Melissa Chen is a human rights activist and classical liberal who is the Managing Director of Ideas Beyond Borders. She is based in New York City. [2]

Early Life

From a young age, Chen realized that she did not describes to traditional religious dogma. [3] When she was 17-years-old, she came out as an atheist after reading Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. [3]

In a podcast "Walk-Ins Welcome" with Bridget Phetasy, Chen said:

And I immigrated to the U.S. when I was about 17.  I always said I came for an education, but I stayed for the civil liberties, which is true.[22]

Education and Career

Chen attended Boston University for undergrad and was inspired by Dawkins to be a geneticist. [3] During this time, she became more vocal about her philosophical positions on social media. [4] She later studied computational biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [2]

Chen worked at the Broad Institute and was an Editor at the Global Secular Humanist Movement. [2] She is currently the Managing Director of Ideas Beyond Borders and the New York Editor for Spectator USA. [2][12]

Political and Philosophical Views

Chen is an atheist and a humanist. [3] She considers herself a feminist, but one who is the Christina Hoff Sommers type. [9] Chen is a classical liberal and staunch defender of enlightenment values such as individual liberty, reason, secularism, tolerance. [1]

Interviews

Chen was a guest at Joe Rogan Experience show.

They spoke about death penalties and other laws in Singapore, Chen's company Ideas Beyond Borders, freedom of speech in America, and how it feels to be unpredictable, think outside the box and have eclectic taste in modern world.[21]

Chen took part in a podcast "Walk-Ins Welcome" with Bridget Phetasy.  Here are some citations from the podcast:

• Melissa : So yeah, I went to Boston University.  The first place I lived in in the U.S. was Boston.  And loved it, and fell in love with the sports teams, the culture there.  It was so liberating 'cause I grew up in a place that was very, it was a nanny state.  You know, they call it a benevolent authoritarian state.[22] 

• ...

• Melissa:  Right, right.  And when I came to America, I realized, I mean, it was just, it was liberating because I knew First Amendment was this shield that protected everybody.  The government can't come after you.  And not to say, obviously, that there are no consequences for your speech.[22]

• ...

• [Bridget] That's amazing.  So when, what did you get your degree in?

• [Melissa] Quantitative computational biology, so I did those degrees because I was trained scientifically, you know, in Singapore.  Just high school and everything, I specialize in science.  I really, really love the clarity of the scientific method.  I find it so satisfying when, you know, evidence can support the conclusion, which is why I also naturally have a bit of a resistance to grievance studies.[22]

• ... 

• Melissa:  Well, CRISPR is a very specific gene-editing technology, and it was actually invented.  So the institute that I worked for was in the big patent fight with another person at UC Berkeley.  That was, like, a three-way intellectual property fight for the patent rights to CRISPR because it was just kind of life- changing.  We're talking about the ability to excise portions of your genetic code and insert whatever you wanted in it.  You could make a complete synthetic gene using, you know, some sort of, like, molecular system, scissors kind of system that we derive from bacteria.  And so I was actually working at the time on a platform called the Infectious Disease Platform at the Broad Institute which is the institute that, where one of the claims were for CRISPR, intellectual property came out of.  And it was scary tech-because this was the first time.  We couldn't do this before.[22]

• ... 

• Melissa :  So we started an organization called Ideas Beyond Borders basically to take ideas that are not represented in Arabic, Farsi, and Kurdish, languages that are widely spoken in the Middle East, but we really focus on Arabic because it is the fifth most spoken language in the world, but represents only less than 1% of the global online content. So we look at Wikipedia, you know, whatever you and I can access on Wikipedia in English, blot out 90% of that. That's  all you can get in Arabic.[22]

• ... 

•  Melissa :  And at the end of the day, I don't think me and my sister would ever doubt that my mother loved us.  She's super religious, and whatever we ultimately feel that she's trying to curtail our way of life, curtail our freedoms, because of her pre-assumption, her set of assumptions, she's doing it out of love.  And you can see the direct line.[22]

References

• [1] :  twitter.com  /  Melissa Chen on Twitter
  • • [ https://twitter.com/msmelchen?lang=en&lang=en ] 
• [2]  :  facebook.com  /  Melissa Chen on Facebook
  • • [ https://facebook.com/MsMelChen] 
• [3]  :  youtube.com  /  'No Old White Guys' - S01E10 - Guest: Melissa Chen
  • • [ https://youtube.com/watch?v=WzWkT_pXS-c ]
• [4]  :  youtube.com  /  Seeking Solutions to Human Problems (with Dave Rubin, Melissa Chen, and Faisal Saeed Al Mutar)
  • • [ https://youtube.com/watch?v=U8QccR7oJro ] 
• [5]  :  ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com  /  Melissa Chen and Bill Nye
  • • [ https://ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/melissa-chen-1-fV6ZL1q3xZKSnbmJsnnnNgp5zl1snd ]
• [6]  :  ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com  /  Sitting with a deer
  • • [ https://ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/melissa-chen-1-STVnnMBcGQ2RzlRjRM9qoqDqAflVBl ] 
• [7]  :  ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com  /  A picture of Melissa Chen out in nature
  • • [ https://ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/melissa-chen-1-Tu8vVpUUkSv6AeNJKbve3NX8xiNGeB ]
• [8]  :  ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com  /  A quote from Melissa Chen
  • • [ https://ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/melissa-chen-1-nscaq4lvuMZWHPquDfB3N6OCVvLbzy ]
• [9]  :  twitter.com  /  Tweet about being a feminist
  • • [ https://twitter.com/msmelchen/status/716877910670442496 ]
• [10]  :  ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com  /  'No Old White Guys' - S01E10 - Guest: Melissa Chen
  • • [ https://ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/melissa-chen-1-79wJC8KKQX6TbapuqZozYZDEuMCKj0 ]
• [11]  :  ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com  /  Seeking Solutions to Human Problems (with Dave Rubin, Melissa Chen, and Faisal Saeed Al Mutar)
  • • [ https://ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/melissa-chen-1-bl1I0M5x84WdV9QEkF7MxJoVDAGLPW ]
• [12]  ;  www.youtube.com 
  • • [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLvW3_OgGUs ]
• [13]  :  ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com  /  Melissa Chen pictured on Twitter
  • • [  https://ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/melissa-chen-1-JBFr58cO3ERk3s1Py8lZLodHyGQQBE  ]
• [14]  :  ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com  /  Melissa Chen pictured on Twitter
  • • [ https://ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/melissa-chen-1-XOiBcBsQuYPbUN8vJIAUPRF1HCIO3W ] 
• [15]  :  ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com  /  Melissa Chen pictured on Twitter
  • • [ https://ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/melissa-chen-1-LSJEVXpME5FspQ2P2bfdwL4c3fNXHm ] 
• [16]  :  ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com  /  Melissa Chen pictured on Twitter
  • • [  https://ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/melissa-chen-1-9rmT40Ml1Wj1Ja6iARKqWglLs7IkIg  ]
• [17]  :  ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com   /  Melissa Chen pictured on Twitter
  • • [ https://ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/melissa-chen-1-xg1jeUIGBWbLs61YphYMff3Nrk3YQ9 ] 
• [18]  :  ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com  /  Melissa Chen pictured on Twitter
  • • [ https://ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/melissa-chen-1-ksWo29GMUMSguTul2yD3pV47TIVhbp  ] 
• [19]  :  ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com  /  Melissa Chen pictured on Twitter
  • • [ https://ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/melissa-chen-1-m8aCv8yCPrXlQqyVVVhPfVCuc164sD ] 
• [20]  :  ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com  /   photo of Melissa Chen
  • • [ https://ywqaugeunhowzrcj.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/melissa-chen-1-N58ftQH5eMF3AxZFsPRu0ezUG0bn90 ] 
• [21]  :  www.youtube.com  /   Joe Rogan Experience #1427 - Melissa Chen
  • • [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SLVjWbER4M ] 
• [22]  :  ricochet.com  /  Melissa Chen Asserts That if You’re Ignorant in America, It’s A Choice
  • • [ https://ricochet.com/podcast/walk-ins-welcome-bridget-phetasy/melissa-chen-asserts-that-if-youre-ignorant-in-america-its-a-choice/?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=99b9e27c8402e51ef3bc6f8ea5c8a9ff4cbf24fa-1583251201-0-AbwtawsoIUrbRM8gs6np3DsnP5j4a65Rm0QcjjXuS3mGjndM0IKpgiOgVxzjBftaxuhFHLA566L9rVfWXAXhrkhJIWbhceWmY7SKw4sE9cOMsPrHuG_oeAPLnXHmXSjqjPh_xkWrzjh7U9J-EddNME3NJ0tKiFTrtccSSqn2VHsDqke7tNlgMAYd7cBuu1XE3H_h8rWtljt5JmjJx0woqs4LBBq2Lhn6K1SgTQqxeBspvYtT6devrg-Q9mSkAQc2Mokn4iH5crl-JT9mnArq_Ob7qyydOOpkveQAt-hQhESRs1uF6qX8NnSCYZZAR2cIaVBLE0b820M3BAgXCc63x0rIumwBg8Egz9rZkwwRi-7ZpSyHBfdSvNh_SMfVOkUaim9AMsqnLRjRcgDetRrM_6d4gBvwAW8Oqgl3JuE30b4X ] 

Americans who identify with President-elect Donald J. Trump’s message of anti-political correctness may have a new, unlikely ally: a Singaporean teenager who is seeking asylum in the United States and calls himself a “poster boy for free speech.”

The Singaporean, Amos Yee, 18, is a former child actor turned prominent online dissident who fled to the United States last week after being convicted in his own country of “wounding the religious feelings” of Christians and Muslims. Mr. Yee was apprehended by American immigration officials at O’Hare Airport in Chicago and is in custody.

The plea he plans to make to American authorities, that he was punished for insensitive speech, echoes an argument that Mr. Trump made repeatedly throughout his campaign — that political correctness was damaging to the country, and that it had prevented government officials from adequately addressing issues of national security, race and religion.

“We’re all dealing with these issues of, ‘What are the lines, what are the boundaries, what’s permissible?’” said Sandra Grossman, an immigration lawyer in Bethesda, Md., who is representing Mr. Yee in his asylum case. She said she believed the outcome “may say a lot about how we treat our own freedom of expression cases.”

Mr. Yee drew the attention of the Singaporean authorities in 2015, at a sensitive time for the country. Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister who had served from 1959, when Singapore gained self-government from the British, until 1990, had recently died. His death prompted more than a quarter of the nation’s 5.5 million residents to pay their respects at public mourning centers, and more than 2,000 attended his funeral.

Mr. Yee absorbed the news differently, posting a video on YouTube titled “Lee Kuan Yew Is Finally Dead!” In it, he called the prime minister “undoubtedly totalitarian,” and likened him to Jesus, calling them both “power hungry and malicious” figures who “deceive people into thinking they are compassionate and kind.” Mr. Yee was convicted of speaking out against Christians, and served one month in jail.

Then, this year, Mr. Yee took to YouTube again, to criticize Islam and Christianity for scripture that he said supported murder and belittled women. He was arrested again and sentenced to six weeks in confinement. In both court cases he was tried as an adult, prompting criticism from human rights groups.

Mr. Yee’s videos garnered hundreds of thousands of views before they were taken down as part of his punishment. His large following stems in part from his past as a film prodigy of sorts — he won prestigious awards at age 13 for a short film that he wrote, starred in and shot himself — and in part from the lewd and outlandish nature of his more recent content. In videos that criticized organized religion, for example, Mr. Yee tore pages from the Bible and Quran, and simulated sex with religious symbols.

Despite the crassness of his manifestoes, Mr. Yee has drawn the attention of the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, who has repeatedly criticized the Singaporean government for its treatment of Mr. Yee.

“The criminalization of a broad range of legitimate, even if offensive forms of expression is not the right tool for any state to pursue legitimate aims such as tolerance and the rights of others,” Mr. Kaye said in September, after Mr. Yee’s most recent conviction.

In Singapore, “people are extremely sensitive,” said Melissa Chen, a Singaporean human rights activist who is now a legal permanent resident of the United States.

While Ms. Chen, who helped Mr. Yee flee Singapore, said she was “not entertained” by his videos, she said the dozens of Singaporeans who had filed police reports against him reflected a culture that had overcorrected in seeking to protect marginalized populations. “I call it the tyranny of the offended,” she said.

Singapore is a young country made up of groups seen as tenuously linked — ethnic Chinese, Indians and Malays. Legal protections there apply to all races and religions, according to academics, because of a fear that public criticism of one group could lead to retaliation by another, causing a domino effect that has led to race riots in the past.

“The official ideology of Singapore is that the country is diverse and fragile, and the country cannot risk tensions between religious and ethnic groups,” said Michael J. Montesano, an American academic based at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a think tank in Singapore.

Mr. Montesano added that while contrarianism is anathema to Singaporean culture, the laws in Singapore are rooted not in protecting individuals, but rather in society as a whole. “It’s about the fact that if groups are offended, there could be unrest and the national project could be unwound,” he said.

Despite being one of the richest societies in the world, Singapore is one of the most closed. The advocacy group Reporters Without Borders ranked it 154th out of 180 countries on its 2016 Press Freedom Index, and concluded that media outlets that are run independently of the Singaporean government are often censored.

Mr. Yee, who is being held at an immigration detention center in Illinois as he awaits the next steps in his asylum case, said in a phone interview that he believed free speech should be “unbridled” worldwide, and that he hoped to continue criticizing religion “without the fear of being sent to jail.”

He also attributed some of his most offensive videos to “a phase,” and said that he planned to spread a more palatable message moving forward in order to appeal to a wider audience.

Of his past work, Mr. Yee said, “I think that the entertainment value of my content actually pushed activism a few steps back.”

Human rights activist praises Shaq and blasts Lebron for bowing to Chinese censorship

"The only person not shaqtin' acting a fool in the NBA is Shaq," joked Melissa Chen, who is a human rights activist and columnist on the latest episode of Fox Nation's "UNPC."

Chen was reacting to Shaquille O'Neal's defense of Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, who spoke out against the violent repression of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, who are demanding more autonomy from the repressive Chinese government.  Morey was the target of backlash from the Chinese regime as well as prominent NBA players and coaches.

"One of our best values here in America is free speech, "O'Neal said in a now-viral video. "We're allowed to say what we want to say and we are allowed to speak out on injustices and that's just how it goes. If people don't understand that, that's something they have to deal with."

O'Neal's remarks followed the controversial reaction of NBA superstar Lebron James, who said that Morey "wasn't educated on the situation at hand" and added, "just be careful what we tweet and say and we do, even though, yes, we do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative that comes with that, too."

Chen noted: "It wasn't just LeBron. It was Steve Kerr. It was Steph Curry as well. They all express views very similar to Lebron's."

However, Chen said that James' defense of China was the most egregious because he is such a vocal critic of the United States.

"It's just astounding to me for somebody that... speaks up so often about injustices on our turf, but when it came to putting profit on the line," Chen argued, James balked.

"It didn't cost anything for him to basically be a champion for injustice here. But when it did... he just didn't follow through."

Furthermore, Chen called on the NBA to use its influence to encourage positive change in China.

"The NBA has a lot of power and I think when you do have that power, it behooves you to assert that," she argued.

"[Americans] thought for years that if we just engage with trade with China, that they would be importing our values, freedom and democracy... But that was one of the greatest miscalculations of the 21st century," Chen concluded.  "The truth is that China has been exporting censorship to the United States. They're exporting their values around the world now. So we empower them economically, but we didn't get the part of the deal where they would become more politically free."

All of you know by now that I, as your resident boomer curmudgeon stuck in a millennial Asian chick body, would've probably posted something snarky and dark about the new year because I can't help but question most things that people sink into reflexively and also in general, because I'm a bit of an introverted asshole.

Yet, even I can’t resist the temptation of deep introspection and reflection today. Humans are creatures of precedent after all, and even though time constructs were created to frame our fragile existence within tangible terms, I suspect that deep down, most of us do want change in some ways, so we end up looking to arbitrary devices like New Year’s Eve to shake off bad precedents and usher in good ones.

[....]

In the first month of this new year, I'll be taping a Joe Rogan interview. I don't even know how one prepares for such a thing. All I know is, I have always felt not ready for "exposure," and perhaps in 2020 where there's a huge risk to the simple act of thinking in public, such apprehension is prudent.

I'm almost at the point where, despite no formal training, I'm gaining some form of mainstream recognition for just airing my views. It's ridiculous to me that people are remotely interested in what *I* have to say. It will never not be ridiculous because, man, it's *just* me.

I've no doubt that the past few years of posting content, write-ups and interacting with all of you here online have gone a long way to prepare me for this huge opportunity. We've sparred with words, laugh reacted at snarky takes and in doing so, honed the kind of argumentative skills that a good public commentator should possess. So a very big thank you to all!

It starts with seemingly insignificant numbers alongside little red blips on the world map. In a matter of days, the numbers soar and the red circles balloon to engulf an entire region. This pattern has repeated itself several times across the globe — notably in South Korea, Iran and Italy — as the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 has surged since the virus first emerged in Wuhan back in December. Despite the Chinese economy coming to a grinding halt amid an unprecedented city-wide lockdown, the inevitable happened. The virus could not be contained within mainland China’s borders, and neither could its accompanying fear.

Coronavirus has spread perniciously, causing 4,716 deaths worldwide and radically transforming life as we know it. In the COVID-19 global sweepstakes, France, Spain, Germany and the US are perched ominously behind South Korea’s 7,869 confirmed cases with between 1,000 to 2,500 cases. We know that this latency will not last, because in the space of the last two-and-a-half weeks, Italy’s case incidence exploded from 132 cases on February 23 to 12,462 by March 12.

For the non numerically-inclined, the news reports should be sufficient to induce gripping anxiety and hopelessness. The tourist-packed piazzas of Rome are hauntingly vacant. The Italians have pliantly given up their cafe culture. The French have stopped greeting each other with cheek kisses. Store shelves from the UK to Australia are stripped bare of toilet paper. Cruise ships have become floating prisons on which the nightmarish plot of Resident Evil no longer seems far-fetched. Airplanes — the ones that still get to fly — take off with near-empty payloads. In the US, universities have transitioned to online courses, a beloved celebrity announced his coronavirus diagnosis and the NBA suspended its season. What’s clear is that the fear and uncertainty triggered by this pandemic will linger long enough to shape our collective psyche and social behaviors.

COVID-19 began as a zoonosis associated with the Wuhan seafood market where live wild animals were traded. Along the way, it acquired mutations that rendered it efficient at person-to-person (community) transmission. Highly infectious and capable of existing on surfaces for days, COVID-19 attacks our respiratory systems and wreaks havoc on our lungs; in the worst cases, it causes viral pneumonia and death.

For as long as humans have lived, we have been at the mercy of all kinds of infectious agents and pathogens. Our ancestors developed a suite of psychological mechanisms that enabled them to detect the presence of disease-carrying threats in their environment and to respond in ways that would distance themselves from contagious sources. It’s called the Behavioral Immune System (BIS), and it is responsible for guiding our instinct for disease-avoidance behaviors that act as the first line of defense against potentially devastating pathogens. Primed with the steady drip of COVID-19 news stories, our heightened BIS is likely to have myriad implications for how we approach the world and each other, our dating habits, and even our health. Lesser understood is the affect it may have on our political attitudes and thus the upcoming 2020 election.

For starters, pathogen cues have been shown to increase xenophobia and ethnocentrism, as interaction with exotic peoples tend to increase the risk of exposure to foreign parasites that pose severe threats to locally-adapted immune systems. History witnessed this most indelibly when the European settlers of the 15th century brought infectious diseases such as smallpox and measles to the New World, wiping out large swathes of indigenous populations within decades. The genomes of modern-day Native Americans still bear evidence of this influence on their immune systems.

Evidence of increased prejudice in the face of pandemics seems to be borne out by reports of Chinatowns across America becoming ghost towns and Chinese restaurants shuttering, though it’s hard to tell whether the business fallout is more from the general decrease in dining out activities. In a widely shared video, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York bemoaned that people are ‘not patroning [sic] Asian restaurants because of just straight-up racism around the coronavirus.’ But can we fault our BIS for using an imperfect heuristic, and one that might be operating subconsciously, to try to minimize exposure to people who have recently been to China or are likely to be in close contact with people who have? The longer the threat of COVID-19 is drawn out, the more salient conservative attitudes toward immigration policies become.

Broadly speaking, preferences toward social conservatism as characterized by a high degree of conformity, less openness and decreased promiscuity, are enhanced when people are primed to think about germs. The costs of both sexual promiscuity and social extraversion are relatively greater and more likely to outweigh any social benefits when individuals feel prone to infection. As a result, regularly-scheduled orgies along with non-sexual snuggle parties (thanks Obama), have all fallen by the wayside in favor of what the New York Post is calling ‘coronavirus and chill’ — shacking up with a single partner for a longer term.

When dealing with an absence of real knowledge about diseases, people tend to consult with their social circles in what psychologists call ‘social learning’, since the potential cost for trial-and-error or individual learning is high (or fatal). A greater conformity to group behavior and appeal to social obligation are perceived to be effective disease-avoidance strategies. One study showed that students who experienced higher perceived vulnerability to disease wound up conforming more to the majority view when evaluating abstract art drawings and self-rating as more conforming on questionnaires. In contrast, individualism, which is characterized by greater tolerance and even encouragement of deviation from the status quo, might not be an adaptive trait during periods of pandemic duress. So even for a freedom-loving society like the United States, viral outbreaks can make the population malleable to submitting to government authority and complying with social norms such as the newly-issued diktats to practice social distancing and adhere to strict hygiene standards.

During elevated pathogen threat levels, mating preferences are skewed toward higher attractiveness and better symmetry because these two physical traits are known evolutionary proxies for high-quality gene markers that confer fitness in a disease-ridden landscape. More remarkably, this even translates to voting preferences — in the face of contagion risk, people are more likely to elect a political candidate who is young and physically attractive (perhaps that makes Tulsi Gabbard the black swan candidate all along?). As more scientists and global leaders have implored the population to embrace the likelihood of a year-long protracted battle with COVID-19, the potential impact on the ballot box is decidedly intriguing. All three remaining presidential candidates are in the highest-risk age group, which means their  chosen running mates are likely to wildly influence voting preferences. Coupled with the economic recession, the complete retooling of working life, and the impending referendum on our healthcare system and gig economy, the effect of the novel coronavirus on shaping our cultural psychology and politics shouldn’t be ignored.

This outbreak was a total game-changer. And we’re just about to see how it will all play out.

There’s a recurring flashback from my childhood that never fails to induce a blood-curdling shiver down my spine. My mother’s request for company on her monthly shopping trips to the wet market was always a Hobson’s choice, one I deeply resented because the experience was awful. Deep in the bowels of Singapore’s Chinatown complex was a large open-air market that stood in stark contrast to the surrounding glitzy skyscrapers and immaculate streets. The place was a veritable not-so-little shop of horrors and till today, those horrors remain firmly etched in my memory.A distinctly fetid stench greets you long before entering the market; soon it becomes apparent why they’re referred to as ‘wet’. Unidentified fluids, sometimes with ribbons of red swirls, pool around your shoes, draining from the blocks of ice used to keep all the meats fresh. Storekeepers occasionally hose things down in specious attempts to disperse the suspicious-looking liquids, meaning the floor never dries. Live eels and fish slosh around in open tanks perched on prep tables where they’re bludgeoned, gutted and filleted for each customer. I once had the misfortune of standing in the Splash Zone, too close to a fishmonger who was wrestling with and descaling a snakehead (type of fish) while it was still violently flopping and gasping for air. A mixture of blood, water and flecks of fish scale rained upon me like macabre confetti. Wet markets, like the one in Wuhan that was ground zero for the COVID-19 pandemic raging across the globe, are common throughout Asia. The larger newly-industrialized cities in China play host to hundreds of such markets, providing fresh produce and meat but also functioning as social nuclei. Dubious food safety and hygiene standards aside, what made the Wuhan Seafood Market such a swarming petri dish for viral pathogens is the compendium of dead and live wildlife that were kept in close proximity, sometimes festering in their own fecal matter. Pictures and video clips circulated on Weibo and other social media platforms showed the range of animals on sale — wolf pups, rats, peacocks, raccoons, porcupines, snakes, crocodiles and foxes, all jammed side-by-side in flimsy cages awaiting their own slaughter, making it easy for zoonotic diseases to leap from species to species and from animals to humans. Scientists believe that the pangolin, an endangered Southeast Asian mammal that looks like the lovechild of a scaly anteater and an armadillo, was the intermediary that helped bridge the novel coronavirus’s jump from its original host, bats, to humans. To date, the virus has infected more than 200,000 and killed more than 8,000 people worldwide.The Chinese preference for wet markets and exotic wildlife has deep social, historical and cultural roots. Around 1960, Chairman Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward led to agricultural collapse and the starvation of tens of millions of people, a trauma that continues to make an indelible print on China’s collective psyche today. For one, it necessitated a scarcity mindset. Under starvation conditions, does it really matter what vessel of bodily flesh was delivering your next caloric intake? Why would you squander any body part? There’s an old Cantonese saying that goes, ‘anything that walks, swims, crawls, or flies with its back to heaven is edible’. The myth that freshly killed animals taste superior is very pervasive, particularly among the older generation. ‘Freshly killed hens are much better than frozen meat in supermarkets, if you want to make perfect chicken soup,’ a 60-year-old woman named Ran told Bloomberg while shopping at a Chinese wet market. ‘The flavor is richer.’ Perhaps because home refrigeration only became widespread in China in the last few decades, Chinese folks with rural roots still associate freshness with how recently the meat was slaughtered. This is why sellers keep their animals alive and only butcher them before their customers’ eyes.As for what’s driving the demand for exotic wildlife, we need only look to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) which is very widely-adopted in China and among the Chinese diaspora. Its philosophical roots can be traced all the way back to the ancient text The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine, written roughly 2,000 years ago. This is the source material that lays out the various therapeutic effects of specific wild animal parts and suggests that consuming exotic meats confers wealth and status upon its devotee. What a tragedy that the 100,000 pangolins that are purged every year are sacrificed over the false belief that their scales can aid in blood circulation and curerheumatism! Meanwhile, Beijing continues to aggressively promote TCM both internationally and domestically, in a bid to project nationalistic pride and soft power. Late last year, the state-run China Daily news website reported Xi Jinping saying that ‘traditional medicine is a treasure of Chinese civilization, embodying the wisdom of the nation and its people’. Most recently, Chinese officials have also been touting the success of deploying TCM methods to treat over half of the hospitalized COVID-19 patients in Hubei province, an ironic move given that it was the very indulgence of magical belief in traditional remedies that most likely caused the coronavirus outbreak in the first place.To its credit, the Chinese government has since taken swift action to close down some 20,000 wildlife farms and punish over 2,000 people for wildlife crimes since COVID-19 broke out uncontrollably. They have also temporarily banned the wildlife trade until the epidemic is over, but not without carving out exceptions for wild animals for the purposes of TCM. Unless this loophole is closed, people can and will simply abuse the system and use TCM as an excuse to smuggle in more meat and partake in the trade.Meanwhile, several articles have decried the problematic ways in which Chinese eating and hygiene habits have been discussed in light of the outbreak, especially because they may lead to stereotyping Chinese people as a whole for being barbaric and uncivilized. These stereotypes, they fear, will only end up fueling xenophobia and racism. The temptation here is to avoid falling into the trap of cultural relativism. It’s perfectly appropriate to criticize China’s rampant consumption of exotic animals, lack of hygiene standards and otherwise risky behavior that puts people at risk for zoonotic infections. Until these entrenched behaviors based on cultural or magical beliefs are divorced from Chinese culture, wet wildlife markets will linger as time-bombs ready to set off the next pandemic, which in a globalized age is proving only too easy to do. We already know that more than 75 percent of emerging diseases ( https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/view/world-zoonoses-day-most-emerging-infectious-diseases-originate ) originate in animals and that in the last century, at least 10 infectious diseases jumped from animals to people. China should be aghast at its role setting off the global domino effect at Wuhan Seafood Market in late 2019. After countless infections and death, the obliteration of trillions of dollars and the radical retooling of modern life as we know it, the least China could do is introduce higher food safety regulations, eradicate all wet markets and ban the wildlife trade, once and for all.