Snake Blood
A medium-sized turtle is suspended upside down, its neck gravity-stretched to visually unnatural limits. Pitying its exposed head in a slow, slug-like writhe, I fight the urge to take it down myself. Tonight it will have its meat cooked into soup and its organs harvested for bile.
It’s medicinal, the Taiwanese stand owner yells after me as I curtly leave, good for the heart!
This evening is full of pedestrian bustle at the Huaxi Street Night Market. The air is heavy with the steam of xiaochi (literally "small eats") and commingled scents of staples such as oyster omelet and stinky tofu.
The North side of the market is a clean, copacetic indoor strip of small eateries. But here, the South end is different. It is made of color and chaos. A former red-light district, the street is now colloquially known, for its exotic concoctions, as “Snake Alley.”
Here is a small stage between a sex shop and a seafood stand. There are at least a dozen skinny snakes in a row, hung by their necks, their three-foot-long, brown, bodies expertly slit, being bled into buckets below. Supposedly unconscious, their dark bodies still convulse.
There's a narrator for this nightmare, fluorescently lit. There is a man with a microphone gesticulating wildly towards the scene. He speaks in fast-paced Mandarin to the crowd with an enthusiastic carnival pitch. There are various-sized bottles of all colors of animal fluids at his feet, most copiously strawberry-red snake blood.
In Snake Alley there is no ailment the vendors won’t claim they can't cure--arthritis, heart disease, poor memory, weak bones, impotence. There is no shortage of silent animal suffering and also nothing illegal about it.
The market is considered by locals to be a culture center, a must-visit for foreigners with an appetite for extremes.
I pass a pig in a cage too small to turn. I swallow only the sadness of my American sensibilities.
