pledge a toast or something, and something else, which I don’t remember. Do I need to mention we were drunk? Then you slam it. Being that a snake is a “cold-blooded” animal, I vaguely expected a chilled beverage. But it turns out a snake is a room-temperature animal. Which allows the full flavor to come through. You know the drill on exotic food. Cobra blood tastes like chicken . . . blood. Drinking cobra blood makes you . . . it’s very good for . . . gives you lots of . . . The explanation was in Chinese. And cobra gallbladder juices do whatever even more. We let the youngest guy drink this. He said it was okay, although he was awake all night chasing mice around his hotel room. But a more foreign foreignness lurks in Shanghai. There’s something, beyond a sip of snake squeezings, that’s alien and sinister about the place. For a very full city, the town is oddly empty. First you notice there aren’t any dogs. Then you notice there aren’t any cats. Then you notice there are hardly any pigeons. The protein is missing. The beggars are also missing. In days of walking around Shanghai, I encountered just two, and these of the most desperately legitimate type, one with no hands and the other a crippled dwarf. Hard to believe begging was eliminated among 17 million poor people by kind admonishment or polite request. Or that children were eliminated this way, either. Families dot the streets and parks, always in trio form. China’s One Child program has succeeded (though whether at greater social costs than the success of America’s One Parent program, I can’t say). The traffic jams seem normal for a moment. Modern cars look alike. But these modern cars look alike for the simple reason that they’re all the same. They’re all locally made Volkswagen Santanas, and all of them are painted half- gallon screw-top burgundy red. The city streets are full to the point of stasis, but the four-lane turnpikes coming in and out of town are deserted. And in the roadside plazas where other countries would have restaurants and gas stations, there are police checkpoints instead—arrest stops. The Chinese countryside is screwed on backward. It has vacant highways running through crowded agricultural fields. All the farmwork is being done by hand. The only tractor I saw was a rototiller thing being used in a flooded rice
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