In an episode of Fresh Off the Boat, Constance Wu’s character, Jessica, reluctantly heads to a supermarket in Florida to buy pre-packaged cheese and biscuits for her son Eddie. He’s been getting bullied at school for bringing Chinese food, and begged her to buy him “white people lunch”.
As Jessica nervously moves through the aisles, she’s visibly overwhelmed by the riot of colours, barrage of brand names, and the sterile, too-perfect order of it all.
“I miss the Taiwanese markets back in D.C.,” she tells Eddie.
The show cuts to a flashback of her shouting at vendors, vegetables clutched to her chest, amidst a flurry of chaos.
“They make me feel so calm”.
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In the Vietnamese language, going grocery shopping is referred to as “đi chợ”, which translates to “going to the market”. The act of market-going is embedded in our way of life. More than that, these markets, or “chợ”, are social spaces for locals to share stories and create new connections.
Some of my fondest childhood memories are centred around the vibrant, bustling markets of Hà Hội. My mornings were often met with a warm, steaming bowl of cháo (congee) paired with golden, crispy quẩy – fried dough sticks that flaked at the touch, yet remained soft and airy at their centre. If I arrived too late, the vendor’s basket would already be empty, the quẩy snatched up by early risers.
This simple detail became my daily motivation to wake up early.
Most mornings, my mum would drop me off at the cháo stall for breakfast while she did her shopping. On one particularly busy day, as I waited for my bowl, I noticed the vendor struggling to juggle the cooking, serving and cleaning all by herself. She caught my eye and beckoned me over with a small wave.
“Giúp cô đưa mấy bát này ra.”
She asked me to help deliver the bowls of congee to waiting customers, pointing to where each one should go. I carried them carefully, doing my best not to spill any of the rich, savoury contents inside, and returned with empty bowls left behind by those who had already eaten.
When the morning rush finally eased, she placed a steaming bowl of cháo in front of me, topped with a generous portion of quẩy. I tucked into my well-earned breakfast, quietly proud, seeing it as a small reward for the part I’d played that morning.
In the afternoons, I usually accompanied my grandmother to the markets to gather what she needed for that night’s dinner. I trailed behind her through winding alleyways and narrow nooks, pressing close to the walls to avoid the steady stream of motorbikes weaving past. As we turned a corner, we emerged onto a street lined with vendors on either side, many selling directly from their homes.
The stalls hug the edge of the road, allowing motorbikes to pull up, grab their food, pay, and speed off without ever dismounting. In the afternoons, the market is filled with people on their way from work or school, stopping to pick up ingredients for that evening’s meal.
For many, a visit to the market is just part of their daily routine – one they hardly have to give a second thought to. With little space left on the sidewalks, pedestrians and motorbikes share the street, weaving around one another in an unspoken choreography. The soundtrack to all this chaos is the constant humming of engines, the staccato of high-pitched honks, and the voices of vendors shouting to compete over the sea of noise.
Stalls overflow with seasonal fruits and vegetables, their goods arranged in colourful baskets displayed on the sidewalk or balanced atop stacked plastic chairs. Depending on the day’s pickings, my grandmother might buy bundles of morning glory or handfuls of rau ngót (sweetleaf) to simmer into soup.
We’d pass the meat stalls, where slabs of unlabelled cuts were splayed across worn wooden tables. A makeshift fan made from a wooden rod with plastic trimming tied at the end would be used to bat away flies. The butchers, wielding cleavers nearly the size of their forearms, hacked through bone and flesh without hesitation, swiftly slicing each piece to the customer’s liking.
Nearby, live fish and crustaceans thrash in shallow plastic tubs, their pungent smell hanging thick in the air.
I watched my grandmother bargain with the vendors, a skill I’ve yet to master to this day. One of her go-to tactics was to casually mention that the shop down the street offered her a better price.
To an outsider, this back-and-forth over the cost of a chicken might look like a petty squabble, but here, it’s part of the ritual. It’s not simply about saving a few thousand đồng – it’s about building trust and connection. It’s about knowing the vendor by name, believing in their fairness, and returning not for the price but the relationship you’ve built.
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Now, living far from Hà Nội, I find myself missing things that were once so ordinary – the clatter of cleavers, the sight of multicoloured plastic baskets strewn across the sidewalks, the chorus of voices calling to each other over the street.
Like Jessica in Fresh Off the Boat, I understand how all this chaos can bring comfort and peace. The market was where I felt safe and cared for while my mum did her shopping, where I helped carry my grandmother’s groceries, and where my sister and I would eat ngô chiên (fried corn pancakes) in the evenings.
Even now, when I spot congee on a menu or catch a whiff of fried dough in the air, I’m taken back to those early mornings at the cháo stand. And for a moment, I’m home again.
Photos by the author, Lan, who writes, “[The cover is] my grandma picking leaves. She’s worked at a market in quảng bình her whole life. This image also highlights the labour of women in these spaces.”