10.1SHEKOU Fish fishing fisher1

During the holiday, my friend and I went to see an exhibition which, according to what is written in the introduction, aims to use different art installations to present the sense of “place” constituted by Shenzhen. I am not an artsy pioneer, therefore, from those delicate paintings and the reoccurring flower image, I try hard but fail to connect myself to the sense of Shenzhen. These symbolic works hang in the hollow room, they are shouting hard with a muted device.

We escaped from the galleries and cycled aimlessly down the slope. We stumbled into Shekou Old Street， and we accidentally ended up at the Shekou market. It's said to be a vegetable market, but all it sells is seafood; it’s nothing strange because this is Shekou: it is located in the southeastern part of the Nantou Peninsula in Shenzhen, bordering Shenzhen Bay to the east, the Pearl River Estuary to the west, and across the sea from Yuen Long and Lau Fau Shan in the New Territories of Hong Kong. Every time I commute from the Shekou Pier to Hong Kong, I can always see small fishing boats floating on the sea, and now you can guess out where the fish in the market are transported from. I love Shekou market--- a small Disneyland made up of sea food. Different types of fish, shrimps, crabs, and various mollusks are squeezed in the blue plastic boxes, patting the clean fresh water, stretching their claws and gills. They reminded me of "さかなのこ（The fish Tale）," a movie about a little girl who is obsessed with fish. I kind of empathize with that fondness, even though it comes from the gluttony of imagining them being cooked.

Of course, the most interesting thing about a place is the people. Vendors her always wear plastic boots and bucket hats----a sign of their return from the sea.  To satisfy the picky customers, they asked their small animals in the pool to show off their talents and turn them over like parents who ask their children to perform on stage during the New Year. They praised these little creatures for their size, color, its breed. While pinching their noses to endure the fishy smell, the customers opened the plastic bags and asked the stall owner to put the chosen one into the bags, ready to bring them back home. We wandered around the market for half an hour, but eventually, we couldn't resist the strong fishy smell and ran out. Next to the big shed, we saw a cat tied to the wall, running around anxiously, although its moving space was limited to a circle with the radius of the rope around its neck. My friend said that this cat was poor because all cats love to eat fish but the only thing this little poor thing can do when faced with rows and boxes of fish is to only feel the smell of them. No wonder it had to be tied up, otherwise all the fish here would have been gone to its belly.

 

On the drive home, I saw that iconic line: “Time is Money, Efficiency is life”. This is the slogan of Shenzhen’s reform and established as a special economic zone. Shenzhen has indeed interpreted these words: In the buildings in high-tech parks where the lights shined bright like a star in midnight, in the subway where you can't get handrails because there are too many people, and in the taxis rushing to various lessons from Nanshan to Luohu. Shenzhen flies. The running footsteps did step on my body bit by bit, leaving a slight pain on my spiritual backbone. However, deep down in my heart, I still believe that Shekou is the place that truly gives me a sense of place in Shenzhen. It was Shekou, the place that carries the earliest memories of Shenzhen, that accepted me as a child and inspired my love and desire to chase for the sense of place.

After leaving the market, we walked along the Shekou Old Street, and this is what we saw: Cantonese dessert shop, Cantonese Claypot Rice, and Cantonese Herbal Tea Shop. Although the official language of the entire Shenzhen (including here) is Mandarin, this place radiates a vibe of Bawa(the pronunciation of Cantonese in Cantonese). It's already four o'clock in the afternoon, and there is still an endless stream of people in the dessert shop. The weather is so hot, that the air is light and floating upward. Everyone is floating in the sky, leisurely. The laid-back vibe here is not the exquisiteness derived from the expensive soda water sold in the café in OCT. The laid-back vibe is constituted by that small bowl of Guiling paste with over-added milk syrup and the swallow of it in one gulp. We also passed my kindergarten, where my classmates and I went down slides and swings, rolled on the ground, and stood up to kids’ fight. We passed by the bus stop where I held my grandfather’s hand while carrying a schoolbag broader than my back when I was a child, waiting for the bus home.  We also passed by the bun vendor who saved my life when I was extremely hungry after school. This is where I grew up, this is a part of me. Yifu Tuan once said in his book "Topophilia" that the generation of the environment is the process of human beings constantly constructing ideal relationships between people and land. Space is the carrier of human social relationships and emotions. And Shekou has carried most of my short life.