The Shanghai Food Market
Ji Xianlin

Shanghai has countless eye-catching skyscrapers and innumerable streets and lanes, with beautiful shop windows and busy market quarters. Nevertheless, many foreign friends would rather pay a morning visit to the food markets there. That is understandable. Didn't we ourselves choose to go and see a food market there on our first visit to the city?

It was on an early morning of several years ago, when the sun was just coming up, that I went at the first light to see a food market near the hotel where I was staying.

The nearer I went, the more prevalent the atmosphere of the food market. The surrounding streets were thronged with shoppers milling around. The shopping baskets carried by many elderly women were filled with vegetables, seafood, chickens, ducks, fish and meat. Some fish were wagging their tails and some hens clucking. The elderly women, with a happy smile spread across their faces, were on their way home.

Once inside the market, I felt like landing in a new world. The rich assortment of hues and colors was dazzling. All goods were kept neat and tidy and arranged in perfect order by they at a vegetable stall, meat stall, seafood stall, fruit stall, etc. And each stall, being specialized, showed a characteristic of its own. Take for example the vegetable stall with its display of colors: purple eggplants, white radishes, red tomatoes, greenish cabbages. It also displayed various lines: round clumsy wax gourds, long narrow bean pods, flat wide cabbage leaves. Hence, different colors and lines merged into an organic whole showing diversity in unity. I looked here and there until my eyes became blurred, taking the vegetable stall for an oil painting or a watercolor with distinct colors and lines done by a famous painter.

The same was true of other stalls. At fish stall, live fish were swimming in the water and big carps weighing more than five or six kilos each were lying on chopping boards. At poultry stalls, caged chickens and ducks were making a lot of noise to greet each other. At meat stalls, chunky pieces of pork, beef and mutton were hung up. There were also special counters selling beef and mutton to Moslems. At some stalls, chicken and duck eggs of a glistening white were piled high up like small hills while rows of bacon and salted duck, seemingly dripping with fat, were hung out on racks. The fruit stalls were even more attractive. Arrayed side by side were juicy honey peaches, plump watermelons, yellow round muskmelons, fresh tender lotus roots, vying with each other to be the most beautiful. It seemed as if I saw unfolding before me luxuriant orchards, fragrant lotus ponds, leafy green melon patches. Wasn't it a painting of matchless beauty?

It was, however, more of a transient illusion than a painting. To tell the truth, no painting could ever compare with these stalls. Things in a painting were fixed and immovable while goods at a stall were always on the move. Things on the display shelf would, before we knew it, soon find their way to the elderly women's shopping baskets. Standing before a stall, the elderly women would narrow their eyes and pick and choose until they decided on what they wanted to buy. They never worried about their purses because all food was selling at reasonable prices. Shopping was done in the hubbub of the market to the satisfaction of all. Everybody got what they needed, their shopping baskets filled to the brim. While the elderly women were on their way home, the shopping baskets they carried in their hands also looked like beautiful paintings.

Our foreign friends, putting p at hotels, were provided with everything they needed. But, when they saw the captivating food market, they clicked their tongue in admiration and were eager to do a bit of shopping there by themselves. Some of them bought several kilos of tomatoes, some bought some dried bean curds. To the satisfaction of all, the new acquisitions added to the richness and variety of their already abundant table.