Alan Sipress - The Fatal Strain

Kong Phalla has been selling merit birds from the cobblestone sidewalk at the base of Wat Phnom since she was eight. A slight woman in her twenties with small brown eyes, she had the familiar look of those who trade their childhood for the hustle of the street: a thin veneer of smarts overlaid on innocence. She approached me with a lotus stem in one hand and a cage crammed with birds in the other. She said the birds had been shipped into the capital overnight by riverboat. She had already sold nearly three dozen to worshipers. “They want to free their depression, free their sadness and illness with the birds,” Kong Phalla explained. Her dark hair was tucked under a red knit cap despite the day’s gathering heat. She rested her load in the shade beside a table of incense sticks and flashed a weak smile, saying she had brought five cages to the pagoda that morning and was confident all one thousand birds would be sold by nightfall. The birds went for about fifty cents each, good money in Cambodia, though Kong Phalla got to keep only a tiny fraction. On holidays like Cambodia’s New Year, when business was especially brisk, she said, prices could triple.

Bird flu was of no concern, Kong Phalla continued, patting the cage. It’s only the foreign tourists who fret. She snickered. “They’ll only open the doors of the cages and ask me to release the birds myself so they don’t have to touch them,” she said, adding with a boast, “Bird flu has never happened to me.”

Kong Phalla spied one of her frequent Cambodian customers drive up to the curb in a new Toyota sedan and get out. She instantly abandoned her thought, grabbed the cage, and gave chase. She followed him up the long brick staircase, past the statues of lions and pink balustrades of mythical serpents and beyond the stone stupas above, beseeching him at each step to purchase some of her birds. He acceded just before vanishing into the sanctuary on the crest of the hill. Kong Phalla put down her cage on a stone bench beside those of other peddlers and waited for her next chance.

To understand this Buddhist custom, I sought out a monk named Khy Sovanratana. I found him at his monastery in the center of Phnom Penh, a once romantic city of French colonial villas still trying to collect its thoughts three decades after Pol Pot’s reign of terror. The Khmer Rouge had abolished religion, decimating the country’s Buddhist institutions. Since then, Buddhism has revived, monks bearing alms bowls have returned in large numbers to the early morning streets, and Khy Sovanratana has emerged as a commentator on morality and social issues. Though his close-cropped hair was still black with youth when I met him, his learning had already elevated him into the ranks of senior clergy. When he received me, he was seated cross-legged on a thin cushion, his orange monk’s robe draped over his left shoulder.

The monk started by recounting a legend of Prince Siddhartha, the Indian nobleman who would later attain enlightenment and become the Supreme Buddha. The young prince and his cousin were walking through the woods when they spotted a swan. The cousin drew his bow and shot the swan with an arrow. Siddhartha raced to the injured bird, refusing to relinquish it. His cousin grew furious. But Siddhartha caressed the swan, eventually nursing it back to health before setting it free.

“This kind of conduct has had a big impact on Buddhist practices,” the monk said softly. “Giving life is very much extolled in Buddhism.” He explained that the simple gesture of releasing birds is rich in significance, and he slowly explicated the different layers of meaning. First, by giving life, a devotee follows in the footsteps of the Buddha. Second, the act of releasing the bird helps to cast off the “torments and tortures” of everyday life. And third, the act of liberating a living creature earns devotees religious merit toward reincarnation into a better life. For a person with financial means, the only limit on the number of birds to be released is his kindness. Sometimes, the monk said, adherents have been known to free not only birds but fish, turtles, and even cows and buffalo that are tied up awaiting slaughter.

But setting aside the sublime, Khy Sovanratana acknowledged that believers should not be blind to the dangers of this tradition. “There’s no point if you don’t get benefits but instead catch a virus,” he counseled. “Monks should be given this kind of awareness and pass it on to devotees when preaching.”

That’s a tall order in Cambodia, where this tradition is intertwined not only with religion but national identity. The king himself frees doves, pigeons, and other wildfowl about four times a month—in especially generous numbers to mark royal birthdays—and this has complicated efforts to regulate the practice. Its adherents rarely comment on the contradiction of trapping birds only to set them free, an irony compounded by the success of some boys in catching fowl moments after their release so they can be sold yet again. Not long before my audience with the monk, an environmental group based in the United States had tried to curtail the practice on the grounds that the sale of merit birds represented illegal trade in wildlife. The organization, WildAid, had established a rapid-response unit that included Cambodian military police and forestry officials and carried out several raids on bird peddlers. The campaign culminated in the confiscation of birds sold at Wat Phnom and elsewhere. But this provoked a religious and political backlash. The government suspended further raids.

Even in Hong Kong, which so successfully overcame public opposition in its decisive response to the initial bird flu outbreaks, officials have been reluctant to tackle this revered ritual. Nearly ten years after the virus first jumped to humans, fears of a new outbreak in Hong Kong surged when several dead birds recovered from city streets tested positive for the lethal strain. Among these were munias, which are not native to urban Hong Kong but imported by the tens of thousands from mainland China each year for Buddhist rites. The discoveries prompted Richard Corlett, an ecology professor at the University of Hong Kong, to publicly warn that bird releases posed the principal threat of reinfection in the city. Agriculture officials urged people to refrain from freeing captive birds and asked religious organizations to make a similar appeal to their members. But while the government ultimately suspended trading at Hong Kong’s famous Bird Garden market after an infected starling was discovered there, a similar ban was not imposed on merit-bird releases. The cultural sensitivities were too great.

By the banks of Phnom Penh’s Tonle Sap River stands an ornate, carnival-colored shrine called Preah Ang Dang Ker. Under its steeply pitched roof rests a likeness of the Buddha gazing across the broad gray waters. Around the outside linger peddlers surrounded by cooing and chirping. “I have no concern about getting sick with bird flu, and the buyers have no concern,” offered Srey Leap, a stocky woman in a sweat-stained shirt keeping vigil from the shade of an umbrella. “They never worry about this. It is our Cambodian tradition.” When a family approached, Srey Leap and the other hawkers converged. The five visitors paused to haggle, then purchased an entire cage frenetic with the flapping of about a hundred pairs of wings. They carried it to a low stone wall above the water’s edge. They pulled the birds two by two from behind the mesh and, with the occasional whisper of a prayer, set them loose, casting a line of silhouettes down the ancient river until the entire contents of the cage and whatever contagions it concealed had disappeared along the banks.

To thwart a gathering pandemic, the perimeter must hold. Once it is breached, there’s no turning back. This precarious frontier, the first and last line of defense separating the pathogen’s animal hosts from the human race, runs through thousands of remote Asian villages. These outposts are vulnerable and often unsuspecting, like the Javanese hamlets that scale the lush, terraced slopes of the Mount Lawi volcano. There, an Indonesian animal-health officer who goes only by the name Suparno had been drafted into keeping the virus in check before it crossed to people. But the day I met Suparno, he preferred to go to lunch.