Demon Fish (16 page)

Cheung, the Hong Kong fisheries official, doesn’t buy all of that. He just knows that if his son had a wedding banquet, his parents would lecture him about serving shark’s fin soup in order to preserve his family’s good reputation. “It’s some sort of showing of respect for the guests, not because it’s good for your health,” he says. “This is a tradition for maybe several hundred years.”

Giam Choo Hoo, a Singapore-based representative of the shark fin industry, can tell you exactly how far back the shark’s fin soup sipping tradition dates. It came to be considered a delicacy during the Sung Dynasty, which lasted from 960 to 1279, and it became an integral part of formal banquets during the Ming Dynasty in the fifteenth century. During that time, he says, a Chinese admiral named Cheng Ho journeyed to Africa with his fleet, and after seeing villagers discard the fins in favor of the meat, they came back with sharks as part of their bounty. But since Chinese fishermen were mainly focused on the meat, Giam says, people faced a quandary. “They thought, how are we going to use all of that?” The answer, of course, was shark’s fin soup. Six centuries ago the world dismissed fins as worthless and tossed them aside; now it’s the shark’s body fishermen throw overboard while preserving its fins to generate cash.

As Giam explains this to me, I am surrounded by the shark fin trade heavyweights of Hong Kong. Lim, the secretary of Hong Kong’s Sharkfin and Marine Products Association, has convened a special meeting in his organization’s conference room for my benefit, so he and his colleagues can explain what exactly they do for a living. Giam has come in from Singapore; C. P. Mak—an elderly, balding gentleman with enormous, bushy white eyebrows whom everyone refers to as “the godfather of shark fins”—has come over from the street stall he still operates. Yip Chiu Sung, the association’s heavyset vice chairman who heads its shark fin and sea cucumber team, in addition to running his own business, is there, as is the group’s chairman, Chiu Ching Cheung. In the middle of the conference table there’s a small plastic shark with gigantic white teeth encased in plastic, which strikes me as sort of endearing.

With me are two local university students I’ve brought along to translate. They represent the small but fervent pro-shark lobby in Hong Kong. Allen To and Shadow Sin, along with Vivian Lam, another graduate student, have begun to advocate for sharks within both academia and their own social circles, a sort of emerging rebellion against this long-held tradition. Once we leave the meeting with the fin traders, they explain how they are trying to shift public attitudes toward sharks.

Lam is a bubbly, brilliant researcher who studies marine science at the University of Hong Kong. A native Hong Konger, she is as devoted to her family and her puppy as she is to environmental conservation. This sparks conflict at home on occasion, like when she questions whether her father—who imports lumber from Thailand—is supporting illegal logging. (Under her prodding, Lam’s father now adheres to a set of sustainable forestry practices.) Few moments have been as tense, however, as when Lam tried to resist eating shark’s fin soup at a cousin’s wedding in June 1999. Sitting with her family in Hong Kong’s Convention and Exhibition Centre, surrounded by hundreds of guests, Lam whispered to her grandmother once the waiters whisked off the silver domes covering the bowls and set them down on the table. “I don’t want to eat shark’s fin soup anymore,” she confided. “Can you eat it for me?”

Her grandmother was unrelenting. “You silly girl,” she lectured Lam. “This is such a good shark’s fin soup we have. It’s already made. People will think you’re ungrateful.”

Lam gave in that day. But now that she’s in her twenties, she, along with several of her friends, no longer eats shark’s fin soup. The most environmentally conscious students at the University of Hong Kong now manage to reserve one or two “green tables” at their weddings where shark’s fin soup isn’t served: in fact, the university itself has adopted an anti-shark’s-fin-soup policy. Tsui Lap Chee, the university’s vice-chancellor, no longer lets professors or administrative officials expense shark’s fin soup on their business meals. (Some university employees still try to skirt the rules, despite the vice-chancellor’s best efforts.)

The attempt to make shark’s fin soup socially unacceptable has moved in fits and starts. In March 2008, Delta Air Lines served “braised shark’s fin soup with cucumber and fish maw” at its welcoming dinner celebrating the carrier’s inaugural nonstop flight between Atlanta and Shanghai.
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Other U.S. companies, however, have reversed course when it comes to serving the dish. When Disneyland opened for business in Hong Kong in 2005, the company declared it would serve shark’s fin soup to its customers. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society launched an all-out PR offensive against Disney, distributing T-shirts that depicted Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck holding knives over sharks that had been finned. At first, Hong Kong Disneyland defended the practice, saying the theme park was simply trying to respect Chinese cultural values and would not use fins from the three internationally protected sharks—basking, whale, and great white—in their soup. But ultimately Disneyland backed down and took the dish off the menu. Irene Chan, Hong Kong Disneyland’s vice president for public affairs, declared in the summer of 2005, “After careful consideration and a thorough review process, we were not able to identify an environmentally sustainable fishing source, leaving us no alternative except to remove shark’s fin soup from our wedding banquet menu.” Another Hong Kong theme park has gone further, turning its refusal to sell shark’s fin soup into a marketing ploy. James Fin H20 is one of the main theme characters at Ocean Park, which provides both amusement rides and a marine conservation message for its customers. And more than fifty companies and institutions operating in Hong Kong have now signed the World Wildlife Fund’s pledge to neither buy nor sell the soup as part of their corporate activities, a coalition that includes Swiss Re and the University of Hong Kong as well as Pure Yoga and Mandarin Orange clothing.

A parade of Chinese celebrities have decried shark’s fin soup, including Yao Ming, the NBA star who once played for the Shanghai Sharks, and the pop music idol Liu Huan, who have pledged not to eat it.
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The Singapore Chefs Association took the dish off the menu for its 2009 annual dinner, a major break with tradition.
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And in some Asian cultures the delicacy has come to symbolize the excesses of the idle rich: Japan’s Princess Masako, married to Crown Prince Naruhito, came under fire after a series of lavish meals, including “shark fin soup at a top Chinese restaurant.”
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Hong Kong restaurateurs know local popular sentiment about sharks is shifting, but they’re not worried. While shark’s fin soup consumption is waning in Hong Kong, Norman Ho explains, this decline is more than outpaced by the surging demand from mainland China. “China is at the beginning of the cycle,” he explains. “In China the market for shark fin is growing as they are getting more and more rich.”

There was a time when shark’s fin soup was frowned upon in China: when Mao Tse-tung held power, such status symbols were seen as conveying undesirable class distinctions. Now that’s the entire point. Poon Kuen Fai, a third-generation dried-seafood importer, sees this as part of a generational and economic shift. Poon, who was educated abroad and goes by the name Richard, runs one of Hong Kong’s most prestigious stores in Sheung Wan, On Kee Dry Seafood. The store boasts a dizzying number of Chinese delicacies, including abalone, sea cucumber, and fish swim bladders, and its shark section is equally impressive: frozen shark with cartilage, dried fins, and instant shark’s fin soup with bamboo fungi or chicken, your choice. Hong Kong’s older generation viewed making shark’s fin soup as an integral part of family rituals, but this allure has faded over time, and customers are only comfortable purchasing premade versions at this point.

“For my grandfather’s and father’s generation, shark’s fin soup was quite popular,” Poon explains as we sit in his executive office, a small suite on the second floor of his building that is sheltered from the frenetic movement of employees running back and forth to serve the flood of customers. “The younger generation doesn’t know how to make the soup.”

As a result, Poon explains, in Hong Kong people only order or prepare shark’s fin soup for weddings or to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Rather than confine themselves to that market, shark fin sellers are marketing their product to suit mainland Chinese consumers. Some are even thinking of how “to farm the shark,” he adds, following the model of salmon and shrimp farms. “The importance is how to continue the business,” Poon says.

While shark farming seems improbable, given that these fish don’t naturally congregate, there’s no question that Hong Kong street vendors see mainland China as their customer base. Ming Li Hang has spent forty-five years of his life selling shark fins: on the afternoon that I pass by, he is patiently trimming fins as he sits on the street in front of his store. Ming has no interest in speaking to me, since he is hard at work. But his sister-in-law, a chatty woman who goes by the Anglicized name of Betty Cheung, is more than happy to discuss the details of their trade. The Hong Kong market is almost irrelevant to the family business. As Cheung observes, “In Hong Kong, nobody cooks at home.” Instead, she estimates, they sell 80 percent of their fins to China (ironically, this entails having the fins undergo the circuitous route of traveling from Hong Kong to mainland China, back to Hong Kong, and then back to mainland China, but no one seems bothered by this) and 20 percent to a single Chinese restaurant in Canada. Chinese hotel operators sometimes come directly to the store to buy fins, Cheung says, along with tourists “coming down from mainland China to buy fins because the people in China are rich now.” Business has never been better.

“We’re selling more; the price is higher than before,” Cheung says, smiling. While there are fewer fins available now, Cheung and most of the other shark fin vendors don’t see this as a problem. “If you’ve got less, it’s more expensive. People will still buy it.”

This is one of the sad ironies of fishing economics: scarcity only accelerates the animals’ demise. As a species becomes overexploited, the price shoots up, and the most rational thing to do is to continue fishing it in order to collect it before someone else does. The race only ends when the species in question becomes so scarce it’s no longer worth pursuing, and at that point it’s doomed. This is especially true when it comes to sharks because they—by definition—connote status, so an elevated price is not a barrier to sales.

Lin Ying Jui, another friendly shark fin seller in Sai Ying Poon, calls the shark fins in her shop “a luxury product,” just like the swift birds’ nests she and her husband sell. “If you’re rich enough, you can afford it, if not, so be it,” Lin says, adding that if sharks disappear from the sea altogether, “There’s nothing we can do about it. We have to accept it.”

Shark fin dealers feel embattled nowadays, and they point fingers at an array of people they see as the most hypocritical players in the conservation debate: Europeans who eat shark as part of their fish-and-chips habit, self-righteous Americans, and whiny environmentalists. Lim points out that Mexicans like to eat shark meat, for example, but no one blames Mexicans for the worldwide decline of sharks. And on a certain level, the Europeans bear responsibility as shark consumers and shark hunters.

Europeans like eating shark both as an elegant entrée and as the more plebeian offering of fish and chips; while you might not see the words “spiny dogfish” on a menu, it might be there nonetheless. According to the environmental group TRAFFIC, it will just be labeled “rock salmon” in Britain,
saumonette
in France, or
Schillerlocke
and
Seeaal
in Germany instead.
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As Europeans have sought out the nearby fish that could meet their demand, the northeast Atlantic spurdog population—a European name for spiny dogfish, or
Squalus acanthias
—has dropped by 95 percent. Quite simply, they took as many sharks as they could off their shores until there weren’t any left to catch, and then they began to look elsewhere. At this point the German fishing fleet catches 750 tons of shark annually, but the country imports another 14,000 tons each year to satisfy domestic demand. The German Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture, and Consumer Protection tested an array of shark meat in February 2008 and reported that more than a fourth of the samples contained concentrations of the neurotoxin methyl mercury that violated both European and American health guidelines, but this has not hurt sales there.

But these nuances are lost on the traders’ critics, Giam says. From activists to young people who are unwilling to work, he chimes in, “the whole world has been blaming the shark fins.”

Yip, a man in his late sixties who heads the Dry Marine Product Trading Company, talks about his industry the same way an American farmer or fisherman might, as if he’s the last generation who’s willing to stick it out for the sake of the family business.

“The business is going down,” Yip complains. “Nowadays, young people are not willing to work in this industry. Especially for the younger generation, they don’t want to become fishermen. They want a more comfortable job. The smart guys, the professional guys, they run away from the business. Many young people are going out to work, maybe in IT, and make more money.”

“Nobody wants to teach their son to do this business,” Lim chimes in. “Nobody wants to get up at 6:30 in the morning to do work.”

Nonetheless, these men are enormously invested in seeing their line of business survive. In Yip’s eyes, Westerners simply fail to grasp the role shark’s fin soup plays in Chinese culture. At the start of the interview, Yip spoke only in Cantonese, but as he and the other shark fin traders begin to question my assistants’ translation skills, Yip decides to switch into English. “It’s a misunderstanding of a Hong Kong tradition,” he says. “They are very eco, Americans. Sometimes there’s self-exaggerating Americans. I don’t like them, strictly to the point.”