I’ve been to the Great Market in Budapest; two stories high and filled with everything from rag dolls to pig’s feet, from pickled peppers to hair pieces. The smells were the same; old fish and old vegetables. And the sounds were the same; the quick murmur of bartering crowds, the scuffle of many feet, and the occasional baby’s cry.
And I’ve been to Pike’s Place in Seattle, where coffee wafts in with the strong sea smell, and the dim fluorescent lights light up concrete corners. Where the best clam chowder is right around the corner and the next shop you’ve never seen is down a yellow staircase and the caricature artists place themselves perfectly to catch the tourists.
The markets in Japan were squeaky clean and quiet like their neat and calm restaurant tables, and the markets in Jakarta were small, thatched and noisy like its wild groups of people. In Bali their main stock was clean water, and the surroundings made you wonder if the water they were selling could really actually be clean.
Here, in Honolulu, the Chinatown markets are dirty compared to Japan and clean compared to Jakarta. They contain people who were born, raised, and who will die in in this small area. And why would they need to leave? They have everything they need within these narrow boundaries. Rows of bananas, priced differently for brown ones, ripe ones, green ones. Boxes of goya (bitter melon), which brought back a specific salad to me, one brought to my house by an English student in Japan, one difficult to eat because I was not accustomed to its sharp bite. (I discovered later I could eat goya better when it was fried. But aren’t most things like that?)
And bakeries filled with sweets. Honey covered pastries, taro filled rolls, piles of desserts wrapped in banana leaves. Almond cookies, covered nuts, banana flavored cakes.
People say you can find a place’s culture in its arts, in its movies, in the laws of its people. But I think you can find all of those in its markets, in the way the people mill around the vegetables, in the straightness or messes of their lines up to the registers (in Bali I had to fight for my position in the line, in Japan if I accidentally cut in front no one said a word), and in the rows of red lanterns along the streets. In the greetings as the people lean in, which let you know they have seen these people almost every day of their lives.
This is their living art, that they have built, a vegetable stand next to a dim sum restaurant, next to a flower shop. And any place I can see that is a place that is worth going.
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