Chapter 01: The Wet Market

Once upon a time, in a drain inside a market, there was a tortoise.

The drain was very dirty, and so was the tortoise. No one, not even the tortoise himself, knew what his real name was (though it is not sure whether tortoises are meant to have names anyway). What they did know, was that he was very dirty, and he was a tortoise, so they called him Dirty Tortoise.

Dirty Tortoise lived in a drain located directly below a vegetable stall in a wet market in a town called Temelo. The vegetable stall was owned by a young boy named Ah Choi, who had inherited the stall from his parents. Ah Choi’s parents were too old to take care of the stall now, so these days they mostly stayed home watching Hong Kong Cantonese television series while playing the occasional game of mahjung.

As far as the layouts of markets go however, this was a very conventional one. If you took an aeroplane and looked down on it, you will see this medium-sized square building with strange, blue and red roof tiles. The market is divided into four very different equally square sections, with each section peddling different sorts of wares and seperated by two main yellow painted paths that divided these sections looked like a very big yellow cross.

If you were a newcomer to the market (regulars usually come in from the side doors that lead directly to the sections the want to go to), you would walk through the front entrance on the south side, which consisted of two dark grey metal doors with HUGE locks on it, and a simple, faded white plastic signboard that said “TEMELO WET MARKET” in big bright blue letters (and had a tiny white sticker on the right corner that said “24-hour locksmith: Maniam (HP: 017-3xx5xxx5)”. These doors were closed at 12am sharp every night, after the final stall – usually the Mamak Stall owned by Maniam the Locksmith - shooed their last customers out.

As you enter the doors, you will be assaulted by a barrage of different smells coming from either side of the vast hall. On your right, the wonderful scents of flowers and fruits waft by from the Fruit and Flower section, where the stalls peddle the freshest fruits and the most wonderful blooms in all of Temelo. But turn your face slightly to the left, and the obscenely strong scent of raw meat and blood makes your nose would wrinkle in disgust.

Quite why these two contrasting scents were put side by side is unknown, but legend has it that hundreds of years ago when the Wet Market was built, humans had yet to discover the joys of flowers, fruits, vegetables and spices. So when the Wet Market was built, it consisted only of one section – the meat section. Butchers from all over the town would congregate there, selling all sorts of meats – from chicken, beef, pork and mutton, to exotic meats like deer, frogs and even (gasp!) tortoises.

By and by, as human began to crave more culinary and sensory delights, there were more and more stalls in the Wet Market that sold other things besides meat. But the meat section (which was still very big at the time) remained in the front of the building, and you had to walk through the rows of dead meat and the stalls of bloody entrails to get to the vegetables and fruits.

One day, a Very Important Politician, who wanted to turn his town into a Very Important Heritage Site, visited the Wet Market hoping to turn it into a tourist attraction. As soon as he stepped into the market, he was shocked by the smell of the meat market.

“WHAT IS THIS STENCH!” he thundered. “HOW WILL WE ATTRACT TOURISTS TO COME HERE IF THEY CAN’T EVEN GET PAST THE FRONT DOOR??!!”

That day, the Very Important Politician went back to his office, called in a reporter from the Very Serious Propaganda Network (VSPN for short), and made this announcement:

“FROM TODAY ONWARDS, THE MEAT SECTION IN THE WET MARKET IS TO BE MOVED TO THE BACK OF THE MARKET SO WE CAN ATTRACT MORE TOURISTS,” he thundered on camera.

To cut a long story short, the butchers protested, held demonstrations (both peaceful and violent) and marched upon the Very Important Politician’s office, throwing pigs intestines and Bishop’s Noses at his limousine until they came to a compromise – the butchers could remain in front, but they had to let the nicer smelling stalls like fruits and flowers have the other half of the market, to create a more harmonious smell and the impression that they are getting along. The Very Important Politician called it his 1Market campaign, and though not everyone was happy with the arrangement, they decided that the best way to avoid anymore stupid policies was to go along with it.

But that was a long time ago. Now, no one remembers the 1Market policy anymore, and the Meat and Fruits and Flowers section people get along just fine.

But let us move along with our little tour of the Wet Market. If you survive the strange and contrasting smells of the front section and walk along down the middle of the hall to the middle of the big yellow paths, you will come upon the most wonderful and most famous section of the market.

On your left, the Spices Section is full of little stalls manned (or rather, womanned) by little old ladys, surrounded by all sorts of different spices either contained in little glass jars or in tiny little pyramird-like piles in front of them.

From conventional spices like curry powder, chilli powder, coriander, pepper, parsley, sage rosemary and thyme, to more exotic spices like Mantis Tears, Organic Gunpowder Residue and Venus Flytrap Extract; this was the section that the Temelo Wet Market is most famous for, and which eventually got it named a Very Important Heritage Site, just as the Very Important Politician wanted.

It is said that every spice you ever need can be found here, and people from all over the world have a saying that if you want to spice up something, whether it’s your chicken masala, your lasagne or even your sex life, there’s always something for you in the Temelo Wet Market.

Compared to the other sections of the market, the Spice Market was always the most crowded, full of not just shoppers, chefs, and representatives of multi-national spice export companies; but also of countless tourists taking pictures of the little old ladies who seemingly do nothing other than flick at flies (and the occasional tourist) with their little plastic bags on sticks.

By contrast, the Vegetable Section of the wet market where Dirty Tortoise lives under Ah Choi’s vegetable stall, seems almost pathetic. Although the vegetables are fresher, cleaner and certainly more organic than any hypermarket in Temelo, business is generally slow in this part of the market, limited to a handful of old regulars and the occasional lost tourist trying to find his or her way to the Spice Market.

Ah Choi’s vegetable stall is one of the oldest stalls in the vegetable market, and though he was not doing badly (his parents friends still came to his stall regularly to buy their vegetables), he still looked in envy at the booming business of the spice stalls opposite his.

So there you have it – the Temelo Wet Market, the most unique market in a world filled with hypermarkets, and home to the hero of our stories – Dirty Tortoise.


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