When in China, one has to rethink the way they look at food.
Aside from raw meat, nothing is fresher than fruits, veggies, seafood, desserts, and even hot full-course meals sold at the neighborhood farmer's market, where vendors depart the countryside during wee hours of the day to lay their produce out under their tents. People are expert bargainers who will not hesitate to give you a discount for being a frequent customer, but not exactly devoid of gossips about how the next stand's peanuts were dyed by artificial coloring.
The traditional measurement of jin is widely used here instead of the metric system, indicated on old-schooled, rusty medal scales held up by soil-kissed hands that pushed through night and day to make a living. As long as it flew in the sky, swam in the ocean, and ran on the soil, you could find it here. Seaweeds cut into different shapes laid out next to creatures that were still wiggling their bodies as if they were just out of the sea, the farmer's market was its own kind of ecosystem.
You could taste-test, loiter, and you could ask them about the authenticity of the product. There are no guarantees that you're hearing the truth, but nobody really doubts the vendors until another vendor does, it's the politics of marketing. When everybody bargains, it is a bond, something that people identify themselves with. You want to save the best deal while you can, so that the when your produce is made into meals, they taste like how the rest of your people is eating them.
The vendors are usually here throughout the day, with their numbers diminishing as the night sets in and the shish kabab sellers set up their stands and put out buckets of coal. Everyday, there was something new: a new type of cucumbers planted by a vendor whom you have never seen in this area, apricots that were better than yesterday's large ones, baby garlic pies that only have half of their warmth left at the end of the day, and pots and pans sold at an outrageously cheap price.
All of this was on the side of the road, or better yet, amidst traffics with trucks larger than it's really ethical. But the business of farmer's markets really isn't hindered but enhanced by noise pollution, simply because of the communal feeling that's created within these narrow alleys. People shouting over one another was a sign of familiarity, a ritual sacred enough to not be questioned by city folks, a way of connecting the dots.
JinZhou's farmers market served a small community of big-mouthed Northeastern women with big feet and tall bodies, grandfathers from the old salt plant like my own who pushed wheelbarrows for a living, and youths with red ribbons around their neck asking the vendors to weigh two jin of cherries for their own indulgence while memorizing ancient texts for their fifth grade Chinese literature class. People next to people, produce next to produce, transactions seemed like its own form of affirmation: how are you? I am good, just making sure that we all have enough to eat.
Summer in Manchuria meant pumpkins that sang a peppy tune about a harvest somewhere, grapes arranged like gemstones on festive red carpets, peaches' faded pink that sold itself faster all of its neighbors, and boiled peanuts in big mounds that could probably bury a small tricycle.
Processed foods broke themselves apart and scattered their ingredients among tents, and I could not see food in any other shape of form other than straight from the rich, black soil of BeiDaHuang, a nickname for the Northeastern part of China where rice does not grow and stretches of forestation that, if were left untouched, could have stopped the wind that gave my grandma and I both light concussions on a wintry day in 2007. The farmer's market was our oxygen bar, for prices that were up for bargaining.
We celebrated at the farmers market. We applauded the coloring of the produce, drummed watermelons for quality, and dug our hands into the wheat bags. We were among friends and not just human ones. Sometimes we privatized them, made them one-of-a-kind by our unique definition:
It was the "Big Cherry Festival" in the DaLian area while I lived in JinZhou district with my grandparents' home, ten miles away from the city whose administrative area stretches across the entire peninsula and a few outlying islands. Those two weeks of June were crucial, because you really have to control your impulse of picking every plump fruit from the curvy, short trees under the sun. I picked an entire bucket in LuShun district, a former Soviet colony, that weighed out into two crates that I sent back home to JinZhou for my family.
My grandfather shook his head and said: "JinZhou's cherries are infinitely better." It was like football for the entire city, silent competitions sometimes emerged onto the surface. There was no doubt that the cherries outnumbered anything sold on the market during those two weeks, red like the blood rushing in my veins when my steps flowed rapidly with the crowd. We were one.
One of the biggest stands (not pictured) was about five yards long and wide. It had red tablecloth filled with western desserts such as brownies, pound cakes, sugar cookies, croissants, with a Chinese twist. Sesame seeds were among the most popular additives, they are like important dinner guests who won't even be blamed for arriving in the wrong venue.
Suddenly I missed home in America, where sugar flourished in our daily diets sometimes without realization, the sesame seeds of the western world. Necessary in a way that they retreat to the invisible, working backstage to assure our taste buds that we, too, have a home to go to at the end of the day. It doesn't matter how obscure, foreign, or rare a type of food is. As long as there were sesame seeds and sugar, people all over the world speak, breathe, and taste the language of food in their homeland.
I stared at the stand until finally purchasing a brownie-like cake with nuts and sesame seeds. The intermarriage of chocolate and Chinese spices and, surprisingly, locality. Food had their identities here at the JinZhou Chinese market.
I suddenly thought of them not as units of desserts, but rather fields of wheat that had sustained generations of back-bending Chinese families who were too poor, too rural, and too labor-intensive to be regulated by One Child Policy, and their congee diet for 360 days a year while their customers switched up their menus daily. Fresh produce taught me a lesson of a type of bittersweet-ness that was overdue in my mind.
In the middle of a bustling city, the farmer's market of JinZhou did not need proof for its organic qualities, and it had changed me in a way that was culinary ------ a physical transformation that resulted in the betterment of how I viewed the sources of all things in life. The air was fragrant, and not just in the physical sense. As long as we shopped together here every day, we could get rid of our worries and look forward to what's new under these tents tomorrow.
We all came from a farmer's market somewhere.
