A World of Wonders, Yet She Never Looks Around

As someone born in the 1980s, before I had my daughter Shu’er at thirty, I rarely visited the wet market. I could hardly understand why my mother, rain or shine, insisted on pulling her trolley to the market, why she so relished recounting her market observations to me, or why a well-balanced cut of pork belly, just five yuan cheaper per half kilogram, could make her happy as a child.

Later, I became a full-time mother, confined to the house. The wet market was one of the few social spaces I had, and I always took Shu’er along when I went shopping. Before she turned two, she had boundless energy and loved to dart off at will. Every time we went to the market, I carried her in my arms, terrified she’d be swept away in the surging crowd. From the age of four, Shu’er could help me carry things. She was born with astonishingly strong arms—at three, she could already hoist a five-litre bottle of Golden Dragon Fish cooking oil. Children are seldom seen at the wet market, and even rarer are those who can help their parents carry the goods. After years of regular visits, many of the stallholders had come to know this rather wild child.

Shuer was diagnosed with autism at the age of five, accompanied by a mild intellectual disability. It was only from that point on that I truly began to understand her. Now, I make a more conscious effort to bring her to the market. This is an indispensable part of her life. Shopping for groceries is also a means for her to maintain her normal social functioning and prevent regression.

Shu’er’s Growing Up

Due to her condition, her interests are narrow. In the wet market, stalls of every kind line the aisles, and hawkers’ cries rise and fall — “Watermelons! Authentic Yongjia Shatian melons, free if not sweet!” “Bargain! Bargain! Freshly dug lotus root, still muddy, five yuan a big bag!” — none of it stirs a spark of interest in her. Pork is the only red meat she likes. When she sees the butcher slicing belly pork, chopping ribs, and cutting pork knuckles on the thick round chopping block, she lights up, murmuring over and over, “Pork, meat to eat.”

For some autistic people who experience sensory integration disorder or sensory overload, a trip to the wet market is no easy feat. The shrill megaphone announcements looping endlessly in front of the stalls, the jostling of strangers shoulder to shoulder, an e-bike suddenly appearing behind them, the pungent smell of seafood, chickens, and ducks — all of it can make them tense, disgusted, frozen, or screaming and wanting to flee.

From two to twelve, Shu’er has grown day by day through her visits to the wet market. For as long as six years she was terrified of cats and dogs. Stray animals often dart out from the open-air market, and the moment a tall, pure-black stray dog appeared, she would grip my hand so tightly and stomp her feet in place, panicked. Autistic people crave stability and find it hard to adapt to sudden change. For Shu’er, who feared cats and dogs, the wet market was a place full of unknown dangers. She was like a “cat-and-dog radar” — even when they made no sound and came no closer, she could sense a threat nearby before anyone else. Last year I took her back to our rural hometown for twenty days, where she spent the time playing with the small local dog Grandad kept. The desensitisation has largely worked; at the very least, if she now encounters a dog on the street, she can walk past it calmly.

Until she started primary school, Shu’er had mild sensory integration difficulties. When pushing the small trolley to the wet market, if she hurried and a wheel clipped a passer-by, she didn’t understand the need to stop and apologise; she would just carry on. She also couldn’t empathise with the irritation or pain of the person she had bumped into. On weekends especially, she bumped and jolted along the trolley, easily hitting people or colliding with obstacles. Since starting school, through repeated practice, she can now handle the trolley with ease, and if she bumps into someone, she’ll blurt out “Sorry.”

Her Favourite Stalls

At first, the only stall in the wet market that Shu’er liked was one — the zongzi shop at the far end of the market. She loved double-yellow-egg pork zongzi, and buying them became the reason she went to the wet market. One zongzi costs seven yuan; seven a week comes to forty-nine yuan. This is the only multiplication sum Shu’er has ever been able to do. After starting school, she learned to get up early and set the gas hob timer to boil a zongzi for herself — a habit she has kept up for four years now. When eating a zongzi, she picks out only the salted egg yolk and spits out the pork after sucking the juices from it. But if she buys a double-yellow-egg zongzi with no meat, she misses the richness of the pork fat. “Your daughter is a foodie,” the shopkeeper told me. “She knows how to eat a zongzi.”

◉In Shu’er’s eyes, there is no sense of the big picture. She is attentive to detail and far more interested in objects than in people. The market in her drawings is vivid, abstract, and fragmentary. The image shows the zongzi stall as drawn by Shu’er.

Having been to the wet market long enough, she took a liking to a fish stall and a vegetable stall, in addition to the zongzi stall. What drew her to both was how good-looking the proprietresses were. “Aunty is pretty.” At four years old, her words still tumbling out unclear, she was already a sucker for pretty faces.

The proprietress of the fish stall — when I first met her, she was still a girl, fresh and bright as a scallion. This was the first stall in the wet market to offer fish-slicing service for shuizhu yu. “Scallion Girl” wore tall rubber boots every day, donned rubber gloves and tied on a rubber apron, and scraped scales with an electric fish scaler. Thanks to her stall, many customers stopped ordering shuizhu yu or feiteng yu takeout and chose to make it at home instead. On weekend mornings, when business was at its peak, Scallion Girl worked alongside three male employees. She was in charge of lifting the fish; when they were short-handed, she would slaughter them too, oblivious to scales sticking to her hair. Every customer who left would pick up a jin of mung bean sprouts and two cucumbers on the way out.

Shu’er only eats yellow croaker, but no stall in the wet market sells it live — it’s all iced. She has no interest in the live fish on display. Only when a fishmonger occasionally opens a cold case and reveals a few red-hued sea fish arranged on the ice — red star grouper, stone grouper, sea bream — does she go over to take a look. But she loves crouching in front of the fish stall, staring at the frogs, bullfrogs, and rice-field frogs bouncing in mesh bags with their big eyes bulging, and at the soft-shell turtles and small turtles in large red plastic basins.

◉Left: a sea bream and a red star grouper drawn by Shu’er. Right: a paddy frog in a mesh bag.

Sometimes, when the queue for fish butchering is thin, she stands to one side and watches the helper at the bench work through the process: slam the fish to stun it — scrape off the scales — split the head open with a vertical cut — nail the half onto the board and slice the flesh into thin pieces — peel off the skin — section the backbone. Watching a fish put through something like lingchi, or seeing a bullfrog skinned and cut up, its knee-jerk reflex still firing as the blade comes down — she finds it all riveting.

Her favourite vegetable stall is, by the standards of the market, one with a fairly limited range, not exactly fresh, and a little pricey. But every time we go, the stall owner will compliment Shù’er: ‘What a good girl — helping her mum shop for groceries now.’ The Shù’er I used to carry in my arms has already grown to almost my height. The owner also often exclaims that Shù’er is growing too fast, like the Wenzhou saying goes: ‘Shepherd’s purse by the privy pit grows fast.’

The stall owner keeps a black rabbit and a white one. The litter was large, and both rabbit cages are getting a bit crowded. Every time Shù’er passes this vegetable stall, she takes the wilted leaves the owner hands her and goes to play with the rabbits. She always asks, ‘Where have the bunny babies gone?’ She simply cannot fathom that the soft, squishy, slightly translucent pink kits, whose eyes haven’t even opened yet, will one day grow up.

Shù’er: stubborn yet simple

Most autistic children are fussy eaters, and getting them a balanced diet is no easy feat. The range of foods they will accept is limited, and so too is the range of ways those foods can be prepared.

Take Shù’er, for instance — she only eats the yolk from a soft-boiled egg. When she was little, to get vegetables into a girl who lived by the motto ‘no meat, no joy’, I tried everything, buying through the entire vegetable stall. After a year, I confirmed that she would only eat Chinese cabbage, bok choy, water spinach, and cauliflower — and only the leaves and florets, never the stems. ‘Mum, how many do I have to eat?’ ‘Five.’ ‘Can it be three?’ ‘All right.’ Every time it came to leaves, she would haggle with me. One leaf at a time, counting each one.

Shù’er has no sense of which vegetables to pick, and probably cannot tell the difference between fresh produce and anything that has gone limp. When I spot a variety of vegetable or mushroom that is uncommon locally — basil leaves, chayote, red bolete, for instance — I am tempted to buy some to try. When buying tomatoes, I pick one up and give it a sniff; if I can catch the scent, give it a gentle squeeze, and it is just the right firmness, there is a little thrill, like finding a bargain.

Shù’er feels no curiosity about food and has no attachment to seasonal produce. Round the year, when she goes to the fruit stall, all she wants is Shatang mandarin and watermelon. In summer, she practically cannot wait to carry a three-kilo Qilin watermelon home every single day. In winter and spring, she eats nothing but Shatang mandarin. She eats it with remarkable patience — pulling off one segment at a time, then carefully stripping away every last thread of pith before popping it into her mouth. A single Shatang mandarin can take her over ten minutes.

◉A watermelon stall drawn by Shu’er.

For those who shop at wet markets year-round, there can be times when they feel unsure what to buy. The stalls may be brimming with a dazzling array of produce, yet they still grumble: “I keep buying the same old things—shopping for vegetables is so hard.” Some elderly customers, having walked the length and breadth of every wet market in the city, have worked out the best deals and will deliberately take a bus to one far from home. Nowadays, most city-centre wet markets have supermarkets set up inside them, and the fresh produce sections in these supermarkets are generally cheaper than the individual stall vendors. Older customers won’t buy bagged rice—only the loose, weighed-out kind. Each trip they buy three or five jin (any more and they can’t carry it), and the loose rice works out about two yuan cheaper per jin. My next-door neighbour is a stay-at-home mum born in the 1990s. Thrifty to a fault, she’ll ride her e-bike to three different wet markets in the city centre, buying meat at one, vegetables at another, and soy products at a third. She always manages to find the best value for money.

Shu’er’s narrow range of interests, a hallmark of autism, is also a kind of “devotion” in its own way, and it brings a certain convenience to her life. She may never learn to budget her grocery shopping with precision. Browsing the wet market is more like restocking for her. Before she steps out, she already has a list in her head: pork belly, Chinese cabbage, zongzi, and pomelos. At the market, she zeroes in on the stalls that carry those items—basically always the same vendors she knows, with no looking about and no lingering. She’s a stubborn yet simple customer. She and I are both the kind to be scatterbrained, but she has never once forgotten to take her vegetables with her after paying.

In truth, there are plenty of alternatives for putting food on the table these days—fresh food e-commerce, delivery apps, or eating out.

But I don’t want Shu’er’s life to become too convenient, turning her into a girl who only orders malatang delivery, never visits the wet market, never cooks, and never does the washing-up. In the rain or under a blazing sun, pushing a trolley to the market, squeezing through the crowds, listening to the vendors calling out their wares at full voice—only then does life feel grounded and real.

As for how to pick fresh, plump ingredients, how to prepare and store them once they’re home, how to buy a nutritionally balanced diet within a budget… there’s real wisdom in browsing the wet market. There are still many shopping skills for Shu’er to learn.

– This is Foodthink’s 832nd original article –

Foodthink

Author

Sweet Potato Face

Full-time grocery shopper and home cook; part-time writer. I love wandering through the wet market — there’s no anger, depression, or anxiety that a wander through the wet market can’t cure.

All illustrations in this article are by Shuer

Edited by: Xiaodan

Layout by: Xiaoshu

Why do Chinese people love wandering through the wet market? Do young people still go?

How have Chinese wet markets stood firm against the wave of the ‘supermarket revolution’?

What social structures and everyday wisdom do wet markets connect?

Let’s follow Author Zhong’s new book and explore the resilience and vitality of Chinese wet markets!

Chinese Wet Markets

Author: Shuru Zhong

Guangqi Books | Published July 2026

Ten years, over 50 cities, more than 200 wet markets……

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

the book explores the history of wet markets, the communities of street vendors, the supply chains behind them, food consumption culture, urban public management, and more.

– Table of Contents –

– About the Author –