Snake Soup

When I was eleven, my grandfather invited our family to a restaurant for a feast of snake soup. The waiter set the porcelain bowl in front of me. It had thick handles, as if to emphasize the grandness of what it held. When I looked inside, I saw strips of white worm-like objects floating around in a thick, yellowish-brown mixture. As I stared at it, I thought, “Is it even right to eat this?”

“Claudia! How do you like the soup?” my grandfather asked.

My grandfather had been battling cancer for three years. He grew up penniless, worked as a child laborer and only had six years of education. Despite his tough beginnings, he was able to establish the world’s largest golf course. If he could give so much to our family, then I could drink snake soup for him. Closing my eyes, I flushed it down my throat.

“Grandpa, I love it!” I said in a cheery tone with my soup-drenched teeth, while feeling the slices of snake meat slither down my tight, rejecting throat.

There is a Cantonese term called “sik sik,” which translates to “knowing how to eat.” To be “sik sik” is to be so experienced with different cuisines that one appreciates all types of exotic food. Most of my family are “sik sik” and they always take pride in ordering the most atypical food like fish head or frog meat. I used to eat fish eyes to prove I was “sik sik” too.

Last year, when I came across a video about animal cruelty, my complex feelings about animals were put into structured thoughts. These thoughts that had passed through my mind throughout the years had all pointed to veganism; I just hadn’t put them together yet. I’ve been a vegan for eight months now. My uncle, who is the most “sik sik” in the family, makes fun of me for my new lifestyle. Whenever he slurps down his favorite shark fin soup, he shakes his head and says to me, “You can’t have this…so sad.” “Sik sik” means something different to me now. To me, it means understanding food production on an intellectual and compassionate level, and learning how to advocate for the voiceless. Perhaps my feelings in the restaurant were the voice of my future vegan self yelling to the preteen me that it is okay to feel disturbed by something when everyone else feels it is perfectly normal.

Becoming vegan is my apology to the snake I ate; it is a representation of my love and respect for my grandfather. When I was reading Animal Liberation by Peter Singer, this story of the snake soup immediately popped into my head when Singer made the argument about how human beings eat animal flesh long before we are competent to understand that what we are eating is the dead body of an animal. Even though most children’s natural instinct is to reject meat, eating animal flesh is a habit developed at a young age by parents, who mistakenly believe that it is healthy for their bodies. The mass media also allows us to be ignorant of the truth behind the animal farming industry – where “the average viewer must know more about the lives of cheetahs and and sharks than he or she knows about the lives of chickens or veal calves” through documentary television shows(216). Perhaps this is the reason why it felt wrong to me to have the snake soup – because I learned from the television that snakes are powerful wild animals. Typical television shows often are more aware of what they show about farm animals, since meat-eating viewers have an ignorant “don’t tell me, you’ll spoil my dinner” attitude (217).  My favorite food back then were honey wings – I used to have ten wings for a meal. Never once did I question myself if it was okay to have chicken. I did really think about where the wings came from. I knew they were from chickens, but I did not know much about chickens to care about their emotions. Just like Singer mentioned, the most children are normally exposed to farm animals are probably through children songs like Old MacDonald.

As Singer explained the short history of speciesism and how the “Man’s Dominion” came into being, I became very ashamed about how egocentric human kind is, especially after the emphasis on self-discovering during the Renaissance (198). As I continue on with this Independent Project, I am looking forward to embark on a journey of self-discovery on the true meaning of coexistence with all animals alike.