Hong Kong –
Groceries I
It’s Saturday morning. 9:00am. The sun looms over Hong Kong, the city with
a severe case of insomnia. The stubborn humidity sits in the air, refusing to
give my body a rest from its ever-lingering presence. My skin already covered
with a thin, but steadily growing, layer of sweat. And so, with my list of
groceries in one hand and wallet in the other, I enter the labyrinth. From the clamour
of roaring car engines, determinedly-moving bodies and the clank of machine against tarmac, building yet another 30-story
skyscraper, I wander into a different kind of organised chaos: an infinite cacophony
of aroma, composition of colour and orchestra of sound.
My nose twitches at the anticipation of the hundreds of peculiar odours
that will, at any given moment and without warning, thrust themselves into my
body: the biting smell of dried fish paired with the gentle lull of ground basil,
or the crisp sensation of ginger fused with the ambiguous scent of durian, altogether
forming an olfactory experience that both enlivens and exhausts my nose. My
eyes cannot decide where and on what to fixate their gaze. With every step I
take, it seems a new world of colour, texture and shape unfolds itself before
my eyes: starting from the glistening butcher’s blades slamming down onto the
still-moving bodies of fish that struggle to release themselves from the firm human
grip, to the perfectly organised displays of dragon-fruits, melons and pineapples
that – through their animated colour and form – bring a certain liveliness and energy
to the space. My ears, too, are spoilt for choice: whilst the space is dominated
by the noise of rustling plastic bags or unsatisfied customers haggling with relentless
shop vendors that refuse to accept the formers’ ‘unreasonable’ price suggestions,
underneath this lies a vast, sonic universe: the drone of constantly-working escalators; the desperate groans of carts’ wheels
that are forced to carry so much weight on their shoulders; the giggling of
playing children that emanates from the cramped corners of the hall and the intermittent
bawk-bawk of caged chickens who appear
to be completely oblivious to their fate of being a future meal.
And mixed in this overwhelming, visceral experience are customers, each
of which desires to – as efficiently and quickly as possible – tick off all the
items on their shopping lists. In the first few minutes of navigating the
space, I know this is not a place to peruse nor saunter for a pleasant stroll. It’s
a battle field; every man for himself. Standing around and waiting until the
crowd clears away from a stall won’t get you far here, nor will indecisive
deliberation on what to purchase: if you come here, you better know what you
want. Having fought my way through the sea of people, all drifting in opposite
directions with different ambitions in mind, I finally reach a vegetable stall.
When I eventually manage to remove the shopping list that had dug itself down
to the bottom of my bag and return my attention back to the vegetables, the salesman
has already lost interest in waiting for me to organise myself and moved on to
the next, more competent customer. Before I know it, my body has been nudged
back into the stream of people that steadily flows through the narrow paths of
this fantastically entangled maze.
While getting your groceries should perhaps be a simpler task than
this, I perversely enjoyed being challenged by the human forces of this city in
my effort to purchase two carrots, an eggplant and some bok choy. It seemed ironically
amusing that such a humble, trivial activity be faced with this a head-to-head
battle with other humans who – like me – only seek to buy some groceries for home.
While this severely forceful atmosphere may – on one hand – make ‘buying groceries’
a more laborious effort than it usually is, it is equally a demonstration of
how humans involuntarily – and through circumstance – contribute to the creation of social space: in congregating
in this compact area to complete the same task, we all unwillingly and subconsciously
participate in the creation of a space which is replete with infinite amounts
of visceral experiences. In going on such a simple endeavour like grocery
shopping, these strangers have, together, made
this wonderfully bizarre and bewildering environment – the environment of a
Hong Kong Wet Market.