Urumqi market

I go to the market near our house almost every day.  It’s just around the corner, on the way home from the library where I write and the gym where I swim and lift weights. 

This is a habit I’ve developed since we moved.  Our kitchen is small.  The fridge is narrow, the cupboard space is limited, and we have just enough counter space for food preparation and air-drying dishes.  We can’t keep much food on hand unless we add a lot of storage, and we don’t have space for that, either.  I’ve adapted by keeping less food in the fridge, planning meals one or two days at a time, and picking up a few things every day before I go home.

Our local market has a bit of an upscale feel.  The stone floors are always clean; gleaming.  Our neighbourhood is an expensive one to live in, and it’s a popular weekend destination, so I suspect the market was renovated with tourist foot traffic in mind.  It’s spread out over two floors, and there are separate stalls for each category of produce.  Near the entrance, a florist sells live plants and bouquets.  The main floor has a long vegetable counter heaped with green and orange and purple and red and yellow.  Parallel to that is the fruit counter, where tidy rows of figs sit next to toppling pyramids of mandarin oranges and Asian pears. The fruit vendor also sells dry goods: bags of rice, bottles of soy sauce and vinegar and cooking oil, bulk peanuts.  They spill out over the edges of their shelves in the square of floor space they’re allotted.  Tucked into the corner beside him is a smaller counter where a woman sells tofu.  There is a fish counter with a backdrop of rectangular tanks, each one occupied by a different creature: crabs, eels, fish, crayfish, shrimp.  There are fish there that I didn’t know existed.  There are more varieties of shrimp and crayfish than I could imagine, in the tanks as well as in shallow Styrofoam pans filled with water.  The water is never still, always tumultuous with tangled crustacean legs, or the twining bodies of eels.

Today I’m buying fruit, tofu, and eggs.  The guy who sells eggs is upstairs, so I go to him first.  I walk past other vendors on my way to his stall.  They display a myriad of cuts of pork, and the man behind the display cases is hacking into a side of pig to dismantle it for sale.  He uses a cleaver and slams it down into the animal’s still flank, making the display case quake.  Opposite the egg stall is poultry: chicken tenders, breasts, and wings, but also kidneys, hearts, and feet, as well as whole and half ducks.

The man at the egg stall recognizes me by now.  It’s 3:30 pm, and he is sitting in a chair, leaning back, holding his phone above his face and swiping occasionally at its screen.

“Ni hao,” I say, lifting a hand to draw his attention.

He smiles and stands up, nodding.  The man is older than middle aged, although I don’t know how old exactly.  He has silvering hair and warm eyes and his face crinkles pleasantly around his smile. 

I point to the pile of ordinary chicken eggs, front and center amid a wide array of duck eggs, quail eggs, pigeon eggs, and other varieties that I can’t identify.  The eggs I’ve been getting lately have been smaller than usual, with dark yellow-orange yolks.

Unlike the eggs I buy in cartons at Canadian grocery stores, the eggs here are flecked with downy feathers and bits of what I can only imagine is chicken shit.  Whatever: the eggs we get at home have a veneer of cleanliness, but we would also be ill-advised to lick their shells.

The man takes a plastic bag from below the display and starts to fill it with eggs.  I watch and smile, then lift a hand to indicate when there are enough eggs in the bag.  He weighs it and I pay: under $4 for just over a kilogram of eggs.  I smile and wave and say, “Bye bye,” which, I’ve learned, is how people here usually say goodbye to each other.  Goodbye in Mandarin is zaijian, but I don’t hear people say it very often.  The egg vendor waves and smiles, returning to his chair.

Downstairs, I stop at the tofu stand.  As with the egg stand, the display contains many different things that I can’t name.  There are packages of fresh noodles that I often buy, alongside packages that state in English that they are “vegetarian chicken.”  Seitan, maybe?  I haven’t been brave enough yet to try it.  There are soft and firm varieties of tofu, some packaged, some in huge bricks laid out in deep stainless-steel pans, from which the woman behind the counter will cut a square for me today.  There are other things, too, that I think might be variations of stinky tofu, and I also haven’t been brave enough to try those.  I’ve seen short videos of people making one version of stinky tofu, letting it mold over with furry white and then brining it until it looks slick and slimy.  As a blue cheese lover, I’m sure it’s delicious, but I can’t quite get myself to try it yet.

“Ni hao,” I say.  “Ummm… laodoufu?”  Firm tofu.  I’m only comfortable cooking with firmer tofu.  I hope I’m saying it right.

She looks at me silently for a moment and then stands up and points at the pan of fresh tofu.  I nod and smile.

The woman doesn’t smile back.  Maybe it’s just her demeanor.  Maybe she gets annoyed by the foreigner who only ever spends five yuan on tofu. 

“Lao doufu,” she says, slowly, emphasizing the tones that I’d butchered a moment earlier.  I know I’m blushing.  She doesn’t make eye contact.  She almost smiles.

She comes around the end of the counter and slides back the glass covering the display.    She touches her first finger to the cloudy liquid in the tofu pan, wetting it.  She dabs it against her thumb and uses her dampened fingers to open a plastic bag, into which she slides the jiggling brick of tofu.  Even firm tofu here is soft relative to what I’ve cooked with in Canada.  At first I felt nervous about using it, but I came around quickly.  The texture is silky smooth, and it tastes almost like cheese.  It breaks apart in the pan when I cook and becomes ragged and soaked through with flavour.  I think it would hold its shape better if I had better tofu-cooking technique, but it doesn’t really matter.

I scan the woman’s QR code and tap in the amount I owe.  Less than one Canadian dollar. 

Next to the tofu stall is the fruit stand.  The man who runs it is broad-shouldered and a bit plump.  He has a pleasantly round face, and he smiles easily.  He greets me and points to some of the fresh fruit laid out beside the scale.  Figs, sitting lightly in the individual divots of their platter.  An unruly heap of small plums.  Avocados, one of the few things that cost more here than at home.  I smile and gesture to ask for a plastic bag.  He hands me one and I fill it with the small plums.  I pick up a bunch of bananas, about fifteen or sixteen of them, which might last us through the next four days.  Kids eat a lot of fruit.  Two avocados, because the twins love them right now and I worry about whether they eat enough.  The man weighs the fruit, and I pay and smile again before I turn to leave.

I look down into my bag as I step onto the sidewalk.  The plums press against the opaque bag they’re in, dark purple where they’re damp and showing through.  They’re in season, and I know how good they’ll be.  I usually buy the cheapest fruit since we go through so much of it, but the last time I was here, buying bananas and oranges, the fruit vendor placed a single plum in my bag after I’d paid.  I ate it on the street as I walked home.  It was soft and firm, sweet and tart, rich and complex and simple all at once.  Why live somewhere subtropical if we aren’t going to enjoy these pleasures when we can?