Being Vegan in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand & China [純素的生活瑣事02]

hi I'm vegan and I have experience
living and working in Cambodia Laos Hong Kong Taiwan Thailand China Thailand and a few other places I get questions from time to time from other vegetarians and vegans asking what it's like to live in that part of the world some of them are asking because they're interested in what is it like to be vegan in a third-world tropical context some of them are asking more in terms of the cultural differences between countries maybe than rest in the Buddhist angle and some are asking because they're interested in terms of the the infamous brutality of a lot of these cultures in terms of how they treat animals I guess that's maybe an impression that's largely based on images that appear on television in the internet from you know the fur industry in China or um you know the fact that in Southeast Asia people eat dogs in addition to pigs and pythons and everything else so I'm gonna try to make a quick video that gives one answer for what's obviously a pretty diverse part of the world's map I really try not to say anything that other people have already said on the internet because I don't see the point of it for me personally honestly the single biggest difference between being in a decadent Western society and fingered in Southeast Asia was the presence of parasites parasitic infections bacterial infections and so on being carried in meat you know arguments about food safety seem very abstract when you're in a western country where maybe you're only pointing to some vague statistics but the number of sick days per year that meat eaters take vs. vegetarians or vegans when you're living in a context where people really get hospitalized with sort of terrifying bacteria and parasites and what-have-you many of which you know stick around with you for life for a very long-term implication you ask yourself how can people knowingly subject themselves to this and for no for no reward they don't get anything out of it but they can and the people around you will will answer that question for you they'll always be forthcoming with what their what their rationale is for why they disregard the harm they're doing to their own health and the harm they're doing to the animals and to the environment around them so if you're a vegan for ethical and ecological reasons you'll suddenly find yourself in Southeast Asia pleading with people people who your co-workers your friends what have you you'll find yourself trying to reason with people in a completely amoral way to get stop eating meat you know the ugliness and brutality of the meatpacking industry and the filth of what it is to have a diet that's based on eating rotting corpses that's fundamentally the same all over the world but it's true that in a tropical third-world context it's harder for people to kid themselves about it you don't have the veneer of um you know plastic and styrofoam and most of the time you don't have you know you just don't have walls built up that'll block your view from seeing what you're really eating where it comes from and how it died I guess that brings me to point to you know I personally when I was living and working in Southeast Asia I've seen all kinds of animals slaughtered in front of my eyes not just pigs and cows but wild animals endangered animals you know in the middle of a biological conservation area I saw them killing Pangolin to feed the tourists when you're in a part of the world that has no electricity or very little access to electricity then one of the reasons why people are so cruel to animals is that they tend to try to keep them alive right up until the time when they're gonna be eaten so you know you'll see while the animals being kind of bound and gagged and dragged along and terrible conditions so that there they are finally killed as close to the customer or as close to the plate as possible you know in general if you really see expose x' of how for example the fur industry works in Russia or Sweden it is every bit as brutal as it is in China or Southeast Asia I think that Western countries simply have a much greater ability to shield themselves from public view and again to to package these these things as products in a way that looks antiseptic and that you know the package doesn't in any way resemble the process that produced it living in that context you also become familiar with how powerful the human imagination is in deceiving itself people who do not want to see what's right in front of their eyes they won't see it and the same way that people can convince themselves that you know eating this stuff is good for their health when it isn't I mean I guess you know point three on my list here if I'm counting would be that the ecological impacts are also very visible if you have your eyes open you're willing to see it I remember you know living and working in a small village where there was one river one small trickle of a river where everybody washed their clothes and where the children went to play and where sometimes you know people went to bathe and that same river you know it had become overrun with cows cattle were provided by European charities as ways of trying to alleviate poverty in my biased opinion it only makes poverty worse and one of the ways it makes it worse is that those cows are then crowding around that River there pooing into that river they they defecate I mean we use this word in english runoff runoff runoff means sewage without a sewer and that's exactly what happens everything that comes out of the cow including when they slaughter the cows and then you have of course the blood and guts would have you pouring into that same small River so you know the scarcity of those resources and the ecologic Olympics and the human impacts it's very real some of it is hard to measure some of it's easy to measure but boy if you've got your eyes open you're willing to see it it's right there for you to see so I guess the the fourth and final point on my informal list here to keep things very brief we've people who ask about the cultural angle all the countries have mentioned they are third-world tropical countries but there are also countries that have buddhist heritage so it's very different to be vegetarian in cambodia than it would be to be vegetarian in indonesia indonesia as a majority Muslim country it also has a Buddhist history but it's Buddhist history was largely exterminated so very different from being a you know vegetarian and the Catholic countries of South America or what have you um I think some tourists show up expecting these Buddhist cultures to be vegan paradise if you look at the statistics and there are real statistics the hard statistics for how many tons of cattle gets slaughtered every year how many tons of pork produced and so on if you're willing to look at those statistics you will see that there is very little reality behind that hype on the one hand a country like Taiwan has a very vocal organized vegan minority on the other hand they have a voracious meat-eating majority and the amount of meat that gets imported and locally produced and consumed has only increased and increased same is true I mean for all the other Buddhist countries in terms of your daily life in dealing with the culture that echo of Buddhism I would say mostly as the potential increase conflict when you're in a country that has no kind of no connection to vegetarianism or veganism in its history if they just regard this as a foreign idea or a new idea then you don't have the same tension the same potential for conflict that comes out of the contrast between Buddhism's historical ideals and the rather depressing reality of what the UM the modern culture is like you'll often not be talking to people many many times heard oh yeah yeah you know I I had a grandfather who was vegetarian he was much more Buddhist now as oh yeah my grandmother more often what you'll encounter are people who have a vague cultural awareness that vegetarianism and non-violence were ideals that Buddhism was supposed to aspire to you know in the same way of course Buddhist cultures and historical reality all had slavery all had torture so meaning of not what's in these in these contacts is worth thinking about carefully many foreigners see as a conflict avoiding sight of East Asian culture really ends up escalating conflict because many of the people in the service industry will feel that they can lie to you in the same way that in Western culture a parent might lie to a child saying anything that's necessary just to get you to sit down just to get you to stay in your seat just to get you to get on the train whether or not it's the right train just to you know go through the motions of serving the meal getting you in and out of the store whatever the case might be and that's really a different attitude from trying to rip you off it's a different attitude from lying to you in a malicious sense but I mean you'll get to encounter again and again the sense of real surprise that it's a problem when the waiter brings you something that they promised you would be vegetarian and that actually has pieces of meat in it living in this kind of context you do have to ask yourself what attitude you're going to take how are you going to respond when someone you care about is hospitalized because they're eating meat what kind of attitude are you gonna take when for the tenth time the waiter brings you something that's not really vegetarian I remember I worked in one village where every day just one wooden cart would show up at the morning market with one slaughtered Pig you'd see the animals being killed but you'd also just see the filth of bloody corpse covered with flies that comes bouncing down the road in a wooden cart you know getting some dirt and dust on it getting rained on if it was raining and so on and you know the most lurid spectacle of all is not the killing of the pig and it's not the corpse in the cart the most terrible thing to behold are the excuses that people are making themselves we like to say in English that beauty is in the eye of the beholder we don't say as often that ugliness is in the eye of the beholder also human beings have a tremendous capacity to not see what's right in front of their faces when it suits their purpose they have the capacity to or diseases even when it's really harming people around them even when it's really resulting in deaths people that they know and you know they have that capacity to ignore the suffering of animals literally in their own backyard that human capacity for self-deception is really the most brutalizing spectacle of all