Two-Headed Women and Taiwanese Cockfights: The Weirdest Things Still Happening in Asia

Image via Complex Original

The two places I miss the most, and really regret leaving, are the rural Chinese taxidermy school that we lived at for a few weeks—it makes up the longest chapter in the book—and Ramachandraiah's. Ramachandraiah's about 80 years old now and runs a sidewalk print shop in southern India. All the rundown movie theaters in town hire him to print cut-rate posters for the movies they show. Tintin dubbed into Hindi, Harry Potter, Tamil and Kannada movies. But instead of using the original art, his team spends days carefully re-drawing the posters, and then printing them on a 1901 lithograph machine. I have a bunch of these as spreads in the book—they were far too special to leave out. But I really do miss our afternoon teas together, talking about Dr. Rajkumar and poring over a Kannada-English dictionary trying to collaboratively translate movie titles. A tear is actually coming to my eye, thinking about that...

Medical museums. From the mummified serial killers shoved in IKEA cabinets in Bangkok to Dr. Shankar's incredible collection of brains in Bangalore, the medical museums across Asia are some of the most wonderful in the world. But avoid the rural Chinese freak shows. Whatever you do, avoid those.

Rajinikanth would destroy Chuck Norris. That's number one. The second is that the Korean War never actually ended. It's still going on. Little known fact in America, but there are entire museums devoted to the subject across China and North Korea. Often called Museum of the War to Resist US Imperial Aggression, they're amazing creations, filled with examples of bombs stuffed with germ-infected American insects, stretches of captured American flags and arms, and these incredible paintings of pallid, almost green-hued, American deserters and surrendering POWs. Of course, it's strange to visit as an American. In a Chinese museum, I was pushed around by some other visitors. In a North Korean museum, the tour guide kept using the term American Imperialist Bastard. But it was in one of these museums that I met Mr. Li, an English teacher from a large Chinese city who'd never met a foreigner before. He wept, he was so excited. That made it worth the awkwardness.

Yep, the Siberian Tiger Camp, where you could buy livestock to hand-feed to starving tigers. At the entrance, a menu offers up strips of beef (a buck fifty), sheep (ninety dollars each), cows (almost two hundred dollars), anything you wanted really. It's close to the Russian border, in freezing north-eastern China. Old women walk through the park, pushing dim sum carts filled with live squawking chickens, and children can buy them for just a few bucks each, hold them over a fence, and let tigers grab them from their hands. It was stomach-churning, as well as terrifying. Of course I bought one. My girlfriend, now wife, almost left me that day. But somehow I talked my way out of that situation.

Laotian mahout school. Do I really need to say more than those three words? It was a ramshackle operation, where tourists could stop and ride flea-covered elephants through a mine-filled jungle for an hour. Rather than duck our heads in, we stayed for a week, training to become licensed elephant trainers. Within a day, my legs were bleeding with swollen flea-bites. We'd bathe the elephants in a rock-mining operation. But it was the German tourist that nearly took my life. I was perched on the neck of Boonsu, a 50-year-old, 10-foot-tall, steed, with a round German tourist riding passenger behind me. At some point, the woman stood up. Was she taking a grand photo, or was she panicking? I'll never know. All I do know is she lost her balance, and plummeted from the top of the elephant. As she fell, she grabbed the first thing she could reach: the back of my shirt. I'm sure a lean, taut, muscular Laotian mahout would have reacted in a flash. But at this ramshackle Laotian tourist camp, I let her grab me, drag me off my perch around the elephant's neck, and pull me ten feet into a terrible pile of elephant shit. She refused to pay for her ride, and I was fired from my job as an elephant guide.

So many, but my favorite would have to be the story of Prince Zhong'er. In Chinese, the entire tale can be condensed to four powerful characters: 割股奉君. But in English, it's a little strange. Hiding in the mountains, this exiled prince was starving. Sure, there were roots, and vegetables, but there was no meat! And the prince loved his meat. One thing led to another, a push eventually came to a shove, and somehow Zhong'er convinced his favorite, most loyal servant to carve the flesh from the servant's own leg. And Zhong'er finally feasted. "Cutting flesh from the thigh to feed the emperor," the story goes. Years later the prince came back for more... and this time wanted that flesh cooked. There's also that amazing old Chinese book, Outlaws of the Marsh, which is filled with enough shitting, farting, fighting, fucking and pube-filled dumplings to make Chaucer blush. But it's on the mandatory reading list for every Chinese kid, along with the gruesome classic kids' comic, Sanmao. I couldn't recommend either of those more.

The Butterfly Kingdom outside Kunming, in southern China. Sounds innocent, right? It isn't. After all the butterflies died a few years back, the owner replaced them with a hundred all-singing and all-dancing dwarfs. Everyone who works there now has to be under 4'3" tall, and the park is packed with visitors. It sounds terrible, but then you talk to the employees who, over and over, tell you the same story. For that story, you should visit the website!

Ha! I actually steered as far from the sex tourism circuit as I could. It wasn't always easy—I found myself furiously whipped in a Tokyo bar—and I dip into some of these scenes in the book. The strangest might not have been a sex fetish, but as a Jewish kid from Kentucky, it was for me: the South Korean nazi scene, where attractive kids spend their weekends hanging out in full SS regalia. There are a bunch of photos in the book, and more on the website. Weird, hot, and really, very creepy. Not necessarily in that order.

A black magic Hindu graveyard in southern India. It was filled with these incredible rat caves, curses pinned to trees, and emaciated stray dogs. But then I stepped on a bone. I assumed it was a cow's leg, at first, and walked on through the gravestones. And then I stepped on a skullcap, and there was no mistaking where that came from. This graveyard was filled with human bones. It didn't make it into the book—there was too much to include! Frankly, before visiting the graveyard I didn't even know Hindus were buried, but this was just weird. But I suspect when you said "dirty," you actually meant "sex."

AIDS Soup, with Sheep Placenta. It was the hot dish at an obscure chain of Yunnanese restaurants, where you'd drop plump slices of placenta into a bubbling broth to build up your immune system. No idea what diseased it really fends off -- but it tastes sooo damn good. That's in the book, of course, along with fried bugs and sea cucumbers (which aren't cucumbers) and a bowl of dongs -- the dog's baculum sticking out like a culinary erection. Those are all pretty weird things. The weirdest meal, though, was the dog we ate while living at a small village taxidermy school in China. It wasn't just any dog, though. This was a two-week course for the country's top taxidermists, and our first class project was to stuff the old family dog. We spent one day skinning her, and then over beers passed around a bowl of her sautéed flesh, while the taxidermy professor told heartwarming anecdotes about her. He told us how smart she was, he told us how she barked, how she knew how rich people were -- all of this while we took turns dipping her in bowls of salt and pepper. Ultimately, it might be considered a rather holistic experience. But we had to be mighty drunk to experience it.