The Anthropologist Practising at the Fish Stall in the Wet Market | New Book Excerpt & Event Preview

Foodthink Says

Not long ago, through Foodthink’s “Eat Something Good” story-submission column, we received many fresh observations and stories about wet markets. So what does a wet market mean to an anthropologist?

To see clearly the vitality and challenges of Chinese wet markets, anthropologist Zhong Shuru once took on the role of a “fish vendor”, spending island summer nights in wellies, battling the stench, hauling and selling fish, and “embedding” herself in the street-level life of market stall-holders. Starting from a fish stall in Hainan, she went on to visit over two hundred wet markets in more than fifty cities across the country, using her feet and hands (and, of course, her palate) to feel the flavour and freshness, the toil and the harvest, the livelihood and the trade, the personal ties and the street-world, the change and the unease. These observations and reflections on food spaces, social structures, and the warmth of everyday life, all orbiting the wet market, ultimately crystallised into her new book—Chinese Wet Markets.

In this edition’s new-book excerpt, let us follow Dr Zhong back to the starting point of her fieldwork and share in the real, vibrant daily life inside the wet market.

On the evening of 14 August 2026 in Shanghai and the evening of 22 August in Beijing, there will be new-book sharing events hosted by the publisher Guangqi Press; on the morning of the 22nd, Dr Zhong will also visit the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market, browsing and livestreaming along the way. For registration and bookings, please see the event preview at the end of this article.

The content of this article is excerpted from the “Prologue” of Chinese Wet Markets. Thanks to the publisher, Guangqi Press, for granting permission.

It was a tropical summer night. A slight breeze had come up, but I felt the air growing stickier. The complex fishy stench of the wet market, mingled with sweat, had seeped into the fibres of my T-shirt and no amount of washing could remove it. It was eight o’clock in the evening, and I had just finished a day selling Spanish mackerel at Yefeng Market. I dragged my weary body along the path back to my rented room. With every step, the water and sweat mixed in my rubber wellies made a squelching sound.

I was invisible, swallowed up by the hurried stream of passers-by. My clothes, paired with the heavy “market stench” clinging to me, made me a fish vendor through and through. No one would have any idea of my real identity: an anthropologist doing fieldwork in a wet market.

◉ The author selling vegetables at the wet market.

In June 2016, having just completed my doctoral qualifying exam and still not quite back to myself, I flew from Texas, in the United States, to Hainan to begin my fieldwork, never expecting I would end up staying for fourteen months. A close friend, Xiaogua, offered for me to stay at her home to save money. I was touched, but I genuinely did not want to be a burden on her for so long.

Summer in City Y blazed under a merciless sun. I searched for housing with growing anxiety; on the streets, everyone seemed to be rushing somewhere. A newcomer with a sense of distance from the place, I wished I had an extra leg so I could walk faster, disappearing and dissolving into the crowd. I had not realised until then that the city-centre streets were full of handshake buildings—rows of narrow apartment blocks built so close together that residents on opposite sides can literally reach across to shake hands. Local property owners in City Y rented entire buildings to agents from the Northeast, who ran small guesthouses at thirty to fifty yuan a night. A few ran them themselves: the family would live on one floor, while the remaining five or six floors were each divided into several tiny single rooms of barely ten or so square metres, let to the ant tribe—migrant workers doing manual labour nearby—at rents ranging from 700 to 1,000 yuan a month.

I, too, became part of the ant tribe, trying to feel the city’s most common pulse in my state of struggle.

With Xiaogua’s help, I finally settled on a small room that faced the street and had a balcony. Compared with the first room I had booked—a second-floor space above a restaurant, thick with cooking-oil fumes and without a ray of sunlight—this one was hard to fault. Just beyond the window, a red-sandalwood tree some four or five storeys tall was within arm’s reach, its leaves rustling in duet with the sea breeze at dawn and dusk—though I later discovered that the tree was also the rats’ express route to my room. I did not enjoy the feeling of drifting, yet the path of study had kept me drifting all along, and this year-something of fieldwork seemed like little more than a layover. Even so, I had to put down roots.

My accommodation was just a ten-minute walk from City Y’s largest wet market—a straight, tree-lined path, a few blocks to go, which was precisely why I chose to live here. It was also convenient for buying daily necessities; all sorts of shops lined the area around the market. For several days in a row, I was a worker ant, dashing back and forth, hauling supplies until I had everything needed to survive. The tropical midday sun was merciless: a mop bucket, a washbasin, a rush mat—too much to carry with two hands. I had to stop every few steps and inch my way home. It was only after buying a single-burner stove, a wok, and fitting up a gas canister that my mind gradually anchored itself. As long as I had a small kitchen to feed myself, I had energy. In the days that followed, in this kitchen with not even an extractor fan, I put practice theory to repeated practice. Seafood names are complex; knowing them cannot rely on written symbols alone—smell, touch, and taste must be engaged to strengthen cross-sensory awareness, what I call “once it passes through your belly, you never forget it.” In my little kitchen, I cooked the flounder that my market stall-friends gave me, and invented Spanish mackerel fish balls so fresh they could make your eyebrows fall off. On the occasional evening I gave myself a day off, I would pick up two swimming crabs at the market, steam them plainly, and that was my snack while watching football. Old friends Liu You and Lin Li came to visit City Y, and my tiny kitchen never once held back the standard of hospitality I could offer. To this day, they still often bring up the food we ate in City Y—especially the giant mantis shrimp with their roe.

◉ Sea fish at Tai Po Market, Hong Kong, in summer.

The landlord and his wife were locals, living on the ground floor with their two daughters; neither of them had a regular job outside the home. The landlord also served as the building’s caretaker and repairman. The second floor, where I lived, somehow crammed in four rooms. The corridor was dim, with pools of water from laundry hung to dry and littered cigarette butts. In the year and more I lived there, I only ever met the occupants of the room next to mine.

The first group was four young women who had come to City Y to work as waitresses at a restaurant nearby. The restaurant rented the room as a staff dormitory; in the barely ten-plus square metres, two sets of double bunk beds were squeezed in, oppressive and cramped. Their room had no outside window, so the door was usually left open for air. Even without looking deliberately, I could often catch a glimpse of them lying on the beds, scrolling through their phones. One day, all four had simply vanished—perhaps the restaurant had closed too.

Before long, an auntie from Hunan who did odd jobs moved in. She was in her fifties, very kind, and we occasionally exchanged fruit. Her son was ill and needed money, so she was always looking for ways to earn. Her room was piled high with scrap and recyclables; collecting refuse was one of her means of livelihood. One day she told me her son’s condition had worsened, that she needed to go back to her hometown, and that she probably would not be coming back.

A while later, a middle-aged couple from Jiangxi became my neighbours. They had run a barbecue stall at the night market before; they had bought the business outright from a fellow townsman who had quit. They went out late and came home early, threading their meat skewers under the shade of the ground-floor trees in preparation for the evening stall—that was when we met and said hello. Later, they rented a shopfront on a busy stretch of road at 5,000 yuan a month, but they still could not escape the urban management officers’ “harassment.” Enforcement had become much stricter than before. Previously, even if they confiscated the barbecue cart for occupying the road, a fifty or a hundred yuan and it would always be returned. However, with the “Double City, Double Repair” urban renewal campaign underway, even when they offered to pay, the officers did not dare accept the money, and several barbecue carts were simply impounded.

This street had a very tropical, languid air, with no clear boundary between day and night. In the daytime, under the shade of trees at the junction, some thirteen shoe-repairers from Jiangxi sat in a row, waiting for business. They were all fellow townspeople, knew one another well, and quietly observed the unspoken rules: no fixed spots—each person rotated one position every day. Beside the shoe stalls, in the afternoon, a few “masters” would also appear. Compared with the cobblers, they were the stars. Within moments, rings of onlookers gathered around them, listening as they spewed saliva, passionately predicting or analysing the winning numbers of the current underground lottery draw.

As night fell, City Y finally came alive. The open-air food stalls were the first to sense the heat gradually ebbing away, pulling out their pink and bright-yellow plastic-backed chairs, which filled quickly with hungry diners. After a meal of Hainanese home cooking, Sichuan-style hot pot, or Northeastern dishes, those who wanted to keep the evening going could stay on the same street, because roving stalls selling barbecue, stir-fried rice noodles, and Hainan bingfen would pop up from all directions. Some shrewd late-night operators simply took over the second half of the night from the same stall that had run the dinner service, neatly solving the venue problem and splitting the rent. At the barbecue stalls, a different story unfolded every night—drunkenness, laughter, and arguments alike.

Before the bright clink of bottles had even faded, it was already caught by the cries of the morning roving vendors. Outside my window, every day, several vendors carrying shoulder-poles with woven bamboo baskets of sea fish would pass by. Their best catch was reserved only for the early risers. After eight o’clock, the urban management officers came on shift, and the game of cat and mouse began. Sometimes a customer had just chosen a fish and not yet paid when the vendor bolted off. But after standing on the street watching for entire mornings on a few occasions, I realised that the roving vendors and the officers were not always at daggers drawn; in fact, their relationship was somewhat like commensalism. Without the roving vendors, the urban management officers probably would not exist either.

* * *

In the early days of my fieldwork, I was in the exhilarating “culture shock” phase, finding everything new and wonderful; even just strolling through different market streets each day was endless fun. The old fishing harbour was close to where I lived; after getting up early and slurping down a bowl of rice noodles, I could reach it in time to digest my breakfast. The harbour was about to be relocated; the waterfront had already been fenced off with barbed wire, and set against the five-star Peninsula Hotel on the other side, it looked even more forlorn and derelict than usual. The owner of the small shop said, “You are only now here—the busiest days have already passed.”

At three or four in the morning, the fishing boats came in, and the sea-fresh trade was bustling. I was not in a hurry, knowing I would be visiting frequently before the relocation. This was City Y’s oldest fishing harbour. In the air, the dirty water and stinking fish from the overnight trading mingled with the salt-damp sea spray, releasing a fishy stench even I found hard to bear. Because of the impending relocation, the hygiene was deplorable: fish offal was strewn across the ground, dead fish and rubbish littered the potholes, and the surface had been stained pitch black. By eight or nine in the morning, only three or five retail fish stalls remained. The stall-holders wore conical bamboo hats, tight-fitting long-sleeved floral shirts (to protect against tanning), and rubber wellies—the typical dress of a fisherwoman.

◉ The docks in Hainan wake at midnight; before dawn, the fisherwomen already have flashlights in their mouths as they sort the catch.

During my fieldwork, I was mistaken for all sorts of people; a journalist was one of them. Two fisherwomen running a stall thought I was a reporter and quickly grabbed my arm to vent their grievances. They were sisters-in-law (wives of brothers), and one had injured her hand a few days earlier while cutting fish—her hand was still wrapped in a bandage. One of them had a strong urge to speak; she rushed through something in a rapid stream. In that moment, I regretted not having improved my clumsy Hainanese sooner. Her Mandarin was no better than my Hainanese; seeing me nod, she only spoke with more fervour, and I was anxious and helpless. Fortunately, the younger one picked up on the situation and jumped in, easing the awkwardness. As it turned out, they were deeply unhappy about the fishing harbour’s relocation.

The old fishing harbour was a natural harbour, right in the heart of the city centre, and it was now slated for demolition to make way for tourism development. The new harbour was more than forty kilometres from the city, and it was a man-made port prone to silt deposition. Not only was it inconvenient to use, but for the seafood vendors in the city, transport costs would rise considerably, and their business would be greatly affected. Normally they did wholesale and also some retail; moving to the new harbour, the retail side would be very hard to sustain, they estimated. The old fishermen had collectively petitioned the government not to relocate, to no avail. So they hoped I could help by covering the story and raising more voices to preserve the old harbour.

An anthropologist in the field has to face many such requests, but one must be wary of overpromising. After I candidly admitted I was a student, they were not too disappointed, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The two sisters-in-law then murmured to each other: Hainanese women have it hard; women are exhausted. In the fieldwork that followed, I heard this phrase again and again, and came to feel its deeper weight in their everyday lives.

In the first two months of my fieldwork, I spent most of my time observing the wet markets in City Y. I carefully walked through all thirty-odd wet markets, large and small. Some suburban markets were so remote that a round trip consumed a whole day. While visiting and observing, I seized every opportunity to find someone willing to chat. At first, I did not follow a fixed interview outline; I simply relied on being present and piecing together fragmented conversations, trying to begin building in my mind a map of all the complexity. I am not a “social butterfly”; my go-to trick was to buy something at a stall and then open a conversation, which never failed—the only downside being my weight. All the stuff I bought browsing the market each day had to be burned off, after all!

Yefeng Market, the closest to my accommodation, was City Y’s most famous and oldest market, and the primary research site in my plan. But my first encounters at Yefeng Market left me completely in the dark. The market had over three hundred stalls; the busiest areas were the sea fish and live seafood sections. Local residents preferred sea fish; they considered live seafood such as lobster and abalone to be for tourists. It was only later that I learned most of the live seafood in City Y came from farms in Zhanjiang or from Huangsha Seafood Market in Guangzhou. Guangdong tourists who travelled far to reach City Y were, with high probability, eating their home-town seafood. In the morning the sea fish section was lively while the live seafood section was quiet; by the lunchtime and evening meal rush, it was the live seafood section that drew tourists streaming in, shoulder to shoulder. Walking through the market, I was naturally taken for a tourist and was stopped more than once by “seafood women,” asked if I wanted to buy live seafood for them to cook.

◉ A fish stall at Yefeng Market (Hainan, 2016)

In this market, the air carried, beyond the mingled smells of fish, meat, earth, and raw vegetables that make up the distinctive wet-market stench, a faint undercurrent of tension. At first glance, the level of trust between people seemed very low. City Y’s live-seafood overcharging of tourists had a reputation that travelled far. I saw out-of-town visitors bringing spring scales to buy seafood—some gripping bags of packed prawns and squeezing, squeezing, trying to shake out all the water, others confronting vendors on the spot about short weights. When that happened, the seafood vendor would feign anger: “These shells are heavy to begin with. There’s a public verification scale at the entrance—if you don’t believe me, go weigh it yourself!” Most tourists, seeing this display, would say nothing. The seafood vendors sized up their customers; when they encountered someone who looked inattentive and “easy to fleece,” they indeed worked quickly, weighing the small basket of seafood along with the product before the customer could react, skimming two liang off every jin. When a customer was watching the scale, the vendor’s face didn’t change at all, heart not racing; a standard tare deduction was all it took to pass.

The aunties selling abalone retail from small plastic basins moved with lightning speed on their feet; no matter how fast I walked, they could catch up. “Ladies, want abalone? Ten yuan for three,” one of them said. She bought her stock from a seafood shop outside the market at sixty yuan a jin, roughly twenty pieces. Selling at ten yuan for three, she made only a few yuan profit per jin. My instinct told me not to take this at face value, because the gross margin on seafood is not that low. She went on: “Business is tough. The steps I walk in the market every day would be enough to get me all the way back to my hometown. I don’t even want to do this anymore.” But every time I went browsing at Yefeng Market, I could still spot her, and I saw her quarrelling with other abalone vendors over poaching customers. The more I watched these scenes, the more questions piled up in my head.

In the early days of my fieldwork, I had to endure a great deal of coldness, rejection, and mockery every day. Being highly educated and a young woman in a wet market could only create more barriers. For a vendor, a customer who buys nothing offers no profit and is even something of an unknown—worthy of the highest degree of wariness. The trick of buying something to start a conversation did not work at Yefeng Market. Their business was simply too good; they would brush me off with a couple of perfunctory words, because they were busy attending to a new customer.

However, as I kept turning up at Yefeng Market, the owner of the grocery shop near the entrance recognised me and was very curious about me. After a few words, I casually asked how much the stall rent was per month. She immediately became alert and finally voiced the suspicion in her mind, asking back: “Boss, are you here to do business?”

I had short hair at the time and looked sharp and capable; she assumed I was planning to do wholesale in the market or rent a stall and compete with them. I quickly made clear who I was, explaining that I was a postgraduate student interested in market consumption, here to do social research and understand people’s daily lives. How to express my anthropological intentions as honestly and precisely as possible was a real challenge. In the first two months, I had repeated this explanation in numerous visit scenarios, but almost no one really understood what I was trying to do. A casual browse with no commercial interest clearly could not be slotted into their cognitive map. They probably did not understand, either: what knowledge could possibly come from day after day at a wet market?

I also suffered a Waterloo in my personal history of grocery shopping. After my attempts at interviewing failed, I decided to satisfy my appetite first. I picked out two horse-dung sea urchins from a young man’s stall from Zhanjiang, intending to savour this delicacy with a reverent and excited heart. But the moment I cut one open, I was dumbfounded: it was all foul, muddy water—there was no roe inside at all. When I opened the first one, I thought I had just been unlucky; I had not expected the second to be the same. This deeply hurt my love of sea urchins, and I finally understood why the seafood processing shops could only make steamed egg with sea urchin: apart from empty shells, there was really very little substance to be found.

I went back to argue with the young man from Zhanjiang. He said all the sea urchins here were like that; if I bought from other stalls, they would be the same. Still indignant, I asked where he got his stock. He responded with a look of disdain: “That’s not something I can tell you, and it’s none of your business anyway.” This response pricked my anthropologist’s “dignity.” Tracing the source and getting to the bottom of things is, after all, a core skill in anthropology. Just because he wouldn’t tell me, did that mean I couldn’t find out for myself? One day, I would find out exactly who had stolen my sea urchin roe. This was my dual pledge as both consumer and researcher.

The hustle and bustle of Yefeng Market was, for me, a locked door at first. The wall of distrust with the vendors and the sea urchin incident also made me realise that the trading chains, cooperation and competition, business strategies, and daily lives behind the bustle were, in fact, shrouded in mist. The method of accompanying observation had reached its limits; I could no longer access deeper or more detailed information. It was time to take another step forward…

How did Dr Zhong then “station” herself at the wet market fish stall?

Did she finally catch the “sea urchin thief”?

Why do Chinese people love browsing wet markets so much? Do young people still go to wet markets?

How have Chinese wet markets managed to stand firm in the wave of the “supermarket revolution”?

What social structures and everyday wisdom do wet markets connect?

Join Dr Zhong and her new book in exploring the resilience and vitality of Chinese wet markets!

Chinese Wet Markets

Author: Zhong Shuru

Guangqi Press | Published July 2026

Ten years, over fifty cities, more than two hundred wet markets……

Based on panoramic observation and fieldwork of urban wet markets across the country,

exploring the history of wet markets, vendor communities, the supply chains behind them, food consumption culture, urban public management, and more.

– Contents –

– About the Author –

Associate Professor at the Sun Yat-sen University School of Tourism, PhD in Anthropology from Texas A&M University.

Long-standing research on wet market culture, sustainable food systems, and gastronomy tourism; continuously exploring in both research and practice how food can serve as a medium to reconnect people with food, nature, society, and place.

– Event Preview –

14 August · Shanghai