Garapan Thursday Street Market

We moseyed over to the Thursday night street market last week after showing my two young wards from Shenyang the American Memorial Park (Mei Guo Gong Ren to our resident Zhongguoren) and its environs. The sights, sounds, smell, and taste were compelling.

Something about the street market lends itself to being a communal node. Research shows that people who shop at regular grocery stores tend to do it fast while Sabalu market shoppers meet neighbors and have an average of 10 conversations with live folks before heading back home.

The street market had the same dynamic last Thursday. Retired Jack Hardy, the Ohio surgeon turned graphic designer and photographer, in his signature look, was a delight to run into. The photog of many Saipan postcards, he no longer lug SLRs but his digital camera is just fine for his craft. He’s still busy clicking away.

The big surprise was long-term broadcaster Harry Blalock who conducts scuba dives to the Marianas from elsewhere, where by the looks of it, he may have too easy an access to lollipops than he needed to. The ex-radio guy who plugged our autism family and women’s empowerment events in our early years casually sauntered through the crowd in what in the olden days would have been familiar grounds.

Dino Jones, investigating legislator of the “global top toxic spot,” who opted out of politics for family and business a few years back, still looks swimming trim, though whatever medication he might be taking (we guess), it might have slowed down reflexes and affected normal metabolism. Hopefully, it had nothing to do with the toxicity he tried to highlight out of Tanapag early this century.

One of the features of China life I have yet to explore fully is the daily street market. I shop at the grocery store because prices are marked on the produce, but the fresh fruits and vegetables on the makeshift street stalls, or spread out on the street grounds, are considerably of more recent vintage. One has to haggle for the price, though, and our Putunghua is not good enough to navigate through them shark-infested commercial waters! The sharkies are there, all right, to prey on the unwary. I am working my way to the language. That, or find a local who will steer the rudder for me.

One of the stall proprietors did find my talking to him in English refreshing. He got to practice English that he had not used for almost a decade, but more, he is pleased not to decipher a foreigner’s bad Chinese in order to understand him. That pretty much sealed out my enthusiasm at learning the language in order to communicate.

At the Saipan Thursday street market, all a non-English speakers has to do is point to four dishes and they get their dinner for a standard $5. The veggie stalls are all green, and the art and trinket booths do not look like tourist traps. The Namaste corner was resplendent with Indian banners, beads and bangles. There was the framed poster shop, the leaf paintings, and the seashells (see photos).

The evening’s performances topped our stroll. We saw two: a Hula troupe and a singing group. The hula is standard fare in all the hotels and celebrative occasions save these were young dancers untainted yet with professional cosmetics. The Umang (coconut crab) Glee Club of KES might have looked a bit jerky when they shook their booty and stomp their feet to songs and medleys but when they got to the Black Eye Peas’ Where is the love, we were rocketed to another dimension.

[I]Overseas, yeah, we tryin’ to stop terrorism
but we still got terrorists here livin’.
In the USA, the big CIA,
the Bloodz and the Crips, and the KKK,
but if you only have love for your own race,
then you only leave space to discriminate
and to discriminate only generates hate…[/I]

We still have two missing sisters. Even staid Norway recently got rocked. The racial undertones in dealing with alien workers, from Fortress Arizona to copycat Saipan are ugly and hateful. I wondered if the elementary kids knew what they were singing about, or if the audience understood what they are hearing until I saw a young lady lip-sync and revealed she knew of the song, though not of the Umangs.

I thought of the Singing Revolution of Estonia (now a docu-film). With no army and weapon-less, it was ruled by the Russians, the Germans, and back to the Russians for 50 years. But they kept singing their forbidden patriotic songs, and the Soviet’s brief flirting with perestroika and glasnost ironically exacerbated the situation until a hardliner “coup” toppled Mikhail Gorbachev out of the Kremlin. Estonia two days later found itself free as a consequence. They keep on singing the story of their bloodless liberation.

The street market not only provides the venue for singing and dancing troupes, it has a potential of being a glocal community event from all the ethnics on island with their arts and crafts on display and for trade. Would it not be a ball if the singing and dancing were made participatory?

The street market is more potent than the stimulus-prone, bailout-demanding, crises-reeling Wall Street of our financial market. Let’s patronize the Thursday street market.