The big soup pot sitting on my kitchen counter had been there for two weeks – covered – before I finally worked up my nerve and lifted the lid. The stench was overpowering. The once pleasantly sharp smelling crab boil stew inside had by now been reduced to a liquid toxin, complete with a nasty looking mold floating on its surface. I put the lid back down. There are two big crustacean delicacies here in Nanjing: crawfish – eaten from the spring until the end of the summer – and crabs, eaten from the fall until the spring. I enjoy them both and, from time to time, prepare them myself…by most accounts pretty well. I tipped the pot over the sink, holding the lid in place and letting the dark “broth” slowly siphon out. At the bottom of the almost empty pot, I found the last uneaten crab, missed by the ladle, now about to be dumped into the trash. When these particular crabs – ten of them – had arrived from the pond, they had been uncomfortably bound up in twine and only able to move their eyes and open their mouths. Defenseless. But, in taking each of them out to prepare them for dinner, one had somehow managed to slightly loosen his bonds. Amazed, I just held him by his carapace with my thumb and index finger, watching him as he used his two claws and legs to slowly work himself free and finally drop his twine to the floor like some sort of grimly triumphant escape artist.

Last year, very late in the crawfish season, after having brought back a big load, I put them in a large basin on the kitchen counter, by the window. Usually, the wait between cleaning and boiling isn’t very long, but on this day it would be. Since it was so late in the season, I hadn’t wanted to keep them in their cramped little bag; I was afraid that the conditions would kill too many of them, making them uneatable. Leaving them there, loose in the basin, I moved on to other things. There had been one pathetic looking one: claws, feelers, antennae all amputated…unable to move. When I went back to check on him I saw that, surprisingly, the rest had formed a pile at the edge closest to the window and that one had climbed to its peak, just now hooking one of his claws over the rim and struggling up. I knocked him back down and scattered the group, prodding them to various parts of the basin with a chopstick. This went on all afternoon. Every crawfish was involved. Even the multiple amputee, off by himself, looked towards the reformed piles with seemingly great interest. And whenever they’d sense me nearby, they’d all stop – frozen – until I had moved away. At first amused, then curious, then increasingly uncertain, I was now forced to consider these crawfish as something more than I’d thought them to be when I’d first dumped them out of their bag. That evening, not really hungry, I made sure to eat the little amputee – much the same way as the Mohawks were said to have eaten the heart of the martyred Isaac Jogues – as a sign of supreme respect.

I would not eat this crab now staring at me. He had earned his freedom and would receive it. Eight were cooked that evening, but he and one female were held aside – chilled into hibernation – in the fridge. After consulting maps of Nanjing, bus routes, and the Internet (it turns out that the hardy mitten crabs are ecological public enemy #1 in the San Francisco Bay area), the three of us took the #31 bus to the end of the line: the Pukou ferry station, on the banks of the Yangtze. I paid my two kuai and, crossing the little bridge to the floating dock, knew that this place, free from anglers and protected from the turbulence of the Chang Jiang, was it. I quickly undid the binds of the female and she immediately sprung to life. The other one, who had fought so hard for his freedom, now barely moved. Two muted splashes in the water by the bridge. I went across the river.