Frogs at the wet market – By George Braine
When I lived in Hong Kong, I would drive to a nearby town to buy fish and prawns at the local wet market. Not the cleanest place, the market also sold live chicken, beef, pork, vegetables, and had stalls where one could have a quick bowl of warm noodles. Having been to enough filthy fish markets in Sri Lanka, the “wetness” of the Hong Kong market didn’t bother me at all. And I never saw any exotic meats for sale, as in the wet markets in Mainland China.
I would banter in rudimentary English with the fish monger, an attractive young woman. She (with raised eyebrows): “Holiday?”. Me: (throwing up my hands): “No, no. Lunch break.”
But, one day, I did witness an incident which made me pause. A man sat on a low stool, thrust his gloved hand into a sack, pulled out a live frog, and decapitated it with a chopper – a large, flat bladed knife. Without a trace of emotion or a pause, he would do this mechanically till the sack was emptied. The Chinese, like the French, ate frogs.
A few months later, an under-19 girls hockey team from Sri Lanka traveled to Hong Kong for a tournament. The manager of the team, a school principal from Kandy, was a friend, so I went to watch a game. Sri Lanka was playing Japan and the game went badly for the Sri Lankan girls from the start. No doubt the Japanese players were better, but the Sri Lankans were slow and seemed lifeless. They got thrashed.
Upon inquiring, I was told that, on a walkabout in Hong Kong, the Sri Lankans had wandered into a wet market, where they had seen frogs displayed for sale along with fish and meat. Horrified, the girls refused to eat any fish or meat. All they ate, for days, was dhal and rice.
So I went out and bought an armload of chocolates and gave them to the manager to be consumed by the players before their next game. What more could I do? But not sure if it worked.
