Demon Fish (15 page)

As overfishing depleted Hong Kong’s local shark populations, its fishery went bust in the 1980s. But that only marked the beginning of the ascent of Hong Kong’s shark fin market. The island’s unique status in China made it the perfect place to traffic in shark fins. Under “one country, two systems,” which governs China’s relationship with Hong Kong, the former British colony is allowed to continue its particular brand of capitalism: bringing things in and shipping them out without imposing heavy tariffs.

If anyone is in charge of the shark fins coming into and out of Hong Kong, it’s Cheung Chi-sun, who serves as senior endangered species protection officer for Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries, and Conservation Department. Cheung is an elegant, kindly bureaucrat who has worked in the department for more than two decades. He attends international conferences like the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which is held every three years, and he compiles plenty of statistics about the comings and goings of shark fins in his corner of the world. But he doesn’t do much about it: his agency simply charges an administrative fee that amounts to about eighty cents per shipment of fins.

“In general, there’s no control,” Cheung explains to me as we sit in his cramped government office. “It all depends on how you see these kinds of things. Some people will say all things should be protected, and the government should regulate these things. On the other side, there is the argument for free trade.”

Cheung and the Hong Kong government side with the free traders. “Fisheries in Hong Kong is not an important business,” he continues. “Hong Kong is basically a very commercial, or financial, city.” And when it comes to preserving sharks, he adds, “it’s not a single country’s responsibility; it’s a global responsibility.”

All the same, Cheung sees the identical numbers that Shelley Clarke does, and as he nears retirement, he’s beginning to wonder if the boxes of fins moving through Hong Kong indicate a problem. Cheung envisions a world of “sustainable trade,” where the sharks that fishermen take out of the sea each year are replaced through natural births. Whether that’s happening, he says, “we really don’t know. I must admit the volume of trade is really alarming … For thousands of years people are using natural resources for human benefit. The problem is people are using too much, so there may not be enough for the next generation.”

While Cheung and others envision a world in which a moderate, regulated shark trade could thrive, this is an illusion. With a handful of possible exceptions, sharks cannot be harvested sustainably because they cannot reproduce rapidly enough to offset these human-induced losses. A sustainable shark fishery is as unrealistic as reasonable bald eagle hunting.

Several decades ago the world made a decision it was no longer acceptable to hunt whales, and in 1986 the international whaling moratorium took effect. Three countries have defied the ban over the years—Japan, Norway, and Iceland—along with a handful of aboriginal groups who were exempted from the moratorium at the outset. In each case, these societies argue whaling represents such a strong cultural tradition they should not have to abandon it altogether. The same arguments can be applied to sharks, of course. But for the most part the international community has rejected this line of reasoning, concluding that there are some marine animal populations that humanity has depleted to such an extent that they need extraordinary new protections if they are to survive. It is hard to make these policy decisions when the answer involves absolutes and there is no obvious compromise. But in certain instances, science gives us no other alternatives.

On a hot, humid evening in July, my friend Candice To and I make our way down Hong Kong’s Hennessy Road to grab a bite to eat. Candice and I are searching for seafood, and we find it in Tanyoto restaurant, an impressive-looking, multistoried establishment that overlooks the busy thoroughfare.

While different parts of sharks’ bodies can serve different purposes, depending on cultures and regions of the world, shark fin has just one purpose: to make soup. Since so much of sharks’ current predicament stems from the rising demand for shark’s fin soup, I want to taste it for myself, and this seems like as good a place as any. The dining room is draped in sparkling white Christmas lights, and the wait-staff displays the kind of intense efficiency I’ve come to associate with Hong Kong. Our server sports a black suit and has an elaborate piece of technology firmly attached to his ear, reminiscent of what a Secret Service agent would wear.

While I had heard of shark’s fin soup costing enormous sums—$100 or more for a bowl that serves four people—Tanyoto’s version seems like a bargain, at just $10 for a single serving. Within minutes our waiter brings a small, covered ceramic bowl to our table and sets it down, barking into his earpiece the entire time. He removes the cover with great fanfare, for my inspection. This is the famed
yu chi
, or fish wing, soup, which started in southern China but has now spread to every Asian outpost in the world.

I stare down at the concoction, which resembles a traditional noodle soup with seafood thrown in: a golden broth suspending items ranging from small prawns to unidentified circular objects. It looks perfectly attractive, but not extraordinary.

Candice dips her chopsticks into the bowl, digging for some elusive target. “Here it is, no, here, here I’ve found it,” she declares, capturing a tiny, gelatinous string that measures an inch at most.

“That’s shark fin?” I ask, incredulous. “You’re kidding me.”

“No, no, that’s it,” Candice replies.

I have found one of the primary sources of our global fishing frenzy. It is a translucent, tasteless bit of noodle, known in scientific terms as ceratotrichia, that fans out to support the fin in any given shark. This is the moment that I come face-to-face with shark’s fin soup’s amazing secret: it is one of the greatest scams of all time, an emblem of status whose most essential ingredient adds nothing of material value to the end product.

There are plenty of tasty but morally objectionable food items on the market: foie gras, which requires farmers to force-feed geese repeatedly; veal, which entails raising baby calves in cramped conditions before killing them; and fatty bluefin tuna, whose populations have been devastated in recent years as fishermen have sought to satisfy the upscale sushi market’s considerable demand. While critics can make a strong argument for why these practices should be abolished—cities like Chicago have even banned the sale of foie gras on the grounds that the process of making it is too cruel to be tolerated—even they would acknowledge this suffering yields a gastronomic payoff. This is not the case with shark fin, which could be replaced with a plain rice noodle at a moment’s notice.

This is the most stunning aspect of the entire economic empire that has arisen around shark’s fin soup: it is, to be blunt, a food product with no culinary value whatsoever. It is all symbol, no substance. Throughout my time in Hong Kong, I asked whether a noodle substitute, which could feature the same stringy texture and lack of taste, would succeed in the marketplace. No one, not even the most ardent environmental activists, seemed willing to entertain this idea. It would be deceptive, they reasoned, to coax consumers into eating a shark’s fin soup devoid of its central ingredient. Millions of people who scarf down California sushi rolls with fake crabmeat do not seem to have a problem with seafood-product substitution, but for some reason restaurateurs and conservationists alike are worried about asking shark’s fin soup eaters to make the same sort of swap. Since the central premise behind shark’s fin soup rests on the act of killing the shark itself, rather than the pleasure in eating it, there’s no way to save the animal and still preserve the value of its namesake dish.

The people who produce shark’s fin soup don’t pretend this ingredient adds anything substantive to their product. One afternoon I am lucky enough to get an exclusive crash course in the making of shark’s fin soup, and I can testify that shark fins are the least important part of the recipe.

Norman Ho is director of the Coral Seafood Restaurant on Des Voeux Road, in the heart of Hong Kong’s dried-seafood district. He’s an interior decorator by trade, having run a restaurant for two years in the late 1970s before switching over to decorating eating establishments full-time. In 2004 he took over the Coral Seafood Restaurant, a multistoried edifice he had once decorated.

Part of Ho’s business is shark’s fin soup. The restaurant’s mainstay is dim sum, which it serves every day. But the majority of the business’s income comes from the seafood and fish it serves, and shark’s fin soup alone makes up as much as 20 percent of the restaurant’s total take. During our talk Ho did some quick calculations in his head and realized that he serves 2,820 bowls a month of the stuff: a large bowl runs just under $80, with a small bowl costing a little more than $25. Ho is not particularly eager to peddle shark’s fin soup: it’s a hassle to make, and he says it’s not as big a profit maker as some might assume because it costs so much to prepare. “Being a seafood restaurant, we have to sell everything,” he explains. “It’s the customers’ request. If they have a wedding banquet, they order it. We don’t want to sell shark’s fin, but it’s the customers’ request.”

Ho’s problem is not that he’s worried about sharks—“You can take them for a long, long time,” he says—it’s the fact that making shark’s fin soup is an elaborate, costly process. He starts with the dried triangular fin that likely came into Hong Kong but was transported by barge on the Pearl River delta to Guangdong, China, where labor is cheaper and there are looser water pollution and sewage laws. It takes two to three days to process the fins, which are immersed in hot water before workers use a knife to remove the fin scales manually, along with the main bone. In the old days these fins would dry in the sun for a few days; now they’re shoved into an oven for a few hours. (Ho says he still prefers sun-dried fins: “I can tell whether a fin has been dried in an oven. It’s softer; a fin dried in sunlight will not bend.”) Some shark fins need to be plunged into hot water again for anywhere between three and eight hours after the oven treatment, while others do not. The cream-colored fins Ho imports resemble massive feathers or quills, with one very smooth side. They smell vaguely fishlike, but in a nonoffensive way, and the price they fetch varies based on what sort of fin they are. Pectoral fins produce the most membrane-like “needles,” as they’re called, while dorsal and triangular fins offer up a more modest yield, making them less valuable.

Once the fins arrive, Coral Seafood Restaurant workers put the fins in cold tap water for half a day to soften them and then transfer them to hot water with ginger and spring onions to boil them. At this point the shark fin and the needles will be tender, and kitchen workers will soak them in tap water for four more hours. The entire preparation amounts to a winnowing process, leaving an end product that is just 30 percent the weight of the original fin. At that point the fin and the needles can be boiled for six to eight hours with chicken stock and Chinese ham to produce shark’s fin soup’s base: cooks will throw in plenty of meat, ham, chicken, and pork to add flavor, because Ho knows the same thing I discovered during my shark’s fin soup tasting. “There’s no taste,” he says flatly. “All the taste comes from the soup. You have to put the shark fin and the soup together … To serve the shark’s fin soup is more or less status.” The power of shark’s fin soup to convey status on those who consume it is enormous, and it pervades Chinese society. A coterie of interests have helped cultivate the delicacy’s elevated status, from popular restaurants to wedding planners. While serving shark’s fin soup at nuptials has been a tradition for many years among elites, the Chinese bridal industry has turned it into an essential element of any middle-class wedding. As China’s economy expands, this means more and more wedding parties are putting it on the menu. Priscilla Chang, who works at Moon Love Wedding Planner & Production, makes sure that every one of her clients adds it to the list for their wedding day. “For people who attend the wedding, their friends and relatives, to judge whether the banquet is good, they’ll look at the fish and the shark fin,” Chang explains.

Most Hong Kong couples—and many mainland Chinese ones—buy set wedding packages, and it’s the quality of the shark’s fin soup, and the fish, that determines the price of the package. The soup alone accounts for 20 percent of the package price, Chang estimates. The soup even plays a key role in the banquet ritual itself: once it comes out and the couple has finished eating it, they have received their cue to visit each table and toast their guests. Everyone seems to acknowledge this: when I ask, through a translator, whether a young bride and her mother ever quarreled in her presence over the question of whether to serve shark’s fin soup, Chang seems surprised at the question. “Everybody wants fins,” she responds.

In the end, even a glamorous Western icon like the Four Seasons Hotel is no different from Coral Seafood Restaurant. From its perch on Finance Street, the Four Seasons Hotel has one of Hong Kong’s best views, with a massive glass front overlooking Victoria Harbor. The hotel offers two ballrooms and five private restaurant dining rooms for couples looking to get hitched, along with a secluded room in the destination spa so the bride can prepare for the big event.

Nicola Chilton-Matsukawa, the hotel’s spokeswoman, estimates the Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong averages two hundred weddings a year, and all of them feature shark’s fin soup. She looks a little pained when discussing the subject of shark fins, but hastens to emphasize that it’s simply part of doing business in town.

“Weddings are a big business for us. And shark fin is a traditional part of the Chinese wedding banquet,” she says. “It’s just part of their culture. You can’t not have it.”

While shark fin purveyors primarily rely on major celebratory events to move their product, they also try to offer a range of health reasons to boost sales on a more regular basis. Lim, the auctioneer, says it “increases the amount of collagen in your bones.” The owner of Yuen Fat Seafood Trading, Leung Cheong, whose store boasts an enormous four-foot-high ivory-colored fin wrapped with a red ribbon and encased in glass, says the fins “have anti-cancer properties, are for the kidney and for balancing the body.”