The last wet market on the estate

1On Saturday mornings the wet market under Choi Yuen Estate still smells of ginger skins and bleach. Aunties argue, in a friendly way, over whether the choy sum is from Fanling or just labelled that way. A man with a cleaver nods at regulars and pretends not to notice when a child steals a slice of raw carrot from the display. The floor is wet on purpose. It always has been.

2The Housing Department letter arrived in April. The market, it said, was “under-utilised”. A supermarket chain had offered to take the entire floor, install air-conditioning and pay a rent that stallholders could not match even if they stood there until midnight. Residents were invited to a consultation. The PowerPoint had a picture of smiling shoppers holding paper bags that did not leak.

3Mrs Lam, who has sold tofu on stall 14 since 1989, spoke for three minutes and then sat down because her voice went. She did not talk about heritage. She talked about credit. “People here still take three pieces of fish and pay on Friday,” she said. “The supermarket will not do that. The supermarket does not know whose son is in hospital.” A young couple at the back filmed her on their phones and later wrote that the market was “aesthetic”. Mrs Lam asked her daughter what the word meant.

4There is a real problem the letter did not invent. Some stalls stay shut on weekdays. Young people buy snacks at convenience stores. The drains smell in August. A clean, cold supermarket would be easier to mop. What the letter treats as a simple upgrade is also a change in who can buy food without a credit card and who can earn a living without speaking English to a franchise manager.

5A compromise has been floated: keep a third of the stalls, let the chain take the rest, add tables so that office workers can eat lunch. It sounds tidy on a slide. Stallholders say the rent on a “heritage corner” would still rise. The chain’s spokesman said, brightly, that wet markets and modern retail can “co-exist in a vibrant ecosystem”. He did not say who would set the price of ginger.

6On the last Saturday in May the market was more crowded than it had been in years. People who usually shop in Kowloon Tong took photos of fish tanks. Mrs Lam sold out of tofu by eleven. She was not grateful for the attention. “They will go back to the supermarket on Monday,” she told her daughter. “We will still be here. Or we will not.” The bleach smell stayed in the lift all the way to the twenty-third floor.