You have a fair idea as to the freshness of your fish when the plastic bag in which it sits twitches uncontrollably on the tram home. Buying fish in Hong Kong is a little different from what is customary in Britain. The Chinese don’t really do dead fish. They go to the market and pick one out that they like the look of, and the lady manning the stall fishes it out with a net. It is presented, flapping desperately, on to the scales and the price is given.
Food markets in Hong Kong are referred to as “wet” markets. It seems to make sense. Markets everywhere are often confused by the presence of tat and cheap clothes, which are hardly of interest to us foodies. Wet markets are sometimes a huge indoor affair, sometimes simply a street or two in which every shop is selling vegetables or spices or dried plums, roast pigeons or fish. The vegetables – myriad variations of choy sum, spinach, pea shoots and bok choy, aubergines, mushrooms and herbs – are sensational but it is the fish stalls that fascinate.
There is not much room for any anthropomorphic sentimentality here, and I cannot say that I have seen any such weakness in the local population. There is no squeamishness about the mode of dispatch nor in what is presented at table, something I realised quite soon when I ordered a “drunken” pigeon in a restaurant and it arrived complete with its head, beak and all, sticking up in the middle of the plate. It would have pleased Fergus Henderson no end.