The photo above is meat curing – just down the street from our home.

“What should we eat?” I squeezed into a chair at the hole-in-the-wall restaurant and suggestions came from the group of friends. “Garlic cucumbers.” “Egg and tomato.” “Glass noodles.”

Our table was soon brightened with the green and orange of stir fried vegetables. We spun the lazy-susan and dipped in chopsticks to pull out morsels of food.

‘The meat is good,” someone said. I took a bite and agreed. The salty taste made me reach my chopsticks out for more.

“It’s hanging right behind you.” I couldn’t help but turn to face the rack of meat that I had been trying to ignore. Our table was tight in the corner and with the meat squeezed between us and the wall, I was nearly touching it. The end result tasted great but strips of raw meat didn’t make for nice air freshener, or decor.

It was evidence of Chinese New Year. Friends describe with enthusiasm the spread of dishes they enjoy on the eve of the new year. Nearly every dish features meat: stir fried, stewed, or cured.

This wouldn’t happen without what I’ll call Butcher the Pig Day. On the 26^th day of the last lunar month all farmers butcher the animal they fattened for the festivities. We haven’t participated in this day but both Brian and I have stories to tell. Brian visited friends whose village home is designed for practicality. They store farm tools just off the main room and their animals are only steps away. Brian tried to engage in conversation but the seat they led him to, in the main room, was surrounded by huge bowls of raw meat. He sat beside the meat for his entire visit. Later they showed him to the next room where, from a beam, the tongue hung.

Here It Is – The Tongue

While I expect farmers to butcher animals, I didn’t expect it in our building seventeen storeys tall. But the land on which it sits was, just a few years ago, farmland. Just as I seek opportunities for my kids to run the fields and hike the paths of my childhood, I see evidence of my neighbours, many of whom were farmers, keeping their rural experiences alive. It’s not uncommon to be awoken by a rooster in our city of millions. My kids enjoy telling of a neighbour’s chicken weaving through the bars of their apartment balcony.

While here it is not abnormal to bring live poultry home, even Chinese friends admit that what I heard was unusual. Oblivious to Butcher The Pig Day I prepared to go out for the afternoon. A moan penetrated the walls of my apartment. I ran out into the stairwell. “You ren ma?”  I called to see if anyone was there. Prepared to come to the aid of an injured child or an elderly person who had fallen down the stairs, I listened. No one.
I heard the sound again.

“Brian, I think someone is slaughtering animals in our building,” I said, after running back inside. “Big animals like pigs or goats.”

‘There’s no way.” But I couldn’t imagine what else made that excruciating sound.

I gathered my things and left Brian and the kids home. “You were right,” he said, when I returned. “For the past four hours I listened to the hack of a butcher’s knife.” And when our kids later walked the dog they saw a man outside with a blow torch burning the hair off a huge cut of meat.

This was a shock to Brian and I, who grew up watching our mothers buy meat on a styrofoam tray wrapped in Saran. But to our kids, who have seen this and more, Butcher The Pig Day was just another day in China.