There are places one remembers not because anything important happened there, but because ordinary life passed through them often enough to leave a trace.
A supermarket is one of those places. It does not usually announce itself as memory. It is too practical for that, too brightly lit, too concerned with price labels, plastic baskets, trolleys with imperfect wheels, and the small arithmetic of domestic necessity. Yet childhood is often preserved in such places more faithfully than in monuments. A city may be remembered through its skyline, but a family is often remembered through the things it buys without thinking.
In Hong Kong, supermarkets were never merely supermarkets to me.
They were where the world became domestic.
Outside, Hong Kong was heat, traffic, hills, crowds, rain, and the impatient rhythm of the street. Inside, the air-conditioning held everything in fluorescent order. Shelves stood neatly arranged. Fruit sat wrapped in foam nets. Freezers hummed. Trolleys moved slowly, unusually slowly for Hong Kong, as if shopping gave people one of the few socially acceptable reasons to hesitate. For a child arriving from London, this was oddly fascinating. The setting was familiar enough to understand, yet different enough to make the everyday feel newly arranged.
Milk was not quite the same. Bread was softer. Cereal carried different cartoon mascots. Soy sauce occupied more space than it ever would in an English supermarket. Instant noodles came in varieties that seemed endless, a library of small, edible promises. Fish balls, tofu, dried mushrooms, preserved plums, Yakult, Vitasoy, Ribena, Milo, Horlicks, seaweed, Japanese curry blocks, frozen dumplings, luncheon meat, and strange little jellies all belonged to a geography of appetite that was both mine and not entirely mine.
In London, the supermarket had its own rhythm: bread, milk, crisps, biscuits, cold meats, fruit, perhaps a roast chicken, perhaps something from the world-food aisle if one wanted to feel connected to elsewhere. The categories were clearer. Ordinary food belonged in one place; foreign food belonged in another.
Hong Kong arranged things differently.
British biscuits could sit near Japanese confectionery. Taiwanese drinks appeared beside local soy milk. Korean instant noodles leaned into Cantonese pantry staples. Australian beef, Japanese apples, French butter, Malaysian sauces, American cereal, Chinese dried goods, and Hong Kong bakery items coexisted without much explanation. The shelves did not treat this mixture as remarkable. They presented it as normal, because in Hong Kong it was normal.
That was one of the first things the city taught me about identity: cosmopolitanism did not have to be declared. It could simply be placed on a shelf.
There were the ordinary supermarkets, of course. ParknShop. Wellcome. The practical places of daily life, where one went because the fridge needed filling, because someone had forgotten eggs, because dinner required spring onions, because a child wanted something sweet, because home had run out of milk. They had the quick, efficient feel of Hong Kong domesticity. People moved through the aisles with purpose, comparing prices, checking freshness, calling home to ask whether there was still rice.
These supermarkets had their own sound: scanners beeping, plastic bags opening with a dry crackle, cashiers speaking in brisk Cantonese, promotional announcements repeating overhead, children asking for snacks, elderly women inspecting fruit with seriousness. Someone would block the aisle while studying two brands of cooking oil as though the matter had moral weight. A mother would tell a child to stop touching things. Near the entrance, discounted items gathered in baskets with the faint melancholy of things waiting to be chosen.
It was not glamorous, but it was alive.
And then there was City’Super.
City’Super belonged to another register of Hong Kong life. It was still a supermarket, technically, but to call it that felt inadequate in the same way that calling The Landmark a shopping mall felt inadequate. It was less about necessity than curation. Food became aspiration there. The aisles felt wider. The produce seemed arranged with aesthetic intention. The cheese counter suggested Europe. The sashimi counter suggested Japan. The wine section suggested a life in which dinner was always being thoughtfully paired with something.
The City’Super at IFC became one of those places I remember with disproportionate clarity.
Perhaps it was because IFC already carried a particular emotional weight for me: Central, my father’s office, the harbour, glass, height, and the quiet ambition of the city. To step from that world into City’Super was to enter a different but related form of aspiration. Not corporate ambition, but domestic refinement. Here, taste was organised, imported, polished, made available under bright lights in the middle of Hong Kong’s financial heart.
I loved wandering there.
Sometimes we bought practical things. Sometimes we bought treats. Sometimes we only looked. That, too, was part of the pleasure. The supermarket allowed a kind of low-stakes dreaming. One could imagine meals not yet cooked, places not yet visited, versions of oneself not yet fully formed. A wheel of French cheese, a bottle of olive oil, Japanese fruit wrapped with ceremonial care, Spanish ham sliced thinly, oysters resting on ice, wagyu beef marbled like a private landscape — these were not only ingredients. They were suggestions. They implied knowledge, travel, judgement, and a life arranged with some degree of grace.
But what stayed with me was not luxury alone.
It was the ease with which Hong Kong allowed different worlds to sit together. A family might buy soy sauce and imported cheese in the same trip. Dinner might include steamed fish, roast chicken, salad, Japanese rice, and fruit from three countries. A child could eat siu mai from a street stall one day and wander through a gourmet supermarket the next, without feeling that these belonged to separate identities.
This was not confusion. It was Hong Kong’s ordinary pluralism.
The city absorbed things quickly, used them practically, and turned them into habit. It did not ask whether British biscuits, Japanese snacks, Cantonese soup ingredients, Taiwanese drinks, Korean noodles, French cheese, and Australian beef belonged to the same cultural category. They belonged because people bought them, carried them home, placed them in cupboards, cooked them, shared them, and forgot they had ever been foreign.
For me, that was the quiet lesson of Hong Kong supermarkets.
Home did not have to be pure.
It could be assembled.
It could contain several languages, several histories, several appetites. It could be a flat where Cantonese was spoken, English books lay on a desk, Japanese snacks sat in a drawer, British tea lived beside Chinese medicine, and someone had bought French butter because it was on offer or because they simply liked it. Nothing needed to match perfectly. The mixture itself was the point.
Perhaps this is why imported food never felt merely imported.
British items in Hong Kong reminded me of London. Hong Kong items in London reminded me of summer. Japanese snacks in Hong Kong reminded me of travel from within travel, of a childhood in which no place existed alone. The supermarket collapsed distance into packaging. A carton, a tin, a packet, a bottle — each was a small argument against the idea that home could be singular.
In that sense, supermarkets were more honest than tourist districts.
Tourist districts show a city when it knows it is being looked at. Supermarkets show it when it has forgotten to pose. They reveal what people eat when they are tired, what parents buy for children, what counts as cheap, what counts as indulgent, what is imported, what is local, what is placed at eye level, what is treated as basic. In Hong Kong, the answer was rarely simple. The ordinary basket might contain several worlds at once.
That, to me, was the city.
Not merely East meets West, which is too easy a phrase and often too lazy. Hong Kong was stranger and more specific than that. It was Cantonese and British and Japanese and Taiwanese and Southeast Asian and global, not as a slogan, but as dinner. As snacks. As breakfast. As something bought after school, something carried home after work, something placed in the fridge for later.
I remember one evening at IFC City’Super with Alex.
We had not gone there for anything urgent. That was often the best kind of visit. We wandered through the aisles after lunch, still full but somehow interested in food again because supermarkets encourage that particular hypocrisy. Alex stopped near the snacks, picked something up, read the label, put it back, then picked up something else with the solemn uncertainty of a person making a life decision. I drifted towards the cheese and seafood, pretending to consider dinner plans that had not yet been made.
Our basket held almost nothing at first.
Then, gradually, it became a record of small temptations: Japanese drinks, a packet of biscuits, perhaps some fruit, perhaps something unnecessary from the chilled section, something one of us insisted we should try. Nothing important. Nothing that would survive in family history as an event.
We paid, took the bag, and left through the cool brightness of IFC.
Outside, Central had already returned to its usual pace. People crossed the concourse with purpose. Office workers walked towards meetings, tourists towards the harbour, someone somewhere towards the train. Alex looked into the bag as if checking whether we had made wise decisions.
“We definitely didn’t need half of this,” he said.
“No,” I said.
But neither of us suggested returning anything.
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