Sorrow-Relieving Vegetable Shop | One-Pot Nun’s Little Table
I. Smallholders at the Mercy of the Weather, and Mothers Longing to Break Free of the Motherhood Penalty
Out-of-their-depth post-90s only children like Chuchu, born and bred in the city, are far from few. In following their parents into urban life, they grew up distanced from the land and from farming, “nourished” from childhood by the consumption culture of “cheap, plentiful, and convenient” food constructed by the food-processing industry, wholesale markets, and supermarket chains. Small wonder they struggle to understand why autumn, too, can bring a lean spell between crops.
Since Chuchu is the most inquisitive of our dining companions, I, who cannot resist playing the teacher, seized the chance to explain to her what “spring sowing” and “autumn sowing” actually mean, and went on to discuss how temperature and yield are linked during crop growth. She signalled her bewildered willingness to accept this reality with glazed eyes, then voiced her most pressing need: she wanted to eat vegetables!
At first hearing, this view flies in the face of the “common wisdom” shaped by manufacturers, retailers, and the media in the era of industrial food. Yet numerous studies have already shown that, as animal-derived foods become overproduced, over-supplied, and routine fixtures on the family dinner table, Alzheimer’s disease too has begun to strike at ever younger ages.
Not long ago I watched a film, Still Alice, whose protagonist is a linguistics professor in her fifties who develops early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Her plight is precisely what I have long feared: for the past two years I have already been losing words mid-sentence, and finding that if I do not jot something down, I cannot remember it — these “symptoms.”
I think I know roughly where the trouble lies. After having my child, I co-founded the Lemao Nature School while raising her, and for close to ten years I lived in a state of physical overexertion, constant mental strain, and chronic sleep deprivation. It was truly too exhausting. What kept me from collapsing — apart from my love for my child and for this world — was the “more vegetables, less meat” eating habit I had formed since childhood, which kept my body running more or less normally. But a person is not a body alone: there is also the mind and the soul.
When I realised that no matter what I did I could never satisfy those around me, the accumulated negative emotions began to erode both my mind and my body, and because of that erosion I could no longer maintain a sound relationship with myself. To save myself, to escape the motherhood penalty, to stop being “the self-imprisoning, over-giving wife”, I left Mingyue Village and returned to Yulin in Chengdu to build a new network of life support. Once again, I would fight for my own development, health, and happiness.
II. Vegetables That Sharpen the Mind and Soothe the Woes
Because I was tracking news about depression and Alzheimer’s disease, I paid particular attention to relevant information while reading. “In a report published by the renowned Framingham Heart Study in the United States, researchers noted that eating three additional servings of fruit and vegetables each day would reduce the probability of stroke by 22%.” As I read that, I thought: since the arteries and blood vessels responsible for carrying blood to the brain must be kept healthy through proper diet, and since the benefits of fruit and vegetables accumulate swiftly, then eating more of them to spare us from the dementia caused by unhealthy blood vessels is most probably a sound hypothesis.
Half a year on, the mental and physical well-being of our dining companions grew steadily better. Naturally, they developed something close to a physical need for the healthy fruit and vegetables at our Little Table — even for the ritual of “showing up right on time for our meals.” Especially after a weekend of “just grabbing whatever at home” or “indulging freely in a feast out,” they would look forward with keen anticipation to the variety of vegetables packed in their Little Table lunch boxes.
But vegetables that are both delicious and healthy cannot be obtained simply by being willing to pay a premium and place an order.
Smallholders like Hu Xuemei, who sell directly from the field, can only live by the grace of the weather. If the ground yields nothing, our pots stay empty. Whenever that happens, I feel deeply fortunate to live near the Yulin market, and full of gratitude for the Longquan Green Vegetable Shop.
III. The Art of Running a Community Vegetable Shop
On top of sourcing locally and growing organically, the owner also gives his vegetables careful preparation, and that is the main reason I love this shop.
The oyster mushrooms always come with their stems trimmed clean; the cauliflower is halved so that a buyer who only wants half a head can simply take half; potherb mustard, glutinous rice cake, and little balls are brought in just a small amount every few days; the fermented glutinous rice kept in a clay jar triggers a scramble roughly every fortnight; and as for my favourite — firm tofu — there is always one bamboo basket’s worth, every single day.
Several owners — yes, everyone in the shop is an owner — bound together in a thoroughly egalitarian partnership. Though their roles differ, each of them can answer a customer’s question, and each can adjust between the displayed price and the amount actually charged. Moreover, any one of them can step in for another depending on the situation. This means that customers who shop here always feel at ease, reassured by the team’s seamless coordination and quick responsiveness.
The layout of the shop is also well judged. Corn, taro, carrots, and sweet potatoes are set out at the front for you to pick over. Round radishes and Sha Guan radishes sit beside the tofu, and next to the tofu is the fruit. A vegetable shop that also sells fruit — how peculiar. And yet it is peculiar in a perfectly sensible way: at any one time, never more than two kinds of fruit are on offer.
From summer into autumn I have bought two varieties of organic grapes and two of pears here. The loose grapes that tumble free during transport, the owner boxes up and sells at half price, and I, on my morning walks, have snagged a bargain more than once.
Right beside the fruit sit the season’s finest vegetables. At this time of year, the pick of the bunch are naturally the pea shoots and the radish greens — Sichuan’s very own “provincial vegetable.” Radish greens, that seasonal delicacy, are the kind of find that a knowing eye grabs without a second’s hesitation. A certain auntie and I both zeroed in on the same modestly sized bunch; our hands met in mid-air, and we exchanged a smile, silently recognising each other as kindred spirits who “know what’s what.” (Several ways of preparing radish greens are given at the end of this piece.)
Beyond vegetables, the owner also brings up a few chickens, ducks, and rabbits each day — almost certainly pre-ordered by regulars, for anyone else walking in unannounced would have almost no chance. I have never once harboured the hope of picking up a stray bird here. When you have chosen your vegetables and are queueing to be weighed, you can simply stand aside and watch the owner’s blade work. Once the performance is over, the meat is wrapped and set in a small basket to wait for its owner to collect it — and in that moment, this shop becomes an outdoor preparation station and kitchen for the households of those who have bought their meat.
Beside the meat lies the vegetable shop’s main stage. When the elders arrive, they circle that table first, where every vegetable of the season sits quietly awaiting its destined buyer. Celery, spinach, cabbage, cucumber, bitter melon, luffa, aubergine, tomatoes, large green peppers, thread chillies, spiral chillies… you grab a handful, I take a few, and before long the mood shifts from “Come on, everybody, buy now!” to “Pack it up, time to head home.” Several times, trailing behind a cluster of “silver-haired darlings,” I felt a pressing urgency well up inside me.
IV. A Community Space of Exceptional Healing Potential
Compared with the weather-vulnerable smallholders, market stallholders enjoy the advantage of a stable supply, giving customers far more choice. Whether they source produce straight from growers or stock up at wholesale markets, traders sift and curate what is already on offer, extending a tremendous convenience to urban residents.
As the community’s most vital hub of daily life — where information converges, money flows, and emotions intermingle — the wet market should naturally serve as the most accessible and most frequently visited therapeutic environment for residents. It is no surprise, then, that landmark urban regeneration projects from Beijing to Guangzhou, and on to Hangzhou and Chengdu, all centre on dramatic market makeovers.
Professor Xu Leiqing’s Research Group 408 at Tongji University has long focused on the “community therapeutic setting”. In their recently published article, “Community Therapeutic Settings: A Systematic Review of Environmental Elements, Settings, and Outcomes”, the researchers noted that the community is the smallest cell of the city, the place where residents spend the most hours of their lives, and that beyond naturalness, universality and everydayness are essential attributes of a community’s built environment.
That heart-warming, lived-in buzz of Yulin life — the “smoke and fire” warmth that soothes the soul — is, without question, a product of naturalness, universality, and everydayness layered upon one another. Well-being, social interaction — the very things so often overlooked in modern life — can be found easily at the wet market or at your regular vegetable shop. Residents socialise here and also draw social support. Perhaps the shop owners never imagined that by simply doing the most fundamental work, they had created a therapeutic space — “the most accessible, the most frequently visited” — for everyone in the neighbourhood.
Finally, let me recreate a scene that once set me laughing, for the delight of you all:
A resident, having picked out his vegetables, scans a code on his phone to pay. The network is sluggish, and after what feels like an age the payment confirmation finally appears. He calls out excitedly across the crowd to the shop owner: “It’s come through! It’s come through — can you see it?”
The owner, busy weighing and collecting money from the queue, replies with his trademark half-smile: “So it’s here, is it? And that means you simply can’t tear yourself away, can you?”
V. Bonus: Several Ways with Radish Greens
Radish greens are highly nutritious, high in fibre, rich in a range of vitamins, and commonly used as folk medicine to treat dysentery, diarrhoea, coughs, haemorrhoids, bloating, and vomiting. Growing up in the countryside, with a mother from the mountains, our meals were far more “diverse” than those in the plains. Every time we served Swiss chard or radish greens at the table, relatives would tease us for eating like “pigs”. Now, radish greens have become the market’s “prized seasonal find”, priced even higher than pea shoots — something those mocking relatives of old would never have foreseen.
1. Stir-Fried Pickled Radish Greens with Minced Pork: This is a wonderfully rice-companion and very quick seasonal dish. It usually calls for quick-pickled vegetables, briefly dipped in brine. Aged-vat pickles can be rinsed briefly to bring down the saltiness. I use the pickled yardlong beans and pickled radish my friend’s mother sent me — chop them fine and stir-fry them first with fatty-and-lean minced pork, then scatter in the chopped radish greens just before taking the wok off the heat.
2. Cold Tossed Radish Greens: Wash the radish greens and cut into finger-length pieces. Blanch them, rinse in cooled boiled water, drain, then toss with your favourite seasonings. In Sichuan households, chilli oil is always on hand, so I dress every vegetable the way you would a classic chilli-oil chicken salad — it always tastes wonderful.
Editor: Xu Youyou