Shocked and Disgusted- Seriously, Don't Read This

4/2

As I may have said before, I'm not easily impressed.  The flip side of this is that I'm also not easily shocked, but today I saw something that really did shock me and almost made me throw up.

I'm staying one extra day in Siem Reap to get caught up on some writing and do some planning and errands.  I dropped off my laundry ($3 at $1/kilo), arranged a massage for tonight by Souk and went to the Old Market to get something to eat and buy a bus ticket  I was slowly looking around, found a place with noodles that looked good, ate some with a fried egg on top for $0.75 and started looking around at the other food, still a little bit hungry.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS A VERY GRAPHIC DEPICTION OF A FISH BEING KILLED QUITE GRUESOMELY.  READ AT YOUR OWN RISK WITH A PLASTIC BAG NEARBY.

Past the vegetables, rice, cicadas and grasshoppers (?) available for sale by the kilo, were the stalls either built into the market walls or set up on the long metal cafeteria-style table.  Filled with chickens, live crabs, giant prawns, fish and women shelling thumbnail sized shrimp, it was interesting to look at, but I'd seen those all when I'd been there the day before.

What I hadn't seen before was the people with stalls set up on the ground.  Their food was kept in, and separated by, large metal sheets, the kind you'd find in an industrial kitchen.  Only one woman here, in between two other women selling vegetables, sold fish.  Nothing extraordinary about that until I noticed that they were still alive.  I don't know how, since there didn't seem to be any bucket nearby that they could have just been dumped from, nor were they in water, but somehow they were definitely still breathing.  You could watch their gills flare out and in as they gasped for water but remained dry.

One brave fish attempted escape and flopped about 10 inches into the air and over into the green leaves of a vegetable sellers tray.  Unfortunately for the fish, the woman just picked up its squirming body and threw it back into the sheet with the rest of the writhing black fish.

A shopper came up and must have asked for a fish just as I was passing by and I saw the fishmonger grab one at random.  It was also still wriggling but she held it tightly in her left hand, obviously practiced.  She then quickly brought the flat side of a small meat cleaver down hard on the fish's head with a dull "Thwack."  A second later, she did it again.  "Thwack."

It convulsed as if having a seizure with larger twitches.  Back and forth it vibrated rapidly for several seconds.  This wasn't the flopping of a fish out of water but something far worse and just so obviously unnatural.

I could not look away.  I'd always thought that was a silly phrase, cliched and overused, especially accompanied by the words car crash or train wreck.  I don't know that I've ever seen a train wreck, but I've seen crashes and have always been able to look away easily if I wanted to.  With this fish, I could not stand to watch but I'd simply lost the ability to move any part of my body.  It was horrifying.  Just writing about it makes me feel nauseous all over again.

This part was the worst, though it was over after about 3-5 seconds; as soon as the woman held the fish up at an angle and used the blade to cut halfway into its head behind its cheek, it stopped moving.  Hopefully it was fully dead as the woman cut into it's head on the other side, a bit of bright red blood contrasting with the bright white meat of its muscles, and began to descale its carcass.

Finally I could go, which was fortunate as I was worried I was going to throw up.  As I got out of the market into the street I felt a bit better, though my appetite was gone and my stomach continued to feel slightly strange for hours.  Then I began to wonder why it had bothered me as much as it did.  It was certainly disgusting but I'd seen gross things before, including animals killed in front of me.  I decided that this had upset me so much because it was so unnatural and made so little sense.  Why hadn't the fish all died out of water?  Why couldn't she have just chopped the head off in one go?  And why, why, why did it have to quiver like that- that was truly creepy.

Okay, though, enough of that, I'm off to my massage.