East Asian Market Day

Yesterday, the rain poured down, sometimes in a light wisp, and at other times in a torrent more like the rains brought by the visitation of Hurricane Ike. What better to do on a rainy Friday than to go shopping, right? But unlike most women, I didn’t head to the local department store or luxury mall. Instead, I went to the local East Asian Market, replenishing ingredients and supplies for our kitchen. When life’s duties or priorities make travel to Asia impossible, a trip to the Asian Market is the next best thing. From fresh Thai basil to black Silkie chickens our market has it all or can get it for you – for a price.

I love to go there and see the East Asian women – usually in pairs – one young and the other old – plowing through huge boxes of Korean grapes or Fuji apples trying to select the best. A gentle pinch here on the purple and red flesh, a stolen sniff or a taste discerns the juiciest and the most delicious. Everyone is preternaturally polite except when it comes to selecting produce. On occasion, I’ve even witnessed arguments breaking out between mother and daughter when they have disagreed about the ripeness of fruits and the freshness of vegetables.

From purple banana flowers protecting a delicate cream-colored heart, sesame leaves to be made into a hot Korean vegetable dish and lemon lime crunch of lemongrass to the spicy daikon radish used from Central Asia to the Pacific this place has it all.

Friday, I came home with a durian. When I proudly held it up in its string bag to show my husband, he narrowed his eyes and asked, “Why’d you do that?” “I. . . I don’t know. I just did,” I stammered in reply.

It’s interesting; the durian variety I bought – Mornthong – doesn’t smell all that bad. Or rather, it does reek, but you have to get pretty close to it to get a whiff of its gaminess – kind of like my old college roommate. This fruit is clearly not the cultivar that is banned on the Singapore subway or that causes security to search rooms at Malay hotels for the source of the offending odor. Remembering the durians that I had encountered on the Thai peninsula many years ago that smelled like the rotten flesh used to lure wild civets from their forest homes, I did a little research. Turns out that over the past few decades the Thais have been busy creating smell-free, thorn-free varieties of durian. They started with old-fashioned selective breeding, painstakingly crossing over 90 varieties to get the best taste coupled with the least smell. More recently, they have started creating and exploiting genetic maps to pinpoint the genes involved in stink and thorniness.

How very modern of the Thais to take something both extreme and extraordinary and bland it on the altar of globalized commerce. Kind of like the way the large, perpetually green lawns so valued by westerners are a glorification of a captive and controlled nature – a nature devoid of sex and death – so the durian without stink and thorns is but tree-produced vanilla custard. The stink and the thorns are part of the fruit’s charm, or perhaps part of the danger and mystique of eating one. Durians are blamed for the death of people with heart conditions or of people who ingest too much alcohol while eating the fruit, and they are traditionally thought of as an aphrodisiac – hence the smiles and soft giggles shared between couples who’ve scored a good one. For the near-term at least, stink and thorns remain valued durian characteristics in Indonesia and parts of Malaysia – especially amongst older patrons. What I wonder is will the dangerous and desirable characteristics associated with the fruit disappear as well when the smell and the thorns are completely gone?

Although the newer cultivars of durians are paler shadows of their forbearers, there are many products available at our East Asian market that are the real deal. From fifty different varieties and brands of soy sauce and tamari, to eight refrigerators full of kim-chee and six flavors of fermented bean curd, this place has a dizzying array of items in a rainbow of packaging colors.

Walking down the brightly lit fluorescent aisles one enters into a symphony of color. ‘Yellow, yellow, orange, red, green, orange,’ starts the chant in my head like in the duet Color and Light from Sunday in the Park with George that extols the virtues of Georges Seurat’s pointillist style. Interestingly, I find that most of the colors of the products in the store lay on the long-wave end of the visible-light spectrum. Everything is red, orange or yellow. Packages adorned with blues, purples and violets are more rare. I wonder if the choice of colors has a physical basis. Are Asians – or perhaps humans in general – more sensitive to these colors because of the shape and size of the rods and cones in our eyes? Or is the preference for these colors more cultural? Since reds, oranges and yellows associated with happiness, joy and other good things in a wide variety of Asian cultures are Asian patrons more likely to buy products packaged in these colors?

The only place in the market where there is a great deal of blue is not surprisingly over at the fish and shellfish market selling live or freshly caught fish and shellfish. Huge tilapia and carp swim in blue-bottom tanks, peering out at the shoppers and examining them as both the fish and the shoppers browse for their next meal. Lobsters, snails, eels, oysters and occasionally scallops appear live in the market and locally caught, live crabs striped red and blue are always available.

What is not evident in the few photos of the market that I’ve posted is that the market is patronized by a wide variety of people. Surely Eastern Asians – Koreans, Chinese and Japanese – make up the bulk of the clientele, but there is even variation amongst Asians. Women make up most of the shoppers, and most of them are middle aged householders, or mother-daughter pairs, but there are also a few are young and fashionably dressed women at the market, who tend to shop in the aisles offering heat and eat products instead of in those offering fresh produce. There are couples shopping together, and sometimes Asian men shopping alone as well, but it far more common to see an American man there by himself than his Asian brother.

Just yesterday – an ordinary, rainy Friday morning there were more than Eastern Asians at the market. There were Indians, Iranians, Greeks, Anglos, Africans and a few African Americans, women in Muslim head scarves and a fair number of Latinas at the market as well. What I reveled in was that all of us had come together to buy fresh food, Asian food, food that arose thousands of years ago from the mingling of our cultures on the Silk Road. In coming together at the market we were, in a way, bringing the Silk Road out of history, into the present and breathing new life into it right here at home. (Words and Photos by Laura Kelley)