Asia’s live poultry markets leave many Westerners queasy. Deep inside the cavernous Orussey Market in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, a short walk from the fairy-tale spires of the royal palace, scores of live chickens and ducks are crammed together, legs bound, on wood pallets speckled with droppings. Shoppers stoop over to scrutinize the birds like customers examining cantaloupes in a Safeway, then hang the beleaguered creatures upside down from hooks to measure their weight. Some shoppers carry off their cackling purchases to finish them off at home. Others turn them over to butchers, who hunch on the muddy floor, slitting throats and plucking feathers. So, too, in the dim light of Jakarta’s Jatinegara Market, one of more than thirteen thousand live poultry markets in Indonesia, a dozen boys squat amid stacks of pungent cages on a tile floor slick with death. With swift slices of the knife, these barehanded youths dismember the chickens and then tug out their entrails, heaping them up for waiting customers. Blood trickles down ruts in the floor and spills into the alley outside.
Many Asians swear by freshly killed chicken, duck, and goose, insisting they are tastier and more nutritious. But Robert Webster has vigorously argued that “wet markets” represent a perilous nexus where flu viruses can amplify, swap genetic material, and spread. WHO’s expert committee on avian flu has endorsed this view. Each morning, live markets are restocked with birds, and with them new microbes. They can infect merchants, customers, and other animals, who by day’s end may carry the contagion onward to new frontiers. Researchers in the early 1990s identified live markets as a “missing link” to explain flare-ups of a low-pathogenic strain among poultry in the United States. After the 1997 human outbreak in Hong Kong, investigators ultimately traced six of the deaths back to wet markets. The city instituted new safeguards, including the screening of poultry from mainland China and a ban on the sale of live ducks and geese. But the virus nonetheless returned to Hong Kong’s markets five years later. On the mainland, where an even wider array of flu strains has continued to circulate amid the poultry stalls, Chinese researchers concluded that six city dwellers who came down with bird flu had likely caught it during recent market visits. These patients had no other known exposure to sick poultry.
Yet despite these scientific warnings, Asian governments have been hard-pressed to break people of their longtime passion for freshly butchered meat. Some countries, notably Vietnam, have begun phasing out wet markets and building modern slaughterhouses. But Webster counseled that, as with backyard farming, a complete ban on wet markets would simply drive this commerce underground. Demand would remain strong and prices high while monitoring for disease would become far more difficult.
Among Southeast Asians, it is Vietnamese who take fresh furthest, with a delicacy called
1. Cut a small incision in the duck/chicken to get the blood in a bowl. Pour some drops of lime into the blood bowl.
2. In a separate bowl, mix chopped bowel and stomach together.
3. Mix the blood liquid (the first bowl) and the stock (the second bowl) with the ratio of one spoon blood to two spoons stock. You will also put some fish sauce in, as much as desired.
4. Set aside for about half an hour. The mixture will form a texture like pudding cake.
For many in Asia, birds are an essential element of everyday life, synonymous with sustenance, commerce, companionship, and even national identity. Moreover, for some, they are also linked to aspirations not just for this life but for the life to come.
Over the centuries, Buddhists across much of Asia have released the sorrows born of sickness, hunger, and war through the simple, cathartic act of buying caged birds and setting them free. In front of the shimmering gold pagoda of Wat Phnom, erected on the wooded knoll that lent Phnom Penh its name, Cambodian devotees reach inside the metal and wire mesh cages, draw out sparrows, swallows, munias, and weavers, often in pairs, and raise them in cupped palms to their lips. The adherents mumble a prayer and, often with a kiss, set them free into the warm, still air. But this tradition, in which devotees seek blessings for this life and the next, could now prove to be a curse. The lethal flu strain has been isolated from some of the wild species most commonly peddled outside the shrines of Buddhist Asia from Thailand to Taiwan. The hazards posed by the collection and release of these so- called merit birds is akin to that of live poultry markets.
Kong Phalla has been selling merit birds from the cobblestone sidewalk at the base of Wat Phnom since she was eight. A slight woman in her twenties with small brown eyes, she had the familiar look of those who trade their childhood for the hustle of the street: a thin veneer of smarts overlaid on innocence. She approached me with a lotus stem in one hand and a cage crammed with birds in the other. She said the birds had been shipped into the capital overnight by riv erboat. She had already sold nearly three dozen to worshipers. “They want to free their depression, free their sadness and illness with the birds,” Kong Phalla explained. Her dark hair was tucked under a red knit cap despite the day’s gathering heat. She rested her load in the shade beside a table of incense sticks and flashed a weak smile, saying she had brought five cages to the pagoda that morning and was confident all one thousand birds would be sold by nightfall. The birds went for about fifty cents each, good money in Cambodia, though Kong Phalla got to keep only a tiny fraction. On holidays like Cambodia’s New Year, when business was especially brisk, she said, prices could triple.
Bird flu was of no concern, Kong Phalla continued, patting the cage. It’s only the foreign tourists who fret. She snickered. “They’ll only open the doors of the cages and ask me to release the birds myself so they don’t have to touch them,” she said, adding with a boast, “Bird flu has never happened to me.”
Kong Phalla spied one of her frequent Cambodian customers drive up to the curb in a new Toyota sedan and get out. She instantly abandoned her thought, grabbed the cage, and gave chase. She followed him up the long brick staircase, past the statues of lions and pink balustrades of mythical serpents and beyond the stone stupas above, beseeching him at each step to purchase some of her birds. He acceded just before vanishing into the sanctuary on the crest of the hill. Kong Phalla put down her cage on a stone bench beside those of other peddlers and waited for her next chance.
To understand this Buddhist custom, I sought out a monk named Khy Sovanratana. I found him at his monastery in the center of Phnom Penh, a once romantic city of French colonial villas still trying to collect its thoughts three decades after Pol Pot’s reign of terror. The Khmer Rouge had abolished religion, decimating the country’s Buddhist institutions. Since then, Buddhism has revived, monks bearing alms bowls have returned in large numbers to the early morning streets, and Khy Sovanratana has emerged as a commentator on morality and social issues. Though his close-cropped hair was still black with youth when I met him, his learning had already elevated him into the ranks of senior clergy. When he received me, he was seated cross-legged on a thin cushion, his orange monk’s robe draped over his left shoulder.
The monk started by recounting a legend of Prince Siddhartha, the Indian nobleman who would later attain enlightenment and become the Supreme Buddha. The young prince and his cousin were walking through the woods when they spotted a swan. The cousin drew his bow and shot the swan with an arrow. Siddhartha raced to the injured bird, refusing to relinquish it. His cousin grew furious. But Siddhartha caressed the swan, eventually nursing it back to health before setting it free.
“This kind of conduct has had a big impact on Buddhist practices,” the monk said softly. “Giving life is very much extolled in Buddhism.” He explained that the simple gesture of releasing birds is rich in significance, and he slowly explicated the different layers of meaning. First, by giving life, a devotee follows in the footsteps of the Buddha. Second, the act of releasing the bird helps to cast off the “torments and tortures” of everyday life. And third, the act of liberating a living creature earns devotees religious merit toward reincarnation into a better life. For a person with financial means, the only limit on the number of birds to be released is his kindness. Sometimes, the monk said, adherents have been known to free not only birds but fish, turtles, and even cows and buffalo that are tied up awaiting slaughter.
But setting aside the sublime, Khy Sovanratana acknowledged that believers should not be blind to the dangers of this tradition. “There’s no point if you don’t get benefits but instead catch a virus,” he counseled. “Monks should be given this kind of awareness and pass it on to devotees when preaching.”
That’s a tall order in Cambodia, where this tradition is intertwined not only with religion but national identity. The king himself frees doves, pigeons, and other wildfowl about four times a month—in especially generous numbers to mark royal birthdays—and this has complicated efforts to regulate the practice. Its adherents rarely
