My wife negotiates with a Night Market candy dealer
Night Markets like the one pictured above are a slowly vanishing form of entertainment for the working class. My Taiwan website has a collection of pictures of night markets from around the island, if you want to see more.
Two or three Saturday nights a month my wife and I take the kids to the night market near our house. It is a very small night market and resolutely working class. This kind of market is vanishing breed, however.
As Taiwan becomes more affluent, the night markets have started to bifurcate in response. The new middle class has, like all middle classes, developed upper class tastes and so disdains the traditional night markets as dirty and uncontrolled. The result has been a slow evolution toward night markets like this one in Keelung. Once a traditional night market with a pleasing anarchy of stands and sellers, it has become a lifeless touristy dump of identical storefronts where people show up in decent clothing (gasp!). Fortunately beyond the precincts of the government-mandated cookie cutter sameness the Stainless Steel Rats still hawk their wares in the traditional manner, from stalls with haphazard wooden tables piled high with second rate goods sold at inflated prices.
At the same time the traditional night markets like ours still survive, but only barely. Large parking lots suitable for night markets are steadily being gobbled up by the insane pace of development, turned into hideous apartment buildings or cookie cutter housing estates. Their low rents mean low revenues, while as the picture below shows, many of their wares are illegal and sooner or later will be the subject of crackdowns.
What kind of razors are these? Look closely; the eye can deceive.
Night markets have always been a unique aspect of local culture. When they are gone, I'll miss them greatly.
Clyde said:
ReplyDeleteOh Michael, I could not disagree more! I just spent a week up in Taipei at the Youth Corps center, and went over to the Chen Tan night market a few times, and it was as alive as ever! I even found some stuff I needed.
As you know, I have a big research project on this topic, and I think that the exact form you remember the night market in is changing, as it always has been in flux. For myself, my image of the night market is set in 1985 never to be changed--when we quit Taipei Langauge Institute for the night and head to the market to get 500cc 木瓜牛奶 10NT.
While this still is around, the drink market is taken up by all the drink stores. But the night market culture now exist in places like supermarkets--even foreign retailing chains. Morning markets have also expanded to sell clothes, which are now so cheap. In the 1980s night markets were selling electronics all over. Thus it is really the current economic trends that determine what is sold.
I think I lost my point here, bit tired.
Well, actually, I wasn't really talking about what is sold so much as the "format." Taiwan seems to be reinterpreting its working class traditions so as to make them palatable, and one way is to either bring the anarchy of the night market under control, or to get rid of it. Remember the big debate about the upgrade of the Shulin night market a way back? But your comments are reassuring! I love night markets!
ReplyDelete-- palatable -- to the new middle class
ReplyDeleteClyde said:
ReplyDeleteMichael, you so quickly cut to the core of what I see as an amazing research question: Is the night market FORMAT desired to change, or is it the ANARCHY? While we often here middle class members state they don't like the night market because of the 'anarchy' I question that they really have a new value at all. I assert that they are simply branding it as 'bad' through the use of terms like dirty, chaos, etc., but then they turn around and are attracted to other expressions of dirty, chaos, anarchy! On one side the middle class says anarchy and on the other side they say renao.
They are clearly different categories. Look at the Miao-kou Night Market in Keelung, where every facade and stall is exactly the same. My mother in law loved it, so jen-chi, that Taiwanese stamp of approval, everything neat and controlled and in its place, just like her kitchen back home. I hated it, so sterile and regimented. But it seems to me that if you asked anyone in that incredibly crowded place, they would say it is renao, don't you think?
ReplyDeleteMicahel and Clyde. Please send me Clyde's email address so I can send him my book on night markets. You are both right.
ReplyDeleteBut I think, myself, that the night markets are not dying. Not at all. Never.
Sure, Keelung did something special for that market, but I went there last year and still had a great time selling my books there, standing in the crowds and it was wonderful.
I think you should stop "studying" the night markets so much, and doing academic research on them, and just get into them, without any blinders on. That will kill them, for sure.
Just go out into the crowded aisles and have fun. These night markets are not dying.
Email me, Clyde, and I will tell you more. [danbloom [AT] gmail.com]
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