Free Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar by Matt McAllester Page B

and recycled back to the consumers.
    By then, however, the state had found other miscreants to punish. In March 2010, in a court in Beijing, the trial opened of Zhao Lianhai, an advertising executive and father of a Sanlu baby. Zhao was a prominent campaigner for justice for the Sanlu victims and their parents. He had been demanding a level of compensation that would allow parents to pay for the continuing medical treatment their chronically sick children required. His actions had marked him out from the many parents who had been bribed or intimidated into silence. As his trial opened, Zhao had been languishing in detention for five months. Now he was facing charges of “chanting slogans and holding illegal gatherings” as well as “provoking many people to cause trouble,” crimes against the harmony of the People’s Republic that carry a five-year prison sentence. The trial closed again after a few hours. After keeping him a further eight months in detention, the court finally handed down its verdict. Mr. Zhao was sentenced to two years in prison for “inciting social disorder.”

~ PART TWO ~
INSISTENT HOSTS

HOW HARRY LOST HIS EAR
~ NORTHERN IRELAND ~
    SCOTT ANDERSON
    â€œYOU’RE DOING WHAT?” MY GIRLFRIEND OF THE TIME ASKED.
    I raised the beer bottle to my lips, took a good pull. “Training.”
    â€œReally? It looks to me like you’re just drinking.”
    I finished off the bottle, moved it across the table to join the other empties, shook my head. “No. I’m drinking a lot faster than I normally do, and a lot more. That’s why it’s called training.”
    I didn’t really expect her to understand; she wasn’t a journalist.
    Before embarking on a story, a journalist needs to prepare. That might mean reading background information, arranging interviews, whatever. If going to a war zone, it might also mean lining up a fixer, a translator, borrowing a buddy’s flak jacket. To get ready for Belfast, which is where I was headed that summer of 1993, my preparations were a good deal simpler, if more physically taxing: to get my beer-drinking abilities up to a level where I could stay even with the Andytown Lads—which was another way of saying to a level that would cause the average person to curl up in a fetal position and wet himself.
    I’d first gone to Belfast in 1985 with my brother for part of an oral history we were compiling on different conflict zones around the world. From the outset, there was something about the place that fascinated me. Undoubtedlypart of it was that, being a culture very much like my own, Northern Ireland had none of the confusing exoticism of other war zones. Instead, it was like a little lab school for understanding how armed conflicts can start, how they can be perpetuated, the difficulty in ever bringing them to an end. Plus, it was a place where you had to work at getting hurt. Sure, as a visitor you stood the same random chance as the natives of being in the wrong place when a bomb went off, of being on the same sidewalk where gunmen were performing a drive-by shooting; but Belfast was never Baghdad or Beirut—hell, it was barely Detroit—and it wasn’t like anyone was going to deliberately target an American journalist. It was a way to study the inner workings of war with very little risk.
    After that first trip to Northern Ireland, I began going back for extended stays—a couple of months at a time, once for nearly four months—whenever my finances would allow. It wasn’t altogether clear what I was doing there. I had vague plans to maybe write a book about it one day, perhaps just a long magazine feature piece, but my ongoing lack of productivity, the absence of anything appearing under my byline back in the States that might piss people off, had the pleasant effect of reassuring those who talked to me that I was harmless, innocuous.
    One person who appreciated my continued