Crossroad

It was not long ago. But I almost forgot about it. I may have done so deliberately, until reminded by Jonathan Safron Foer’s book Eating Animals.

Two years ago—maybe? My mom’s colleague gave her three little chicks. They were meant to be eaten, eventually. There is no doubt about that. The chicks, though, were too small to be eaten, so we kept them in a cardboard box and fed them for a while—how long was a while? A few weeks? Few months? I don’t remember. What I do remember is that my brother takes them out everyday to the backyard to play. Initially he just let them out of the box and wander on their own, but sometimes the chicks would wander off into someone else’s backyard across the street, causing the neighbors to complain. Since then my brother would watch them as they played, and put them back into the box in the end. He got pretty good at this—taking the chickens out and making them go back. I don’t know how much he enjoyed being a shepherd of the three chicks, but he would squat down and watch the chicks frolic for a long time, sometimes eve playing with them. The chicks grew slowly—perhaps too slowly. There was a point when we felt like it was just too much to feed three chicks in our garage (which was really smelly at that time because of those chicks) that grew at a glacier speed. We couldn’t keep them anymore. They were still small. We discussed the possibility of just letting them go, but for some reason it died down. Then we finally had to kill them. My mom killed all kinds of animals. For crabs, because they release toxins after they are dead, she would clean, brush, and cut off their tentacles while they are still alive and the butchering reached the climax when she stick chopsticks through their eyes. I don’t know if she still does it. Probably. But I don’t watch her kill crabs anymore because it’s too hard to watch. When she cut off the tentacles, I imagined my limbs being in chopped off like that. When she sticks the chopsticks through the crab’s eyes, I imagined my eyes being treated like that. It was just too much. But I still eat crabs.
The point is, she did not kill those chickens. My step-father, who grew up in a farm and had probably killed lots of chickens, did. My mother said she just couldn’t. But my brother watched as my step-father slit the chicks’ throat open. I didn’t. I ran upstairs because I couldn’t bear the shrieking. Nobody except my step-father ate the chicken meat that night.

I haven’t finished Eating Animals but it’s already influencing me little by little. I don’t order chicken at the pasta station anymore. I still eat meat, but I try to avoid it as much as possible. Foer described his status years after college, when he was not yet a firm vegetarian, as “a vegetarian who occasionally eat meat;” I’m an omnivore who eat vegetables and fruits most of the time.

I never liked animals. Not chickens, not crabs, not dogs, not cats. If I have the energy to love animals, I rather love human babies. I get angry every time I see commercials calling help for dogs because why would anyone be so concerned about dogs when there are millions of people in the world dying of hunger, disease, and all other problems? But that’s not to say that I’m not moved by Foer’s book. I don’t think animals are as important as human beings only because I’m a human being and I naturally put my species on a higher priority than other species. But I do believe that animals obviously can feel pain. Cutting of crabs’ tentacles hurt them as much as cutting off our legs hurt us (imagine that without anesthesia). In the past I avoided the question regarding the ethics of eating animals, telling myself that eating animals is just something that people do—it happens, people eat meat. But now I can’t tell myself this anymore. It just doesn’t cut it. I’m not even going to talk about the conditions at the factory farms—just what right do we have to enslave any animal for their meat? “Enslave” is actually not an accurate term. What we are doing to these animals is trillions times worse than what people did to slaves in the history.

I find myself at a crossroad, not knowing what to do.

6:51 AM 10-29-2010

Last night I volunteered at the men’s homeless shelter for the first time. I would actually say that I had a good time. Or at least, a worthwhile time. They slept in beds that can be pulled out from a large cabinet. There were ten cabinets in the room, a row of table and chairs around it, and plenty of space to walk about. It didn’t feel like a very different world, but it undoubtedly was. The things they talked about—-the other homeless shelters, subsidized housing, gifts that came from donations—-were so far away from my life that I had a hard time realizing that their words were, in fact, deeply, deeply real. They talked about the injustices in another large homeless shelter, how it has a really hostile and incompetent staff, how the only thing it provides them is a plastic chair to sleep in, how it treats people like animals, driving the sane to insanity, how it is keeping the insane because it can collect more money from the government.

"I will try to bring them down. What they are doing is not right." Chris, a big, well-spoken Black man, said.

They were seriously angry, but they also expressed their anger through jokes. The stories about the crazy homeless folks and their own “first nights” were just too funny and too sad. One anecdote that all of them cherished was about this man who left the shelter two weeks ago. He was the joker of the bunch. One night all of them received gifts from the shelter, mostly clothes, and the "joker" tried on his black, T-shirt-looking top in front of everyone—-except it wasn’t a T-shirt, it was a form-fitting, woman’s halter top. “What is this?” He looked down puzzled at his chest, which was so tight that a cleavage was clearly visible.

The rest cracked up all night long.

"So what are you doing right now?"
"I'm trying to get my GED."
"Woah, that's really nice. Do you know what you're going do with it?"
"Oh yes, of course. I'm going to be a judge. I know it."

“If they were walking on the streets would you ever think that they’re homeless?” Yuan Yuan, a friend who came with me, asked when we were on our way back.
“No. Never.”
“Me neither.”

The truth is that some of them certainly would make me suspect that their standards of living are not too good, but I would never even imagine that they are homeless—-this word is so distant from my own life that my mind does not even treat it as a possibility for the less fortunate others. But today in the subway, a big Black woman, dressed in an even bigger, oversized red jacket, walked out of door carrying a small luggage and a plastic bag sitting on top of it. Her expression was the same as the men in the shelter when they were not talking.