I can still remember the first time I set foot in a Chinese supermarket, that sumptuous public forum that features its own brusque rhythms and exotic smells. Inside this bustling realm, I quickly came to learn, ethnic shoppers perceive the food they eat and their personal space in a wholly unique way.
It’s all been so long ago now. I was working in Los Angeles and my new Beijing-born girlfriend lived in the Asian community east of downtown called Monterrey Park. And the cooking ingredients she preferred couldn’t be found at the white-devil Safeway or Ralphs where I did my shopping.
It was a springtime Saturday afternoon as I pushed the shopping cart behind her at the Shun Fat market on Atlantic Avenue, a few miles and world away from my place in the San Fernando Valley. Since we’d only recently met, I figured, what better to explore a new relationship than to accompany someone to the grocery store?
My girlfriend, who later became my wife, shifted her demeanor the moment we walked through those sliding doors. Usually polite, her manner became more direct, more blunt, as determined as a Joseph Conrad character plunging into some wild-hearted den of darkness. She knew instinctively where she was going, what she wanted to buy, and the various obstacles that might be placed in her way to get what she wanted.
For a youngish rube from Upstate New York, who cut his teenage teeth bagging groceries and flirting with checkers in the P&C store in the suburban town of Camillus, outside of Syracuse, this Chinese version of the traditional hunter-gatherer ritual was a nail-biting new territory, so I just clenched my teeth and went along for the ride.
For starters, I noticed, the shopping carts were smaller, almost child-sized, and the aisles were markedly grimier and narrower than they were back inside the P&C, so much so that you held your breath when you grazed past another shopper.
Eventually it gave me a chance to practice my fledging Chinese, and I became fluent in such phrases as bu hao yi si (Pardon me) and Duibuqi (I’m sorry.) I never quite mastered the terms for “Coming on through!” and “Madam, will you please get the hell out of the way?”
Hey, don’t judge. I was just trying to keep up with my girl.
As a guy yet to even try sushi, I was bedazzled by a bizarre fare that included duck, quail and goose eggs, and my favorite, thousand-year-old eggs, unappetizing little spheroids preserved in salt, lime, clay and ash that turns them black. There was also black fungus, sunflower seeds, raw peanuts, soup bases, canned congee (rice porridge), MSG, dragon fruit, wood-ear mushrooms and bitter melon.
On our visits, we usually headed straight for the vegetable aisle. My girlfriend liked to throw little black chickens into a pot, served alongside such leafy greens as bok choy, Chinese cabbage and onions, mustard leaves, snow peas, leeks, watercress and winter radish. And don’t forget garlic, scallions and ginger, which her mother, a five-star cook in her own right, had taught her were the aromatic “holy trinity” in any self-respecting Chinese kitchen.
There was also more exotic fare, such as Yamaimo, an elongated white yam with earthy arms growing out of its side like a root you’d just pulled from the ground, as well as a white member of the asparagus family known as Dongshan Bai Lu Sun. Much of what I found were strange-looking plants with unpronounceable names, most of which resembled obscene body parts.
They were all carefully displayed in neat rows as though the fare at some city market in rural China. The food, the place, the sounds, they all felt so foreign. At the Chinese market, nobody spoke a word of English, from the stock clerks to the checkout girls.
I couldn’t read the package labels let alone ask directions to the bathroom. I was lost.
Eventually, though, it was the live fish counter that hooked me.
The daily (weekly?) catch swam in large tanks, with bulging eyes that seemed to search mine imploringly as I watched them patrol their watery prison — death row inmates waiting for the final verdict to be handed down.
Outside these placid gurgling tanks, the scene was pure lawlessness. Diminutive women, shopping bags held tightly in their hands, elbowed past one another for the best vantage point, like they’d been transported to some acid-fueled church bingo game or chaotic stock-exchange trading floor.
Nobody took prisoners. The women shook their fists and shouted their numbers to a handful of white-aproned fishmongers and there was hell to pay if you got in their way.
Me, I just held back and watched my girlfriend negotiate the swarm. She would start in the back and angle her way toward the tanks, like she was positioning herself to reach the front of some concert stage. When her turn came, she pointed to the unfortunate fish in her sights and the monger dipped a large net into the tank to capture her prize.
There were also snails, skittering crabs, lobster and a slimy-looking fellow known as a sea cucumber. (Don’t ask.) The fish were always the hardest to catch.
Then came the part that still gives me nightmares. The flopping perch or snapper before him, the assassin would reach below the counter for a humungous rubber mallet and pummel the defenseless fish into submission (read: death). Then he’d calmly ask whether she wanted it scaled or wrapped up au natural, like a fresh corpse merely postponing its date with the medical examiner’s scalpel.
And here’s the thing: That was the only thing ever done to a fresh fish purchased at the Chinese market. What was later deposited into our refrigerator was a catch with tail and head intact, like it had decided to hang around for a few days, waiting to be released back into the sea.
My wife, like most Chinese diners, likes her fish served with its whitened boiled eyes staring off at the wall. She insists that the head contains the sweetest meat, the eyes full of crunchy nutrition. Not that I’ve ever verified this.
At the P&C, we bought our fish in sealed packages, beheaded, deboned and de-tailed, so this amounted to my first lesson in the way other cultures eat.
There would be many more.
Eventually, as we got to know one another, we did all our shopping at Shun Fat. Before long, the fishmonger scrum didn’t seem so intimidating and I often even dove in myself.
When my future in-laws visited from abroad, my father-in-law would stay in the car with his daughter to read the paper and discuss politics while Mama and I headed into the store, me playing her shadow, shopping cart at the ready.
We were an odd couple that drew curious glances.
I liked it that way, because all the world is a stage.
Today, Mama is trapped in Beijing amid the COVID scourge, and I dearly miss her quiet presence. The only remedy is to hop into the car and drive straight past the Costco and Trader Joes to our local Chinese market, the place that holds a social place in both my heart and my stomach.
It’s the place where I fell in love with my wife and her family, where I learned how the rest of the world prefers to eat, and how to wield a shopping car like a pro.
