[FICTION] “Blue Eyed Pigs” by Jonathan Han

Jonathan Han on “Blue Eyed Pigs”: Twenty years ago, Hong Kong was the busiest port in the world, the greatest trade centre by measures that extended beyond the abstract and the fiscal. Older dockhands would refer to the container as a golden calf, an idol representing the miracles of modern economics. One could see growth and goods in ways that would be difficult to witness today.

The ports of Singapore and Shenzhen have since surpassed our now declining figures. The cabins on the cranes now bear a little rust, their paint chipped away by years of storms and typhoons. The port nevertheless remains a defining feature of our city, its floodlights illuminating the water in the dead of night. Its vast warehouses, some of the largest buildings in Hong Kong, dominate Kwai Chung. These are perhaps the last vestiges of Hong Kong’s once mighty manufacturing industry, and those who work in them are the last of their kind.

I am the third generation of my family to work in the same container terminal. My grandmother, on my mother’s side, collected shuttle bus tickets. My aunt, on my father’s side, sold warehouse space. I write manuals, thousands of pages of instructions that only a handful of people will ever read and follow. Sometimes I wonder whether the work has informed my writing. Perhaps it has shaped how I view life altogether, instilling in me the sense that each action is followed by a predictable consequence, and that the world, if documented thoroughly enough, could be reasoned through in much the same way.

Often, at the office, I wonder what the worst thing is that could happen at work. The exercise is relatively easy. Docks are a well-worn setting for terrible crimes. The objective, therefore, was to embed details, some of which could only have been informed by years of observation, without resorting to any of the convenient tropes. That being said, I have taken liberties with the basic facts. Hong Kong, for example, does not have a “port authority”, but rather a more complicated system of coordination between government and private entities. Biologically speaking, organs tend to degrade rapidly once extracted from the human body, regardless of temperature. To preserve some measure of authenticity, the story is likely set some years in the future, though not too far.

I do not write much about my life. There is not much to write about. Friends and family who read my work are often confused as to why I prefer writing about other people’s books and perspectives. “Blue Eyed Pigs” should assuage them.

Blue Eyed Pigs

After midnight, I received a call from the Director that a fire had broken out in Kwai Chung. A tractor driver, upon hearing radio silence, assumed the office crew had stepped out for a midnight snack. His friend, the reeferman, called him over asking for a smoke. It was bad weather, common for the season. Rain drummed against the reefers. Water pooled where the land had been depressed by gantry wheels. Foghorns belched and bellowed across the docks, rousing the small seabirds that had taken shelter beneath the cover of a crane.

The driver stopped his tractor by the tallest stack in the reefer bay and lit the cigarettes for himself and the reeferman. The two of them sat inside the tractor head, listening to the radio station repeat the Mark Six numbers of the day. No more than two minutes and five numbers passed when somebody caught them on camera and called them to stop wasting time and finish the job. Stunned, afraid, and probably too focused on how he might be punished, the reeferman ordered the cell be lifted onto the tractor without checking if it was unplugged. The wire was pulled taut, stretched, then snapped, dangling midair. The plug itself was damaged and dislodged. Water seeped into the exposed socket, blowing out the fuse for the whole stack of reefers, and causing the aforementioned fire.

“The reeferman fucked up,” the Director summarised.

I whispered to Dorothy that I was needed at the port, and told her not to stay up nor cook breakfast in anticipation for my return. Grunting, she turned to fit her head between our two pillows. In the darkness, I brushed my teeth, cupped the water in my hands and soaked my face until the drowsiness was drained. The coffee dispenser burred in the kitchenette. Before I closed the bedroom door behind me, I saw Dorothy had shifted across to my side of the bed.

As the taxi sped through the empty highway, a steady wash of rain sprayed over the windshield. Having only three hours of sleep, I couldn’t trust myself with the Toyota. The messages were coming through. They had to shut down the electricity at the terminal, putting a pause to all operations; the only things still working were the radios and the floodlights, so you could hear and see all the shit that was going down, but couldn’t do anything about it.

It took the firefighters half an hour to extinguish the flames. The bitter smell of singed metal remained long after they left. As the first inspector to arrive I was brought directly to the aftermath, the remnants of white reefers now charred and molten, the bottom boxes caved in, collapsed. Victor, the director of operations, carried a clipboard with the yard plan. Holding the umbrella over us, I scanned the piece of paper. About two dozen reefer cells belonged to the bay, a third of them now irreparably damaged, their goods destroyed: potentially millions of dollars in losses.

“There were seven stacks in this block. Twenty reefers.” Victor tapped on the clipboard.

“How many of them were for import?”

“About half. Another ten for transshipment. We were supposed to send them onto the Evergreen right now at berth two.” Victor pointed at the green hull of the ship at the berth. The crew had been ordered to stay aboard, and I could see their orange helmets through the windows of the bridge.

The rain stopped. The clouds hung still above. I flipped the page to the manifest to see what was in the reefers. Apples, pork, pork, vaccines, pork, pork, strawberries, more pork. That explained the hint of barbecue in the air.

Before the firemen drove away, their sergeant reported they had blanketed the cells with ABC powder, and cut off the bay from the main power grid. Given the potentially poor structural integrity of the reefer stacks, the firemen had also cordoned off the entire section. Bad Jenga, as the sergeant put it. No personnel, no trucks, nor gantry cranes would be allowed near the bay until the reefers were removed.

“And when could that be?” Victor asked. “This is our only reefer bay available. The other ones are full-up until next week.”

“The demolition team is coming in right now.” The sergeant took off his helmet and wiped the sweat from the lining. “In any case, I don’t want anyone near the bay until we say otherwise.”

Victor tapped his pencil on the clipboard, muttering, “Understood, understood.” The sergeant jogged back to his fire truck.

The rising sun hovered above the lip of the docks. The extinguishing powder reflected the warm light like a pile of soot-speckled snow. Then a burst of water from the fire truck hosed the powder into a milky puddle. It was time to clean up. I summoned the two alleged perpetrators, the trucker and the reeferman, to the scene of the accident. The police had finished their initial interrogation and spared me half an hour with the culprits. I wanted them to recount to me exactly what happened.

An honest mistake, that’s all I heard from the trucker. The reeferman repeated the same line. The reeferman scratched the wart above his eyebrow as he paused to think of what else to say. Honesty comes up a lot in this industry. To work in a port is to work an honest job, to lead an honest life. What they mean is there is no reward for deceit. A poor man is an honest man, or so their logic follows. They recounted their honest day, how they were tired from working the night shift for the whole week, how the drudgery and the cold took its toll, and therefore how they desperately needed a smoke. The rest (the snapping wires, the electric fire) was just a natural consequence of this honest mistake. They looked straight at me, and if there had been any remorse left in their eyes, they must have rubbed it clean as they tried to stay awake. It is a stereotype I have found true, time and again, that dockworkers are the most difficult, prideful, and incorrigible lot. The two men were the same, bearing hardship as their shield, honesty as their banner.

Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, perhaps the cold, but as much as I would like to maintain a professional manner, I must have appeared quite upset. Victor immediately tried to assuage my anger by pre-emptively scolding his men. The truth is: nothing is more deflating than losing a weekend to clean up someone else’s mess. In fact, I had planned a short hike, my first outdoor adventure with Dorothy, and had prepared the night before several egg salad sandwiches for the picnic. The secret is to add a dollop of mustard and to go easy on the mayonnaise. I would have to apologise to her if I cancelled those plans. At least I would have honesty on my side too.

Behind us the fire brigade had started to dismantle the racks that once held the reefers in place and were lifting the cells onto a large steel flatbed. I was getting a clearer picture. Careless, lazy, stupid: these were the factors behind the accident. The Director would want an immediate report when he arrived. The police will charge the men, and customs shall penalise the terminal. An internal investigation must be conducted, of course. Tie the loose administrative ends, inform the freight forwarders and the shipping lines: roughly a month’s work. Otherwise, we could consider the matter closed, leave the work for tomorrow, and perhaps I could return home in time for the picnic.

Then we heard the crunch of steel. The top reefer had been lifted off, but the downward pressure that it previously exerted on the stack was lost, causing the imploded, deformed cell below to slide off balance and plummet to the ground. The force of the fall slammed open the cell doors, spilling packets of meat across the lane.

As though he had totally forgotten the sergeant’s warning, Victor rushed to the rubble of pork. Chasing after him, I repeated the dangers of going near container handling equipment, the safety violations that he incurred, the fines he might receive. Then no more than ten metres away from the open cell, just behind the red and white tape, we saw the contents of the carnage: hearts, kidneys, lungs, livers dislodged from their white Styrofoam boxes. Then a singular eye, swimming in the chemical milk.

“Pork?” Victor stopped, panting, and looked at his clipboard, flipping through for an answer.

I followed the pink coil of tissue, then stared at the eye. “I’m not a butcher,” I said. “But I’ve never heard of a blue-eyed pig.”

Murder was the first thought that came to mind. It’s the first thought that comes to most people when they read or hear about it on the news. A crime so horrifying must originate from something equally ghastly. When Dorothy heard it over the radio the next day, she asked me, “How could they kill so many people and get away with it?” I tried to assure her the organs were likely harvested from already-dead subjects. Or extracted from black market donors. What little communication I’ve had with the underworld has taught me that even the triads find all the guts and gore rather unappealing. It would take a real psychopath to murder all those people and still have the presence of mind to surgically cut out each organ, nor is it the style of serial killers to consider the economics of their murders. Not to mention that it would be rather inefficient to kill someone for the express purpose of taking their organs.

The silver lining from having a whole container of organs appear at the port would be the growing collective interest in my work. My own included. During the first few days, between our discovery and the public police report, my messages were flooded with queries from friends and reporters. Was the fire meant to eliminate the evidence? Who were the immediate suspects? And the most pressing: where did those organs come from?

The Director had instructed us not to answer any of these questions, but I thought a personal record would be good for a future story. Many years later, when a nephew asks me why, after a priceless education, I wasted so many years on a dreary job I don’t really care for, stuck in a dank port, aspiring for a promotion of little absolute value, I would fall back to: “Ahhh, there were once these dead people…”

I suppose Big Sir Chan would like to hear my personal record too, the man who got me the job, the man who has kept me in it. Our agreement stands that in return for setting me up, I would have to tell him everything that happened soon. I always do.

Within the morning, those of us at the department had set up a temporary office at the gate side of Terminal 2. We were prepared for the long haul. As I recounted the events of that morning, the Director paced the room. Mid-step, he looked at the pictures of the organs, flinching at the sight of a half-baked heart.

“You say it’s a transshipment?” the Director asked the room.

“Just arrived from the Philippines, sir,” Victor said. “Going back to Kagoshima.”

“Thank God they’re not our own,” I said.

“Well, I wouldn’t be so quick to assume.” The Director stared out the window with his hands on his waist, as if musing, tranced by whatever could distract him from the pictures.

“Meaning?” Victor clenched his clipboard.

“We don’t know if someone’s broken into the container and replaced the contents. It’s the least likely case, but what if the reefer contained pork in the first place?”

“Breaking in would have broken the seal,” Victor said.

“And if they did, the fire removed all the evidence.”

“That would be an extreme possibility,” Victor replied.

“There are ways, no?” The Director looked at me. “To replace the content.”

“Maybe, when you restacked them?” I threw out an answer.

Victor turned to answer: “With reefers we almost never restack them. It’s too much of a hassle to unplug and plug them again. Anyway, our system would alert us…”

“Your system didn’t work.”

“Then you should bring this up to the IT department.”

“First, check everyone’s story.” The Director held his hand up to hold our attention. “Then look at the tapes. The cell has been here for ten days. I’m expecting ten days’ worth of CCTV footage.” The Director rose from his chair and put on his hard hat. I opened the door for his way out. “The cops are locking down the terminal for the next six hours. They’ll also contact the consignee. The vessel stays docked until we finish the interviews, do you hear me, Victor? Jim, check their records.”

I expected him to say something like that. Record keeping is a big chunk of my job. I hoard manila files, punch holes, snap binders, make copies, laminate, shred, date, delete, burn data-capsules, alphabetise, staple, jot minutes, and by the end of the day find myself in an unbearable state of clutter. The port authority’s purpose, to oversimplify, is to determine what comes in and what goes out. But amidst the millions of cells, the tonnes of cargo, some kidneys are bound to get lost amidst the abundance. This is where I come in. I am the one who follows the paper trail, until the original documents, or something better than the original, are salvaged. Bureaucracy has never sounded so thrilling.

On the day of the discovery, initial interviews took place in the conference room, in which everyone on shift had to participate, going through their day in detail. This was better than asking if they noticed anything out of the ordinary, because the mind normalises any exceptions to the norm, and all I hear is a flat-out “no.” With each interview came a stack of employment records. Disappointing raises, promotions passed over, written warnings, anything that might point to a corruptible character. Loyalty to a company is always more fraught than it first appears, and the fault lines of corruption are always found in the paperwork.

The reeferman: forty-five years old, spent twenty years doing the same job. He named his son as his sole dependent. Divorced. This was his first job out of high school, most likely his last. There are scant notes of his performance which, given his minor position, I had expected. He had been involved in a previous incident as a tallyman, where he had allowed a cell to stay on a vessel when it was meant for the yard, but his supervisor had struck that out as misnomer in an otherwise plain career.

The truck driver had a comparatively adventurous past. His colleagues called him Little Mac, since he boxed in the amateur lightweight circuit, and had gelled his hair into the shape of a morning star like the video game character. Thirty-two years old. He had been on the job shy of five months. Previously he spent five years as a trucker, and before that was a construction worker on a small island in Japan. There were previously concerns over a juvenile misdemeanour over false cheques, which landed him six weeks in a detention centre, but they were brushed over after a warmly written recommendation from his uncle, the gate clerk.

Other than the reeferman and the driver, none of the terminal staff were present at the site of the incident. Just as the trucker had originally believed, the operations team briefly left their duties unattended to enjoy pizza in the conference room. I could still smell the sourness of the pepperonis in the office.

I had reached, so to speak, a dead end. So I asked for a desk in the corner of the terminal office and access to everything in their database. I planned to start the tape at 0300, when the accident occurred, and sit there, on a perfectly fine afternoon, watching in reverse the trucks and fluorescent men as they ground cells across the blocks, parking and starting engines, rolling great wheels and machines to pick a cell for the vessel, the drivers waving at each other with their arms outstretched from the open windows. I intended to take note of every discrepancy near the reefers, every unnecessary pause within a twenty-metre radius of those fiery cells, only to be interrupted when Dorothy called at noon, tersely asking why I hadn’t woken her up, leaving her alone in bed without saying a word.

I’ve checked just how much a kidney might cost. In today’s economy, anything between fifty and one hundred thousand dollars. That’s a ticket to the moon, right there. Actually two tickets, if you’re counting both kidneys. A good heart can cost up to half a million. Add a liver to the mix and you have a whole cabin for yourself. It’s been a profitable business ever since they’ve managed to cryogenically maintain the biological integrity of the organs. Dorothy told me not to think too much about the people whose organs we found, how they might have died, how they might have survived. I wasn’t worrying about that at all. The only thing on my mind was how economical it might be to die relatively young and intact.

Like it or not, organ harvesting has existed for centuries. In Ancient Egypt, the organs were preserved upon the request of the dead, so the soul’s heart could beat, its lungs could breathe, and its ass could shit in the afterlife. Centuries since the age of magic, there have been graverobbers and alchemists, philosophers and doctors who took their scalpel to the flesh in the name of scientific progress. Once in a while, there comes gruesome news of more dubious members of society. Cannibals and collectors. Frankenstein and friends. But since the 20th century, the market for organs has mainly catered to the medical sector, and experienced a boom since the advent of these reefers. Organs would rot in early classes of refrigerated containers, but the newest reefers, initially designed to preserve medical supplies as they crossed the solar system, can perfectly preserve vaccines, food, and anything else sensitive to atrophy or entropy. I suppose it was a matter of time before we stumbled upon a reefer full of organs. But it can be hard to expect what you don’t want to happen.

Starving, I went out to get lunch from the Vietnamese restaurant on my way home, even though I had originally planned to complete the picnic with Dorothy. I wanted to defend myself, to explain that I did in fact tell her in the middle of the night that I was leaving, and had I more time would have written a note. But after I left the terminal, she messaged me saying she needed to go home to feed her chinchilla. I took it as code for her displeasure; she knew I never liked her rodents.

As I waited, sitting by a statue of a cross-legged Buddha, the local channel broke the news of the discovery. The other patrons squeezed their calamansi as they watched the coverage. The beef tripe balanced on the bed of noodles, with its patterned holes, was already making me lose my appetite. The camera panned over the charred cells, their contents removed from the scene.

“This morning a fire broke out in Terminal 2, exposing a refrigerated cell of what the port authority identified as contraband. The police have opened an investigation into the case. More on this, after the break.”

Contraband. I was too tired to ponder long upon the ridiculous understatement. As soon as I returned home, I slurped through the noodles, then crashed on the couch, burnt out by the morning’s work. My brain was spinning to a stop, fragments of the day pieced together into a fevered dream. The guts, the coffee, the stooping cranes with their steel frames, the pool of white water, the fire, the eye.

I woke up to the thought of work. Within a few blinking hours, word had gone out. The Philippine Ports Authority was alerted of the case and would send their people on the next flight over. The first batch of DNA results were shared with all the relevant authorities: state, federal, and international.

When I first joined, the Director told me that it isn’t our job to know what’s inside a cell, only what should be there, based on the information passed from party to party, trickling all the way through the boulders of bureaucracy until it reaches us. We work in a world where trust between strangers is fraught and, at the same time, all that we have. Otherwise, as the Director explained, we would be constantly opening and closing containers, checking for the worst, expecting the same, and we just don’t have the time. The truth is none of us know for certain what might be in a container, and our lives are easier because we have resigned to that fact.

But now this collective trust has been polluted. The Director demanded the records of container movements from three months ago, far beyond what led up to this incident. Why? Because if it happened today, it might have happened before. And if it happened before, there might be a pattern that would expose how they did it today. Check for the same consignee, the same freight forwarder, duplicity in duplication.

Nothing. Three hundred and eight pages of nothing. No matching consignees.

Instead, it made more sense to review the tape of the incident, to roll it back from the day of the fire until the day the container first arrived in the terminal.

First I saw the reeferman and the driver, chuckling in the cab, the spark and light a brief dot on the screen, as the cigarette smoke was drawn out the window like a thin veil. The rain washed then obscured the lens as I went back through the hours then the days, observing nothing of note. The rhythm of the good port is steady. The back and forth of the crane, the wheeling trucks, and the stoic containers.

Right on the screen’s periphery was a flicker of movement. I paused, then rewound the past. Three masked men, one with a pair of garden shears strong enough to cut the seal, two with the ladder, approached the cell. They opened the box and started shuttling out of view, each time taking out a Styrofoam case from the reefer. Then the men shut the doors and applied a new seal. No alarms went off. It was an impressive combination of balance on the ladder and concentration with the boxes. Almost like a circus act. They were just about to snap off another seal when a truck came down the lane and its headlights shone at the rack of reefers. Spooked, they both fled the scene, abandoning the second container full of organs, and stumbling out of the camera’s line of sight. I counted it only took them five minutes to strip seventeen boxes from the reefer, according to the time stamp, dated only the week before the fire.

Out of the questions tumbling out of this revelation were two certain facts: first, they meant to strip two reefers, but only succeeded in stripping one, which meant that similar illegal organs were now circulating in the market; and second, given that no one was in the vicinity and no alarms went off, someone must have told them when, and perhaps how, to best infiltrate the terminal. Or even worse, someone was paid to stay away at that place and time. That same person likely encouraged the reeferman to cause the electrical fire, destroying any possible evidence. All that I thought I knew, and all that I was yet to learn, were hooked onto these two jutting facts.

I called the Director. I told him what I found and restrained myself from raising the questions that spawned endlessly in my mind, knowing he would likely have none of the answers and all the same questions.

He said nothing in direct response. After a moment’s silence, he said what he had called me to say.

“There’s a lot more pressure on this case. I just got a call from the Commissioner’s office. You know, thirty years I have been working in this department and this is the first time we’ve gotten this much attention from anyone. The Chief Secretary has her eye on this too, can you believe it? Thirty years and now… Tell Detective Lee what you found out, although I’m sure they’ve been through the tape themselves.

“After that, I’m attaching you to the Police. You’re going to be our go-to guy. Or their go-to guy, for that matter.”

“Sure.”

“I’m not certain how you’d be able to help, but I don’t want to seem uncooperative. They weren’t able to locate the consignee. They seemed to have registered the company in the Cayman Islands.”

“Of course, sir.”

“I trust you’ll make something out of it, Jim. Just do what you can to get them off our backs. In the meantime, we’ll work with the Filipinos to figure out how these organs got here.”

“Sir?”

“Yes, any questions?”

“Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

“Hmm,” the Director paused. “Cadavers, yes. As well as a few bodies not for scientific purposes. First time I’ve seen organs by themselves though.”

I wouldn’t know what’s worse, having to see the faces of the dead, or having to imagine them. The whole body absurdly inverted, inside out.

“What’s our end game?” I asked.

“End game?”

“After we’ve found out where the organs came from. After the cops catch whoever is responsible, what do we do? Do we try to return the organs to the victims? What’s next?”

The Director was about to say something but paused, and in the hesitation I could hear him shift the phone to his other ear. Then he cleared his throat and answered: “Have a few more meetings, submit another report, I suppose.”

^{How to cite: Han, Jonathan. “Blue Eyed Pigs.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 29 Sept. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/09/29/blue-eyed.}

Jonathan Han is a Hong Kong-based writer. His work has appeared in Essays in Criticism, Hong Kong Review of Books, and Asian Review of Books. His chapbook Quinquennial was published by Pen and Anvil Press. Follow his Substack @jhantheman. [All contributions by Jonathan Han.]