I enjoy eating, but I usually do so with an appreciative eye, rather than being a hardcore foodie. What I enjoy more is the process of making food—the magnificent transformation of ingredients “from the market to the table.” I believe this is an essential part of life.
I believe many readers have harbored such thoughts: we once wished to be like the protagonists of martial arts novels, “roaming the world, undefeated,” or “founding our own style and becoming masters.” Although modern life no longer permits such wild abandon, I find that same sensation in the kitchen. My culinary skills are not particularly advanced; I simply mean that in the kitchen, you find a sense of effortless creation. You become intoxicated by it—by the process of turning fresh ingredients into delicious meals.
By extension, you might even grow to love wandering through food markets, for they are the source of all ingredients and the places most filled with the flavor of life.
Gu Long once wrote:
If a person is at their wit’s end and feels so trapped that they contemplate ending it all, send them to the food market.
To be honest, I am not well-acquainted with Gu Long, nor have I read his novels (though I have read all of Jin Yong’s works, some more than a dozen times). However, seeing this quote by Gu Long occasionally, I resonate with it from the bottom of my heart.
Both the kitchen and the food market are parts of life (the martial arts world). Gu Long even incorporated this view directly into his novels. In his Sentimental Swordsman, Ruthless Sword, there is a passage:
Tie Chuanjia, having nowhere else to go, inadvertently wandered into a food market. Women carrying children, elderly ladies with canes, greasy cooks—all sorts of people with vegetable baskets jostled past him, arguing heatedly with village women and butchers over a single penny. It was so vivid and full of life that his mood suddenly brightened.
No wonder more and more young people are struggling with despair today; it’s because they visit food markets less and less~
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