He was standing there, at the back of a truck filled with an absurd quantity of freshly picked potatoes. Topless like so many Chinese men during the hottest months, a cigarette dangling from his lips, almost as covered in dirt as the potatoes he was selling to anyone with a potato emergency at 6 pm on a Friday.
The scene was almost incongruous, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. There’s nothing weird about selling potatoes; they’re a staple food in northern China. But I could imagine his life without knowing anything about it at all. Most likely, he’d grown the potatoes himself. Did he just wake up every morning, fill his truck, drive into Shenyang—presumably; I have yet to spot a potato field in the city—and sell potatoes all day long? Can you make a living and afford anything other than potatoes for dinner when you sell potatoes?
Just like pretty much everything I find while travelling, I found him—or rather the market—by accident. Still finding my way around our neighbourhood and looking for my noodle dinner, I took the second street to the left because the night before we had taken the first street to the right and there was nothing noodle-like down there.
I found a lovely noodle shop by accident, and as luck would have it, it was the one I had bookmarked on Dianping the night before.
Then I kept going more or less towards the apartment, hoping to find it effortlessly by accident, of course.
And this is how I stumbled upon the market, block after block of meat, seafood, fruit, vegetables and Northeast Chinese staples.
I rushed home to get both Feng and the camera.
“You gotta see this, it’s an old-style market!”
The market was still there twenty minutes later. The whole thing happens every day, from early in the morning until 8:30 p.m.
It’s one of these places where time seems to have stopped—but perhaps not all that long ago, because Feng would remind me that there was no luxury like meat or oily pancakes back then, just a lot of suāncài (酸菜) for months and months in a row.
Still, it’s a unique piece of not-so-modern Chinese life. Picture this—there’s a mall that looks like Charles de Gaulle airport Terminal 2E, with Dior, Louboutin and all the fancy stores, just a twenty-minute walk away.
We bought bananas, peanuts, cōngyóubǐng (葱油饼)—the woman laughed when I came back with Feng, asking if he could speak Chinese as well—peaches and pineapple buns. We followed the crowd, bikes, scooters, other pedestrians, wandering around, looking for the next food find (Feng) or life scene (me).
I passed on the silkworms. We didn’t fill up containers with booze. I should have bought more doughy, oily pancakes filled with meat and jiǔcài (韭菜).
And the funny part about this market is that, much like anywhere else in China, everybody is buying basic, everyday food for a few yuan, scanning a fancy Wēixìn (微信) or Zhīfùbǎo (支付宝) QR code with phones that are way faster than mine.
Hell, even the potato guy has a QR code. Crazy.
What I don’t find by accident finds me by accident, namely the nightly food market just below the apartment and just three blocks from the market where people buy food to cook themselves.
It’s a completely different vibe, very “we ain’t starving, food is fun” 2026. Carts set up around 5 pm, packed tightly together, and soon enough the entire block smells of spices I can’t identify and find slightly nauseating—as in, I paused by the durian cart to take a break from the barbecue smell floating in the air.
Mind you, weird things are being barbecued, from classic meat skewers to the ever-popular squid.
You thought Chinese people eat with chopsticks? They eat food on sticks around here!
“I wonder how many people get pointy-stick injuries every night…” I asked Feng.
Anything goes on a stick. Unidentified seafood. Scorpions, tarantulas, worms and other insects I’d hate finding in my bed, let alone in my mouth.
Stinky tofu, bright-red shrimp and unidentified desserts are served in small bowls, of course… but with pointy sticks as well, to pick at and share.
All night long, residents in our building go down and come back up, taking the elevator with bag after bag of street-food finds. A guy earlier was genuinely happy to have found silkworms and tried to convince me to try them all the way up to the 22nd floor.
The madness stops around midnight. The madness stops around midnight. It’s a real mess then, with litter everywhere and drunk customers lingering while garbage is picked up and hot cooking oil gets poured down the drains. It looks like a post-Carnaval bloco.
And it’s every night, below my window (although no smell is strong enough to make it to the 22nd floor).
Oh, today, the potato guy was selling tomatoes as well.
wowwww those are big silkworms! I would be afraid to try them. Though spiders are on my list.