To Market, To Market

I am driving home under the harbor, heading back to Oakland through the Webster tube—a short tunnel that connects Jack London to the 1950s. I emerge in Oakland's Chinatown, where I now must negotiate a left onto 8th. To be successful requires, in equal measures, a game of chicken and a persistent slide to the right at the top of the turn like a pat of butter skidding along a hot griddle; a maneuver dictated by local custom rather than the rules of the road. I am driving through a slice of my neighborhood that is accessible to me only on the surface—I will never penetrate the deeper psychology of Chinatown. It will always be a kaleidoscope of sounds, smells, images, and automotive attitude that let me know I may visit, but I am just passing through; always the butter, never the skillet.
.
I am heading west to Broadway, about eight blocks. Is this what the world looked like to my grandmother who came to New York from a small Eastern European village during the huge migrations at the turn of the last century? Sidewalks of artfully stacked crates; cornucopias of deep purple eggplant, tawny cantaloupe, the soothing green and white of onions and leeks, dark crimson beetle nuts, alien sea cucumbers, brown eggs, white eggs, black eggs, fresh fish on chipped ice, the full spectrum of what is possible for green, mushrooms that are as dark and old as the earth, bright oranges and bananas hanging from an awning held up by a broom, women hoisting parasols that splash away sunbeams, men offloading dressed chickens and pigs from the backs of trucks—a market from some other time, some other place, replete with noodle bars, chop houses, steam tables, bakeries, and white steam clouding from cooking vents. Forklifts are not permitted and men run back and forth, sprinting loads of onions, racks of clothes, and buckets of oysters through dense traffic.
.
With few exceptions, stores here are miniscule compared to the big box stores that dominate the landscape of the American interior. Shops in Chinatown are the size of an auto repair service bay, some even less. Typically, it is the cash register and the cold cases that are inside while the rest of the merchandise is piled on the sidewalk. To make the most of limited floor space in a densely packed neighborhood, merchants here use their stores literally—as storage. Each evening they drag all their wares in from the sidewalk that is their true market and pull shut the scissoring burglar-gate. Every morning they haul it all back out to the light of day.
.
Every street is double parked on both sides. I have never seen a meter cop in Chinatown. Drivers stop whenever and wherever they want and people get in or out of cars at any unpredictable moment. With sidewalks narrowed by merchandise to thin strips, bottle necks form and are relieved only when everyone rushes into the street carrying a bright pink plastic bag, twisted at the top and knotted, or pushing a wheeled, wire shopping basket brimming with produce and small, shiny packages topped by a small dog for ballast. Although this neighborhood is best described as pan-Asian, commerce here is heavily Chinese and Vietnamese. Everything is seemingly familiar but nothing is the same.
.
The young are separated from the old by bling and sunglasses as much as by age. Fashionable girls wear short shorts and cork-heeled slides; the boys style tight, white tees, khakis, and Vans. Smart phones swing from wrist chains but the flirting and posturing are universal. Daily life in Chinatown is lived on the street, not in the office or at the mall but in the pho bars, bakeries, and produce stalls where friends are met, news exchanged, ungrateful children are chided, and the old shuffle their way to barrels of dried fish. The restaurants are not the haute cuisine of Michelin stars and celebrity chefs (San Francisco). There is no slow food movement, no manifesto about eating local to save the planet (Berkeley). Chinatown restaurants are about a family making a living serving lunch and dinner to other families off a menu that changes seasonally if at all.
.
I had to be initiated into this world of a restaurant behind every other door. Coming from a big farm state settled by Germans, Norwegians, and Swedes, I grew up eating sausage and hotdogs, salami, headcheese and wursts—foods that are more appetizing when the ingredients are left off the packaging—along with fish pickled in a sharp, tangy cream sauce and crispy sardines fried whole. I should be prepared for a bold menu. Eating here demands some familiarity with a cuisine that cooks with fish oil and includes squid, pig uterus, duck eggs that have been buried in the ground to ferment, stinky tofu, and a menu written in hanzi. More importantly, one should bring an appetite, a spirit of adventure, a willingness to experiment, and the cultural appreciation that one man’s shrimp is another man’s grub worm.
.
Now I have “my place” for tender, white salt-and-pepper squid; my place for deep fried spicy tofu, oily and golden, hidden under a mound of dried red chili peppers served in a wooden boat. I have a stable of dim sum places scattered throughout the area. Almost as complex as shopping for wine in California supermarkets where one must discriminate among hundreds of competing labels that stretch across many aisles, I am learning to buy tea in dark, smoky shops where I can only point and sniff like a hunting dog. All of these now receding in my rearview mirror as I make the turn onto Broadway heading toward the waterfront and home—or what I call home today.