Dear Vicky: Ignorance Is A Virtue

Here’s a Vicky photo to start off today’s post.

Here’s a story that’s been bugging me for a few years. During the pandemic, the promenade on Hong Kong Island became a part of my daily routine. It was my running route, and I took long walks almost every day. It helped me stay active and sane. I did a virtual half marathon along the promenade in 2021.

Walking around long enough I noticed something funny. Maybe funny is not the right word. Local Buddhists often gathered by the harbour and dumping seafood into it. I think it was part of the Buddhist teaching that releasing animals in captivity back into their natural habitat will redeem your sins, or something along those lines. So these true believers would come together, pool their money, buy wholesale seafood, and dump their purchase into a busy waterway where hundreds if not thousands of ferries and cargo ships come and go every day. When I say wholesale seafood, I mean it. Once I saw a truck bearing the name of a seafood vendor from a nearby market park next to these good people as they dump all types of live seafood into the water, octopuses, fish, crabs, prawns, you name it. One plastic bowl at a time. I was screaming in my brain at these lunatics: “What the fuck are you doing?”

I’m no marine biologist, but even I know these poor creatures won’t survive since they are mostly from the deep sea and not from a shallow and polluted harbour. And another thing I’ve learned while hiking with a wiser man is you should not introduce foreign species into an environment. It’s gonna wreak havoc and damage the biodiversity in the system. And these Buddhist fanatics thought they were doing a good deed. Ignoramuses! I hope they don’t believe in hell.

End of my rant. Some photos of these Bodhisattvas in action.

They’d always start with reading some scripture before murdering the seafood. You can see the foam boxes and the buckets there.

And then the killing commences! One bowl at a time. This was a different event from the previous photo.

A funny coda to this story is-maybe I am making this part up- this next photo.

One day, I saw this fisher catch a big crab. Again, I’m not playing expert here, but I don’t think the Vicky waterway is the natural habitat of this type of crab. I’m guessing his catch was from one of the Buddhists’ dumps. Just a guess. It’s a weird story, so why not?