My mother’s multi-generational paternal family lived at 282 Jalan Besar for much of the 1960s (before that, at 8 Jalan Kubor, now the Santa Grand Bugis boutique hotel) before moving, as many Singaporeans did, to their very first HDB (Housing Development Board) flat in Toa Payoh. The story goes that my great-grandfather was doing well enough as a merchant to want to purchase 282 from the Yemeni Alsagoffs, but they were way too canny for that and declined, content to be landlords, unless the old man could purchase the entire row of shophouses, which he clearly could not. It is comforting to know that whichever side of the Rochor Canal they lived on, it still provided children with endless hours of play and adventure.
The day before a 大日子 ‘big occasion’, mother’s paternal grandmother, 阿恩 ‘Ah Yan’ (a contraction of 恩人 literally ‘Benefactress’, her title within the extended polygamous family) would walk over to the large market opposite what is now Swee Choon Tim Sum Restaurant at 183–189 Jalan Besar with a gaggle of grandkids and husband’s concubine’s kids in tow.
It was a market in every sense of the word, regardless of moisture levels. In one designated section, hawkers would roll up in pushcarts selling savoury and sweet foods cooked to order. Fresh vegetables and fruits had their section. Most importantly, in those days, if you wanted to eat meat, particularly chicken and fish, you took it from live to slaughtered yourself, or paid extra for the sellers to do the deed. Most patrons chose to save a few precious cents, as you can imagine. How my great-grandmother did it herself is an anecdote for another day.
This scene is repeated in countless countries across the global south and developing world in general, whether due to lack of widespread refrigeration or these markets being one of the few sources of fresh produce available, or a preference for observing how lively your dinner is up close and personal. Middle-class globalites, myself included, are so far removed from our food sources that seeing a live animal and knowing it’ll end up on your plate that night incurs various emotions, depending on your sensitivities. In my defence, I have been to many a ‘wet market’ in my youth as the family’s chief shopper when my mother was indisposed, but not the live ones as they went out of fashion in the 70s.
Apart from a lack of air-conditioning and generally wet floors, there’s nothing terribly different about a wet market in Singapore compared to Oxford’s covered market or Smithfield in London, which I’ve been to many a time.
Tokyo’s Tsujiki Fish Market was a major tourist attraction — and might I politely suggest it was as wet as wet got.
The recent furore around ‘wet markets’ and the general lack of understanding in the West about what they really are reeks to me of ‘othering’. All markets are potential hotbeds of contamination and disease. Health and safety standards might exist, but as ever, human behaviour is its own uncontainable beast.
There is a conflation of perfectly legal, mostly sanitary, hugely affordable markets with illegal wildlife markets, which in some places either sneak in to the side of legitimate markets or exist on their own. This trade is driven both by long-held folk superstitions (I was once told, rather derisively, that no educated Chinese person believes that ground tiger penis has aphrodisiac qualities — same goes for the colour black and the number 4 being ‘unlucky’ — entirely folk with no basis in any educated literature).
The unfortunate combination of superstition, lack of education and rationality (take Viagra, for crying out loud) and a profit-driven poaching market results in the perfect conditions for a pandemic to take root.
I condemn illegal and immoral practices endemic in the culture I unfortunately share with the landmass known as ‘China’ as much as the next person, and equally condemn yellow (lol) journalism in the West which chooses to conflate the two.
Even cursory research will substantiate whatever I’ve said above. It is clear to me that certain news outlets would prefer to stoke cultural disgust and resentment against vast swathes of the less developed and equally developed world for doing what humans have been doing since they stopped hunting and gathering — bringing their wares to an agreed location to trade.
Next time you grab a vacuum-sealed packet of disembodied chicken breast fillets from the refrigerated aisle, remember you are farther away from the source of your dinner than most of the world. You are in fact the outlier. That’s nothing to be particularly smug about, especially when you consider the statistics of contaminated food in supermarkets.