We ate a lot of street food in Sanya. Aside from the barbecued tarantulas and crickets in Thailand, I generally enjoy a place’s local street food. For the first few months after I got to China more than three years ago I hesitated before the karts and kiosks that the locals gathered around for their lunch and dinners-on-the-go, afraid to accidentally ingest something that’d anchor me to the toilet hours later. I passed them up until the weather turned cold. For some reason, my strange logic theorized that the meat would remain edible longer in the winters. Forget for the moment that the meat eaten in the chilly evening hours was the same meat getting insufficiently baked by the sun during the afternoons–I sure did.

Regardless, once I began eating I only rarely had occasion to hover around the toilet.

Being right next to the water, Dalian has a ton of aquatically inspired street food, and so did Sanya. I personally don’t like it, but I’ve eaten it enough, I suppose. I’ve always liked shrimp and fish, but if you’ve had either the Chinese way, you’d understand why I don’t often get it here. Eyes, head, skin, legs…all still there. I get the need for balance with nature, existing in it without messing with it–fengshui, and all–but I don’t need to stare my meal in the eyes to feel that I’ve communed with Mother Earth in a meaningful way, thanks.

It was in Sanya, though, that I nearly had a panic attack watching a shrimp fight for it’s freedom. And not only one shrimp, but also a crab that crawled off the kart and tried to scuttle away, and a fish that leapt from the holding box and onto the cement ground in an effort to escape. It was that shrimp, frantically flicking itself across the kart top, popping from one tray to the next, skipping over the clams, black-eyed fish, and others of its own kind, that bothered me the most.

I stood there, next to this round Russian guy with a thick beard, and stared at the shrimp while I waited for my barbecued chicken, lamb, bread and veggies to finish cooking. Watching the thing curl it’s body up and, with a lightning fast jolt of its tail, shoot across the tray, I couldn’t help feel a strange sort of empathy.

That sounded absurd to me in that moment, too, but then again, as it continued to struggle against the confines of those tin trays, I kept feeling that I could empathize with it. I began to imagine what it would feel like to physically fight to free myself from a cell, to use every ounce of energy to escape, just to find I’d landed in another cell full of others like me, all dead, to see my immediate future all around me and to see the edge of the cells, the boundary that would grant me freedom, but to find out, upon finally reaching and surpassing that border that I thought separated life and death, that a sharp fall launching me into darkness and, eventually, my own tragic end was the only future I had, that scared the shit out of me.

Then the woman handed me the plastic bag with our food in it, and I left the shrimp to its fate.