A dazzling world, yet she does not glance about

As a member of the post-85 generation, before I gave birth to my daughter Shu’er at the age of 30, I rarely went to wet markets and found it hard to understand why my mother insisted on pulling a little handcart to the market rain or shine, why she so often told me, with great delight, about what she had seen and heard while buying groceries, or why a cut of pork belly with the right balance of fat and lean, five yuan cheaper per catty, could make her happy as a child.

Later, I became a full-time mum and felt trapped at home. The wet market was one of the few social spaces I had, so whenever I went to buy groceries, I always took Shu’er with me. Before Shu’er was two, she had exceptional energy and loved to run off; every time we went shopping, I carried her in my arms, afraid that the surging crowd might sweep her away. From the age of four, Shu’er could help me carry things when we went to the wet market. She had astonishing arm strength from birth, and at three could lift 5 litres of Jinlongyu blended cooking oil. It was rare to see children wandering around wet markets, and even rarer to see one who could help their parents carry things. After years of regular visits, many of the stallholders remembered this little tiger of a child.

Shu’er was diagnosed with autism at the age of five, with a mild intellectual disability. It was only after this that I really began to understand her. Now I am more deliberate about bringing her to the wet market. This is an important place in her life that she cannot do without. Buying groceries is also a way for her to maintain normal social functioning and prevent regression.

Shu’er’s Growth

Due to her illness, her interests are narrow. In the wet market, all manner of stalls stand in dense ranks, and vendors’ calls rise and fall: “Watermelons! Genuine Yongjia Shatian watermelons, not sweet, no charge”, “Bargains! Bargains! Freshly dug lotus root, still muddy, five yuan a big bag” — none of it stirs even a hint of interest in her. Pork is the only red meat she likes. When she sees the butcher slicing pork belly and chopping pork ribs and pork bones on a thick round chopping board, she lights up, repeating “pork, meat” over and over.

For some people with autism who experience sensory processing disorder or sensory overload, visiting a wet market is no easy thing. The shrill looped loudspeaker calls at the stalls, the brushes of strangers in shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, electric bikes suddenly appearing from behind, and the fishy smell of seafood, chicken and duck can make them tense, averse, dazed, or send them screaming and wanting to flee.

From the age of two to twelve, over the course of her wet market visits, Shu’er has grown day by day. She once feared cats and dogs for six long years. In open-air wet markets, stray cats and dogs often dart out; especially when a large, pure-black stray dog appeared, she would grip my hand so tightly, and in her panic she would stomp in place. People with autism seek stability and find it hard to adapt to sudden changes. For her, who is afraid of cats and dogs, the wet market is a place full of unknown dangers. She is like a “cat-and-dog radar”: even when they make no sound and have not come near, she can always sense a nearby threat at once. Last year I took her back to our rural hometown for 20 days; she spent them playing with Grandpa’s little mongrel, morning and evening. Now the desensitisation has largely worked — at least if we meet a dog in the road, she can pass it calmly.

Until just before Shu’er started Year 1, she had mild sensory processing disorder. When she pushed the little handcart to the wet market, sometimes, if she hurried and the wheels bumped a passer-by, she did not know how to stop and apologise; she would just wheel off. She also could not empathise with the injured person’s anger, pain, or other emotions. On weekends especially, she pushed the handcart in a bumpy, unsteady way, easily touching people or hitting obstacles. After she started primary school, with repeated practice, she can now handle the little handcart with ease, and if she bumps into someone, she will blurt out “Sorry”.

Her Favourite Stalls

At first, the only wet market stall Shu’er liked was the zongzi stall at the far end of the wet market. She loved double-yolk pork zongzi, and buying zongzi became the reason she went to the wet market. Each zongzi was seven yuan; seven a week made forty-nine yuan, which is to this day the only multiplication sum Shu’er has been able to do. After starting primary school, she learned to get up early and set a timer on the gas cooker to cook a zongzi for herself; she has kept this habit up for four years. She eats only the salted duck egg yolk, not the meat, and sucks the juices from the meat before spitting it out. But if she buys a double-yolk zongzi, with no meat, there is no fatty, oily aroma from the meat. “Your daughter is a foodie, she knows how to eat zongzi,” the zongzi stall owner told me.

◉Shu’er has no sense of the big picture; she focuses on details, and her interest in things is far stronger than her interest in people. The wet market in her drawings is vivid, abstract, and full of small fragments. The picture shows the zongzi stall drawn by Shu’er.

After spending a long time in the wet market, besides the zongzi stall, she also took a liking to a fish stall and a vegetable stall. The reason she liked both was that the landlady was pretty. “Auntie is pretty.” At four, when she still spoke unclearly, she was already obsessed with looks.

The landlady at the fish stall was still a girl as fresh and lively as a green onion when I first met her. This was the first fish stall in the wet market to offer a fish-slicing service for shuizhuyu. The green-onion girl put on tall wellington boots every day, wore rubber gloves, tied on a rubber apron, and used an electric fish scale scraper to scrape the scales off the fish. Because of this stall, many customers no longer ordered shuizhuyu or feiteng yu as takeaway, and chose to make them at home instead. On weekend mornings, when business was at its peak, the green-onion girl worked alongside three other male workers. She was in charge of scooping up the fish; when they were short of hands, she would also kill the fish, and fish scales stuck in her hair without her even noticing. When each customer left, they would also pick up a catty of mung bean sprouts and two cucumbers.

Shu’er only liked yellow croaker, but no stall in the wet market sold live yellow croaker; all the yellow croaker was chilled. She was not interested in any of the live fish sold at the fish stalls. Only when a fishmonger occasionally opened a chilled cabinet and there were a few hongxing ban, shijiu gong, and sea bream on the ice—red-toned sea-caught fish—would she walk over for a look. But she liked to crouch in front of the fish stall, staring at the frogs, bullfrogs, and field frogs in the mesh bags, their big eyes bulging as they hopped about, and at the soft-shelled turtles and small turtles in the large red plastic tubs.

◉On the left is Shu’er’s drawing of sea bream and hongxing ban; the picture on the right is of the field frog in the mesh bag.

Sometimes, when there were few people waiting in the queue to have fish killed, she would stand to one side and watch the shop assistant at the worktop going through the process of preparing a fish: slap it to stun it — scrape off the scales — split the head open and cut the fish vertically in half — nail one half of the fish to the board and slice the flesh into thin pieces — peel off the skin — cut the main spine into sections. The “lingchi” of a fish, or a bullfrog being skinned, its sectioned body jerking in a knee-jerk reflex — she watched it all with great interest.

The vegetable stall she liked was, in fact, a wet market stall with relatively few vegetable varieties, not very fresh and a bit pricey. But every time we went, the landlady would praise Shu’er: “You’re such a good girl, you can help Mum buy vegetables now.” The Shu’er I had once carried in my arms was now almost as tall as me. She would now and then sigh that Shu’er was growing too fast, just as the Wenzhou saying goes: “The shepherd’s purse by the cesspit grows fast.”

The landlady kept black rabbits and white rabbits. The rabbits had a big litter, and both rabbit cages were a bit crowded. Every time Shu’er passed this vegetable stall, she would take the wilted vegetable leaves the owner gave her and go coax the rabbits to play. She would always ask, “Where have the baby rabbits gone?” She could not understand that the soft, squishy baby rabbits, with their slightly translucent pink skin and eyes not yet open, would one day grow up.

Shu’er, Stubborn and Simple

Most children with autism are picky eaters, and it is not easy to keep their diet nutritionally balanced. The range of foods they can accept is limited, and so are the acceptable ways of preparing a given food.

Taking Shu’er as an example, she only eats the yolk of a soft-boiled egg. When she was little, to get the “meat-or-nothing” girl to eat vegetables, I racked my brains, buying vegetables from every corner of the vegetable stall. After a year, I was sure she could only eat Chinese cabbage, greens, water spinach and cauliflower, and even then only the leaves and florets, not the stalks. “Mum, how many pieces?” “Five.” “Three pieces, is that all right?” “All right.” Every time she ate leaves, she haggled with me. She ate one piece at a time, counting each one.

Shu’er also has no sense of choosing vegetables; she probably cannot tell which vegetables and fruit are fresh and which are wilted. When I see locally uncommon vegetable and mushroom varieties, such as basil leaves, chayote and red pine mushroom, I feel like buying some to try. When buying tomatoes, I pick them up and sniff; if I can smell the tomato aroma and they feel just the right firmness when I squeeze them, I feel the joy of having found a little treasure.

Shu’er cannot develop a sense of novelty about food, and she has no fixation on eating seasonal vegetables. All year round, at the fruit stall, she only wants baba gan and watermelon. In summer, she would give anything to carry home a 3-catty Qilin watermelon every day. In winter and spring, she only eats baba gan. She is especially patient when eating baba gan: she breaks off the segments one by one, then peels away the white pith thread by thread before putting it in her mouth. One baba gan can take her more than ten minutes.

◉Shu’er’s drawing of the watermelon stall.

For some people who have been buying groceries in wet markets year after year, sometimes they feel they do not know what to buy. Even though there is such a dazzling array of goods, they complain, “In the end, it is always the same few vegetables; buying groceries is really hard.” Some older customers visit every wet market in the city to learn the ropes, and deliberately take the bus to a wet market far from home to buy groceries. Now every urban wet market has a supermarket inside, and the prices in the fresh-produce sections of supermarkets are generally cheaper than those at the wet market stalls. Older people do not buy bagged rice; they only buy loose rice weighed in the supermarket, three or five catties each time (more than that, they cannot carry it). Loose rice can be about two yuan cheaper per catty. My next-door neighbour is a full-time mum born in the 1990s. Thrifty and careful with the household, she rides her electric bike to three urban wet markets to buy meat, vegetables and soya products, each at a different market. She can always find good-value ingredients.

The narrow interests associated with autism can, in a sense, also be “single-mindedness”, and this brings convenience to Shu’er’s life. Shu’er may never learn to buy groceries carefully and economically. Her wet market visits are more like stocking up. Before leaving home, the shopping list is already in her head: pork belly, Chinese cabbage, zongzi and baba gan. Then, in the wet market, she locks on to the stalls where the goods are, and basically always buys from the specific stallholders she usually goes to. She does not look left and right, nor does she linger. She is a stubborn yet simple customer. Both of us are absent-minded, but she has never once forgotten to pay and take away the vegetables she likes.

In fact, there are now many alternatives for solving the problem of what to eat, such as online fresh-produce services, ordering takeaway, or eating out.

But I do not want Shu’er’s life to become so convenient that she turns into a girl who only orders malatang takeaway, never goes to wet markets, never cooks and never washes dishes. On rainy days, in blazing sun, pushing the little handcart to the wet market to buy groceries, squeezing through the crowds, listening to the stallholders hawking their wares at the top of their voices—only then can life feel more grounded.

As for how to choose fresh, plump ingredients, how to handle and store them after buying them, how to buy nutritionally balanced ingredients within a budget… there is a great deal of know-how in wet market shopping. Shu’er still has many grocery-buying skills to learn.

– This is Foodthink’s 832 nd original article –

Foodthink

Author

Hongshu Lian

Full-time grocery shopping and cooking, part-time writing. I love visiting wet markets; there’s hardly any anger, depression or anxiety that a trip to the wet market can’t resolve.

All images in the article were created by Shu’er.

Editor: Xiaodan

Layout: Xiaoshu

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