From Mourning a Breast, which was published in July by New York Review Books. Translated from the Chinese by Jennifer Feeley.

Every fall, my friends and I get together to admire the lanterns of the Mid-Autumn Festival and go mountain climbing during the Double Ninth Festival. There are two special activities we always do: eat snake and eat crab.

The former is relatively simple. We join an organized snake banquet, occupying one of the dozens of tables that fill the restaurant floor. Two bottles of medicinal wine are placed on the table, and a large dish of snake soup is served first. Everyone has two helpings, and before we know it, our bellies are half full and our faces flushed. Since we live in different neighborhoods and have to go to work every day, just a few of us meet up regularly for coffee or beer. Only the snake banquet draws the whole group together. The black goat, soft-shell turtle, stir-fried snake slivers, sticky rice, and wild game, even muntjac venison—the Cantonese truly are barbarians when it comes to eating. What can’t we stomach?

While eating snake is a festive affair—the banquet is, after all, in a public place—it doesn’t compare to the comfort of a friend’s home. Thus, all things considered, we’re more enthusiastic about eating crab. We indulge in a few crab feasts each autumn, abiding by the old saying and eating female crabs in September, male crabs in October. We also follow the tradition of incorporating a few chrysanthemums. After setting a date over the phone, we head out at dusk, taking various routes to gather the provisions. Some select the crabs, purchasing four or five kilos, along with perilla leaves; others buy wine (one rice, one a high-grade huadiao); still others buy the dried tofu, brown sugar, ginger, and scallions.

Some friends’ apartments only have a small round table, so they open up a folding table, place the two side by side, and cover the whole thing with a tablecloth. The culinary experts among us assume their posts as chefs, packing the air with fragrant steam. Most of my friends savor each bite, dissecting the crab inch by inch: truly outstanding deconstructionists. There are also some friends who eat quickly, barely touching the legs and claws, casting them aside, whoosh. They crush the shells into bits with their teeth, all while complaining of the inconvenience. While you’re still tackling the legs with a cracker, they’ve already devoured the contents of five shells.

We laud crab as the best delicacy in the world, yet we lament its increasingly steep price. If we see fresh crab that has just arrived by air and is priced low, we place an order at once. Through a friend who works at the airport, we ordered a basket that had just been flown in and distributed the crabs on the spot. I brought home a dozen or so and invited a few friends over to enjoy them with me. But these distinguished guests who’d just arrived by plane were different from those sold in the shops: they were free and unrestrained, without any bands around their claws. As soon as the lid of the basket was opened, all six legs moved in unison, each giant claw stretched high.

One friend claimed to be a crab-catching pro, with abundant experience as a child catching shrimp and crab along the coast in the rural New Territories. As he stepped forth to show off his skills, everyone was skeptical, wondering how this scholar—frail as a feather—would conquer these gutless gentlemen. Sure enough, he caught each creature with his hand, pressed his index finger on its back, and with his thumb and middle finger lifted the edges of the shell, holding the crab hostage as his right hand picked up some straw twine and, with the help of his teeth, wrapped it round and round.

We were tipsy with wine and the crabs had just finished cooking when someone suddenly asked why crab was so delicious and thus was eaten by people. If crabs were rats, their lives would be spared. Furthermore, in our zest for crabs, we should beware the karmic wheel—one day, they would return to exact their revenge.

This was prophetic, as I myself was pinched by a crab. The English cancer derives from the Latin word for crab; the creatures are hard and tyrannical, taking a sideways approach and running rampant and unbridled. The Chinese character for cancer,, has no special meaning but is a terrifying pictograph, comprising “products” () atop a “mountain” (). When traveling to the countryside, you’ll often find sacrificial offerings arranged in such a shape on wild mountainous terrain. Demons in fiction practice their formidable martial-arts skills with skeletons, stacking skulls in a formation. Thus, from a pictographic viewpoint, evokes the spine-chilling image of white bones piled upon mountains and hills.

My friends were all wonderful. They acted just as they always had, all of us eating together. When I felt tired, they let me lie on their beds to rest. Since the autumn began, no one had mentioned eating crabs again. Indeed, many things had happened this year, a heavy feeling weighing on our hearts like a stone. A friend in Shandong province wrote to inform me that he’d been appointed president of a rural cancer-prevention association. The locals had sculpted a stone statue of a woman wielding a sword and stepping on a crab, symbolizing the conquest of this terrible disease. Now that I wielded a sword every day, could this vicious “crab” be conquered?