A Dazzling World, but She Never Looks Around

As someone born after 1985, I rarely visited the wet market before I had my daughter Shu’er at the age of thirty. I could hardly understand why my mother insisted on pulling her little trolley to the market come rain or shine, why she would regale me so delightedly with tales from the stalls, or why a well-marbled cut of pork belly could make her grin like a child simply because it was five yuan cheaper per half-kilo.

Later, I became a stay-at-home mother, cooped up at home all day. The wet market was one of the few social settings still open to me, and I always took Shu’er with me when I shopped. Before she turned two, Shu’er had boundless energy and loved to dash about, so each time we went to the market I held her close, terrified the surging crowds might sweep us apart. From the age of four, she was able to carry things for me at the wet market. She was born with remarkably strong arms—by three, she could already lift a five-litre bottle of Arawana blended cooking oil. It is rare for small children to visit a wet market at all, and rarer still for them to help their parents carry the shopping. After years of regular visits, many stallholders had come to recognise this rather bold little girl.

Shu’er was diagnosed with autism at the age of five, along with a mild intellectual disability. It was only after that that I truly began to understand her. Now, I deliberately bring her to the wet market with me. Here is a place her life simply cannot do without. Shopping there is her means of maintaining normal social functioning and preventing regression.

Shu’er’s Growth

Due to her condition, her interests are narrow. In the wet market, stalls of every kind stand shoulder to shoulder, and vendors’ calls rise and fall one after another: “Watermelons for sale! Genuine Yongjia Shatian watermelons—if they’re not sweet, you don’t pay!” “Grab a bargain! Grab a bargain! Freshly dug lotus root, still muddy—five yuan for a big bag!” None of it stirs even a flicker of interest in her. Pork is the only red meat she loves. When she sees the butcher at his thick, round butcher’s block, slicing pork belly and chopping up pork ribs and marrow bones, she lights up, chanting “Pork! Eat pork!” over and over.

For some autistic people living with sensory processing disorder and sensory overload, visiting a wet market is no easy feat. The harsh, looping megaphone calls at the stalls, being jostled and brushed against by strangers in the crowds, electric scooters bearing down from behind without warning, the fishy, poultry stench from the seafood and poultry sections—all of it can trigger anxiety, revulsion, freezing, or screaming and a desperate urge to flee.

From the age of two to twelve, Shu’er grew a little more each day through the routine of visiting the wet market. For six long years, she was terrified of cats and dogs. At the open-air wet market, strays often darted out from between the stalls, and especially when a large, solid-black stray dog appeared, she would grip my hand so tightly her knuckles went white, stamping her feet in panic right where she stood. Autistic people crave stability and find it very hard to adapt to sudden changes. For her, someone so frightened of cats and dogs, the wet market was a place full of unknown dangers. She was like a “cat-and-dog radar”—even if neither made a sound nor came near her, she always picked up on a nearby threat before anyone else could. Last year I took her back to the village where I grew up for twenty days, where she spent day and night playing with Grandpa’s small village dog. Now I’d say the desensitisation is essentially a success—at the very least, if she encounters a dog on the road now, she can simply walk past.

Until she started Year 1 at primary school, Shu’er had mild sensory processing disorder. Pushing the little trolley to the wet market, sometimes when she walked too fast the wheels would clip a passerby, but she didn’t understand to stop and apologise—she would just march on. Nor could she empathise with the anger, pain, or frustration of the person she’d hurt. At weekends especially, she’d bump and jostle along with the trolley, easily nudging into people or crashing into barriers. After starting school, through repeated practice, she can now handle the trolley with ease, and when she bumps into someone, “Sorry!” comes naturally from her lips.

Her Favourite Stalls

At first, the only stall Shu’er liked at the wet market was the zongzi shop at the far end. She adored double-egg-yolk pork zongzi, and buying them became her reason for visiting the market. A zongzi cost seven yuan; seven a week came to forty-nine yuan—the only multiplication sum she has ever been able to work out. After starting school, she learned to get up early, set the gas hob timer, and boil herself a zongzi, a habit she has kept for four years now. She only ever ate the salted egg yolk, never the meat, though she would suck the juices from the pork filling and then spit it out. But if she chose a double-yolk zongzi without any pork, the rich, fatty aroma of rendered pork fat was gone altogether. “Your daughter’s a real foodie—she knows exactly how to eat zongzi,” the stall owner once told me.

◉ In Shu’er’s world, there is no big picture—only detail—and objects fascinate her far more than people do. Her depictions of the wet market are vivid, abstract, and finely fragmented. Pictured: the zongzi shop, drawn by Shu’er.

After so many trips to the wet market, in addition to the zongzi shop, she came to favour a fish stall and a vegetable stall. Her reason for liking both was that the stallholder women were beautiful. “The auntie is pretty,” she said. At four years old, still unable to pronounce her words clearly, she was already a devoted sucker for pretty faces.

When I first got to know the lady at the fish stall, she was a fresh, dewy girl, like a sprig of green scallion. Hers was the first stall in the wet market to offer a slicing service for poached fish fillets. “Scallion Girl” put on her knee-high wellington boots every day, pulled on rubber gloves and a rubber apron, and scaled fish with an electric scaler. Thanks to her stall, many customers stopped ordering poached fish fillets or sizzling fish from takeaway restaurants and chose to cook it at home instead. On weekend mornings, when business was at its busiest, Scallion Girl worked alongside three male employees—she was in charge of scooping fish from the tanks, and when they were short-handed she also helped gut and clean them, not even noticing fish scales clinging to her hair. Every customer who left would pick up a half-kilo of mung bean sprouts and two cucumbers on the way out.

Shu’er only loved yellow croaker, but no stall in the wet market sold them live—they were all chilled. She had no interest in the live fish on sale at the fish stall. Only on the rare occasions when a vendor opened a freezer box and laid a few red-toned sea-caught fish on the ice—red-spotted grouper, scorpionfish, sea bream—would she step forward for a look. But she loved squatting in front of the fish stall, watching the wide-eyed, bounding frogs, bullfrogs and edible frogs wriggling in their nets, or the soft-shell turtles and little pond turtles in the big red plastic basin.

◉ Left: Shu’er’s drawings of sea bream and red-spotted grouper. Right: an edible frog in a net.

On days when few people were queuing for fish to be prepared, she would stand off to the side and watch the workers at the bench follow the routine: throw the fish to stun it—scale it—split the head and cut it lengthwise in half—pin one half to the board and slice the flesh into thin fillets—peel off the skin—chop the backbone into segments. Watching the fish being “lingchiled”—the ancient death by a thousand cuts—or witnessing a bullfrog skinned and chopped, its legs still twitching with a knee-jerk reflex—she watched it all with rapt fascination.

The vegetable stall she liked was, in truth, one of those with fewer varieties, produce that was less than fresh, and prices a touch on the steep side. Yet every time we went, the stallholder would praise Shu’er: “What a good girl! Helping mummy do the shopping!” The baby I once cradled in my arms had grown almost as tall as I was. She would also sigh at how fast Shu’er was shooting up, quoting a Wenzhou saying: “Shepherd’s purse by the privy never fails to grow the fastest.”

The stallholder kept black and white rabbits, and the rabbits had produced a large litter, making both hutches rather cramped. Every time Shu’er passed by the vegetable stall, she would take the wilted leaves the owner gave her and tease the rabbits. She always asked, “Where have the baby bunnies gone?” She could not fathom that the tiny, squishy pink newborns—skin faintly translucent, eyes still sealed shut—would one day grow up.

Stubborn and Uncomplicated Shu’er

Most autistic children are fussy eaters, and getting them to maintain a balanced diet is no easy task. The range of foods they will accept is limited, and even the cooking methods they tolerate for a given food are restricted.

Take Shu’er, for instance: she only ever wants the yolk of a soft-boiled egg with runny yolk. When she was small, coaxing this girl who “won’t eat a meal without meat” into eating vegetables took every last ounce of ingenuity. I bought produce from every vegetable stall, and after a full year I confirmed that the only vegetables she could eat were napa cabbage, bok choy, water spinach and cauliflower—and only the leaves and florets, never the stems. “Mummy, how many pieces?” “Five.” “Can it be three?” “All right.” Every time she ate the leaves, she haggled with me. One piece eaten, one piece counted.

Shu’er has no instinct for picking produce and probably cannot tell the difference between fresh fruit and vegetables and limp, wilted ones. When I spot varieties of vegetables or mushrooms that are uncommon locally—basil leaves, chayote, wine cap stropharia, and the like—I like to buy a little to try something new. When I pick up a tomato, I smell it first; if I catch that distinctive tomato fragrance, then give it a squeeze and find it neither too hard nor too soft, I feel the joy of having stumbled upon a treasure.

Shu’er feels no curiosity about new foods and has no obsession with eating seasonal produce. All year round, when she goes to the fruit stall she wants only ponkan mandarins and watermelons. In summer, she wishes she could hug a kilo-and-a-half Qilin watermelon home every single day. In winter and spring she eats nothing but ponkan mandarins. She peels them with extraordinary patience—breaking off segment after segment, then picking away every last sliver of pith before slipping the flesh into her mouth. A single ponkan mandarin can take her well over ten minutes.

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

For those who shop the wet market year in, year out, there are days when, despite stalls overflowing with produce, they cannot decide what to buy and grumble, “Buying and buying, it always comes down to the same few things—grocery shopping is truly a struggle!” Then there are the elderly regulars who visit every wet market across the city until they know the lay of the land, deliberately catching a bus to a market far from home just to do their shopping. Nowadays, every wet market in the city centre houses a supermarket within its premises. Prices in the supermarket’s fresh-food section are generally lower than at the wet market stalls. Older shoppers will not buy bagged rice—only rice sold loose by weight at the supermarket—and take three to five half-kilos at a time (anything more is too heavy to carry), saving roughly two yuan per half-kilo on the loose rice. My next-door neighbour is a post-1990s stay-at-home mother; thrifty and resourceful, she rides her electric scooter to three separate wet markets across the city to buy meat, vegetables, and bean products respectively, and she always manages to find good quality at a fair price.

The narrow interests that come with autism are, in a sense, a kind of single-mindedness—and one that works in Shu’er’s favour. She may never learn to shop with a penny-pinching eye; her trips to the wet market are more like a targeted sweep. Before we leave the house, the shopping list is already fixed in her mind: pork belly, napa cabbage, zongzi, and ponkan mandarins. At the market she zeroes in on the stalls where those items are, more or less going straight to the specific vendors she always visits—no looking around, no lingering. She is a stubborn, uncomplicated shopper. We are both absent-minded types, yet she has never once forgotten to collect her chosen produce after paying.

These days, there are plenty of alternatives for sorting out meals—fresh-food e-commerce, ordering takeaway, or eating out at a restaurant.

But I do not want Shu’er’s life to become too convenient—to turn into a girl who can only order malatang from a delivery app, never sets foot in the wet market, never cooks, never washes a dish. On a rainy day or under blazing sun, pushing the little trolley to the market, jostling through the crowds, listening to the stallholders bellowing their wares at the top of their lungs—that is what makes life feel grounded.

As for how to pick out fresh, plump ingredients, how to prepare and store them once you are home, how to get a nutritionally balanced haul within a budget—there is real wisdom hidden in wet market shopping. Shu’er has many more shopping skills still to learn.

– This is Foodthink’s original article No. 832 –

Foodthink

Author

Sweet Potato Face

Full-time shopper and cook, part-time writer. Loves strolling the wet market—there is no anger, depression, or anxiety that a trip to the wet market cannot fix.

All images in this article are by Shu’er.

Editor: Xiao Dan

Layout: Xiao Shu

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Based on panoramic observation and fieldwork across urban wet markets in various cities,

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