Teck Ghee Market at the Turnip Bin

I stood at the turnip bin longer than the queue behind me preferred.

Teck Ghee market on a Saturday morning is a sound collage — cleavers on boards, stallholders calling prices, wheels on wet concrete. I come here when my fridge has reached that hollow stage where you can hear the fan too clearly. My market bag was folded under my arm. I had a list on my phone I mostly ignored once I entered the vegetable section.

The stall I use is run by a woman who stacks produce with the care of a librarian shelving fragile spines. Leafy greens in the shade, roots up front, chillies in a box that warns you before you touch. I needed onions and something green for soup. Simple. Except the turnip bin had two kinds — small ones with pale skin and larger ones with a faint purple shoulder — and I couldn't remember which my mother used when she made the broth I still think about in October.

The stallholder watched me hesitate without impatience. Last week I'd done the same thing at the bean sprout bag and she'd said, "You cook for one or cook for family?" I said one, mostly, and she'd tied a smaller portion without my asking. This week she picked up a small turnip, turned it once, put it back, and said, "This one sweeter if you stew long." Not a sales pitch — a fact offered the way you tell someone the bus number that skips the jam.

I took the turnip she indicated and added a bunch of sai yeung choy because the leaves looked honest — no wilting at the tips. Behind me a man asked for three dollars of ginger and received exactly that amount wrapped in newspaper. The market continued its orbit. A child dropped a coin and three adults bent at once to help, which felt like a rehearsed kindness the city performs without credit.

I paid, tucked the vegetables into my bag, and walked past the fish stall where ice glittered under bare bulbs. The turnip knocked against my notebook through the fabric. Such a minor purchase — a root that would soften over an hour in a pot — and yet I left the stall lighter, as if a decision I'd been carrying without naming had been made on my behalf by someone who knew the inventory.

At home I peeled the turnip slowly, remembering my mother's kitchen and the way she'd skim foam from the surface without commenting. My soup won't match hers. It never does. But the market bag on the counter and the smell rising from the pot made the afternoon feel connected to something older than my lease and my single-serving habits.

I ate at the window ledge, watching the block's laundry flags lift in a breeze that hadn't reached the ground yet. The turnip was sweet enough. The stallholder had been right — or I'd stewed it long enough to become right. Either way, I'll go back next Saturday and hesitate again, gladly.