Xiaotao called the criminal investigation team immediately. Before the police arrived, she showed the shopkeeper her badge and demanded him to stop selling the buns immediately. He was startled and asked her what was wrong and whether some people had gotten food poisoning from his buns.

The customers who were lining up to buy the buns were confused and started to make a fuss demanding to know what was happening. I was about to explain to them, but Xiaotao stopped me. I then realized that telling the crowd the buns they’d been eating had human flesh in it might not be the best idea.

“I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” Xiaotao told them, “but we suspect that this man is related to a case we’re investigating.”

“But do you have to question him now?” argued one of the customers. “Can’t you let him sell the buns to us first?”

“Yeah!” echoed another. “And you must’ve got the wrong person anyway! Master Tang here would never break any laws!”

“He’s right! Just let Master Tang sell us the buns first!”

These people seemed obsessed with these buns. More and more people piped up and defended the shopkeeper. Xiaotao was at a loss and turned to me with pleading eyes.

“We suspect that the pigs used for the filling in these buns were infected with swine flu!” I shouted. “You shouldn’t eat these buns today, otherwise you’ll get infected too!”

The crowd’s mood changed when they heard this.

“Are you sure?”

“But I eat them every day and I never got sick!”

“Yeah, I’m sure it’s no big deal! Haven’t we been eating tons of chemicals and preservatives in food every day anyway? What’s so scary about swine flu?”

A number of them agreed with this sentiment. In fact, it had been the running joke on the internet that Chinese people couldn’t be poisoned due to the additives in the mass-produced food products sold in China. But that was just an urban myth, of course. The body’s intake of toxic substances would accumulate in the liver and kidneys and cause illnesses one way or another.

“Please, Officer,” pleaded the shopkeeper. “Don’t accuse me of such things! I get my meat from a legitimate source. There can’t be any problem with the pork! You’re ruining my small business here!”

Even though the customers were barred from buying the buns, they all remained there, crowding around the steam baskets, watching what was happening with fascination as if they were watching a live TV drama.

“I must trouble you to close the shop for now,” said Xiaotao. “We’ll wait for more police officers to arrive, then you can give the police your official statement.”

The shopkeeper heaved a long sigh, as if accepting his fate, and began to clean and pack his things up.

Then, I called Dali and asked him to bring me some of my equipment, just in case we find a dead body later when we search through this shop.

Once I hung up the phone, Xiaotao asked me, “Do you think the shopkeeper is guilty?”

I shook my head.

“Judging from his reactions,” I surmised, “he seems innocent. He might be hiding something from us, though. And there is another possibility.”

“What possibility?”

“That he is a psychopath who is not afraid of the police!”

“Hmm… he’s probably just innocent,” Xiaotao replied. “I’m not sure if we’re lucky or if our luck is in fact rotten. It’s supposed to be a day to relax, yet here we are stumbling upon another case. By the way, are you one hundred percent sure the meat is human flesh?”

“Absolutely!” I insisted. “If you have any doubts, you should ask the forensics team to do DNA testing.”

“We’ll do that, of course. It’s only proper protocol. Anyway, this reminds me of that case in Macau many years ago.”

I knew exactly which case she was talking about. There was an infamous mass murder case that occurred in a restaurant in Macau in the eighties, also known as the Eight Immortals Restaurant Murders[1]. It was a huge sensation in the news for a while back then. It was rumored that the murderer killed a family of ten in a restaurant, then dismembered their bodies and turned their flesh into the filling of barbecued pork buns.

The case was later adapted into a movie called The Untold Story[2] starring Anthony Wong. I saw it at the cinema when I was still in elementary school. The public reaction to the movie was wild—it caused the business of bun shops to dwindle for months after the screening. Under the protest of restaurant and bun shop proprietors, the movie was then discontinued from being screened in cinemas.

“God, to think that I was chewing human flesh just a while ago!” Xiaotao remarked, her face all scrunched up in disgust. “But I guess the silver lining is that I’ll lose my appetite for a while and shed a few pounds because of it.”

“But you’re not fat!” I said.

“How would you know? Have you touched my body before?”

Color rose to my cheeks immediately, and I just stood there speechlessly.

After a while, several police cars drove in and the officers came to remove the onlookers away from the shop and set up a police line. Xiaozhou of the forensics team saw us and joked, “Wow, you look pretty today Xiaotao! Are you guys on a date?”

“N-No!”

“None of your business!”

Our different reactions illustrated our different personalities perfectly. Xiaozhou sensed the awkwardness and changed the subject, “Um, okay, I’ll go in and take some samples for testing then.”

Xiaotao instructed an officer to question the shopkeeper, then we both went to the back of the shop to begin our search. As I pushed open the door that led into the kitchen, I wasn’t met with a gruesome scene with dismembered bodies scattered around the room and blood all over the floor. On the contrary, what I saw was a pristinely clean kitchen with a few freshly-made raw buns on the countertop and a pile of white flour in the corner. There was a bag of frozen meat filling there too.

I ripped open a few of the buns to see if the raw meat inside was easier to identify. I examined it closely and smelled it. Xiaotao asked me if I discovered anything new.

“This is without a doubt made with human flesh,” I replied. “There’s also a very heavy spice aroma. I think the shopkeeper added some Chinese herbs in here.”

“No wonder it’s so fragrant...” Xiaotao commented. Her face turned sickly pale when she was reminded of what she put in her mouth less than an hour ago. “By the way, how did you know that it was human flesh straight away? You’ve never actually eaten human flesh before, have you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” I exclaimed. “It’s just simple deduction. The meat tastes nothing like pork, chicken, beef, lamb, or dog meat. My first hunch was that it was rat meat, because I’d heard somewhere that some bun shops would add rat meat to improve the taste. But my instinct told me that there was something terribly wrong about the bun.”

Xiaotao looked at me curiously. “Why are your taste buds so sensitive?”

“The mouth and the nose are closely connected,” I explained, “so when the sense of smell is sensitive, the sense of taste is heightened too. You can try it yourself. Just bite into a pear while sniffing an apple. You’ll think that you’re eating apples.”

“Ah, so that’s why you told me you could smell my scent!” marveled Xiaotao. “I was worried about bad body odor, but I guess you must’ve smelled the scent of the shower gel I used last night, right?”

“Uh… yeah…” I lied. The scent that I smelled was her own body odor, but it was far from unpleasant. I definitely wasn’t going to divulge that, of course.

There was nothing more to investigate in the kitchen. We both went to the shopkeeper who was crying and adamantly insisting on his innocence to the police officer questioning him.

“Officer, I have nothing to do with this human flesh business. All I did was buy the meat from the source that claimed it was pork! What reason do I have to doubt them? I’m just a small business owner trying to feed my family — there’s no reason for me to do such a deplorable thing as selling human meat to my customers!”

Xiaotao asked the officer to step away and she started to ask the shopkeeper questions herself. It turned out that the shopkeeper’s name was Tang. He was 48 years old. He came from a rural village and left his wife and children to come and work in Nanjiang City when he was in his twenties. He worked as a laborer in the beginning, but he then learned how to make buns so he set up a bun stall working his way up until he could afford to open up a shop. All of his hard-earned money was sent home to his family.

As for the source of the meat, the shopkeeper said it was sent to him straight from the abattoir every morning, and he always thought it was pork and had no reason to think otherwise.

“I’ve been selecting each of the ingredients for my buns with utmost care!” insisted shopkeeper Tang. “I never even added MSG, and I eat the buns myself every day!”

As Xiaotao was asking the questions, I stood aside and examined his behavior the whole time. Shopkeeper Tang was definitely not lying. The problem had to come from the abattoir itself!

1. An actual case that happened in 1985.

2. A Hong Kong crime-thriller movie made in 1993.