My grandma loves going to the market. It's also what a grandaunt who emigrated to Australia said she missed most about Asia, and I understand why. A sure cure for ennui. There's something in the air, in the dirty onions peels trampled to a mush underfoot, in the wild colour running amok--colour in a tropical, rainforest way, in the piles of fresh vegetables, still glistening, the soil on their roots black and vivid and moist.
Purple cauliflower from Australia appears in the market, an insolent stranger flaunting a self-consciously exotic beauty among her plain white cousins. Fingers reach out to touch the bulby mauve cloud and speculate whether it can be cooked in the same way as normal cauliflower. So expensive! But then, what a pretty colour. The aunties waver.
Gorgeous red grouper fish flame against the ice beds of fishmongers, mottled black (oh, Gerald Manley Hopkin's 'rose moles all a-stipple'!) so beautiful I hold my breath with respect and couldn't dream of such sacrilege as eating them.
The musty, savoury smell of dried goods. Plastic baskets heaped unceremoniously with salted fish, with strange alien-looking salted vegetables, and stringy cuttlefish dusted with white. I remember going with my grandma to buy dried goods for Chinese New Year cooking once when I was very young. While she skilfully haggled with the shopkeeper, I squatted down by the baskets of dried cuttlefish and stared in morbid fascination at the little suction cups. The more I looked, the more revolted I felt, and I decided to do the shopkeeper a favour and get rid of all those horrid things. Because who would buy his squid otherwise? Working efficiently, I managed to pluck all the suction cups off one entire tentacle before Grandma finished her purchases and we left. I'm just thankful he didn't notice me or Grandma would certainly not have gotten her deal. Now, I try not to look too closely at squid tentacles, strawberries, or even the sesame seeds on hamburger buns. OCD? We all have our streak of it after all.
There is a new butcher in the market downstairs--an extraordinarily good-looking young man from China, with a nose to die for and a languishing expression of gentle melancholy such that he could play the noble scholar with a tragic ending in a Chinese period drama. Suddenly there are longer cues at this particular butcher stall than at the others. I don't blame the aunties.
I feel alive when I step into the world of the wet market. This is something I never got growing up in a condominium (which was secluded and run-down and almost all hidden by the arms of old rain trees, like the Asian version of Rapunzel's secret tower. We had to walk twenty minutes down the road or take a bus to buy almost anything; borrow eggs from a neighbour, or buy ice lollies from the little grocery mart.) I remember my first time entering the wet market when we moved here, and feeling overwhelmed by the tremendous amount of life teeming in the air--the smells, the sights, the energy everywhere. I've gotten over the smells now and can sniff at 'city wimp' friends who wrinkle their noses or shrink away from the wet fish scales and slippery spikes of prawns--as if I wasn't a city wimp myself. One day I will be thick-skinned enough to take my camera down and capture my own pictures of the terrific energy at work in the wet market.
On Mondays, however, the market is closed--the plastic baskets lie idly in corners, the metal blinds stand silently shut like closed eyes. People walk past quickly without bothering to glance twice sideways, and perhaps a cockroach or rat scuttles by in that graveyard of cardboard boxes and empty stands. Something is missing, something has died. Just wait for tomorrow--everything will come to life again once more.