dr. Sims, who lives on as a statue in Central Park in New York. If you don't believe me, you can look it up yourself, on page 56 of
The Romance of Proctology
.

(Sims was apparently something of a dilettante when it came to bodily orifices.) P.S.: I could not, from cursory skimming, ascertain what the romance was.