I grew up in a rather suburban residential neighborhood of Singapore in the 1960’s. Our home sat on a hill up from a main thoroughfare. The vicinity is devoid of any commercial establishments but for a little dry goods store three quarters way down the hill. I often frequent the store for two reasons. One was to buy local and foreign candies, which they stocked in neat rows of glass canisters. Another was to ogle at the myriads of dry food products, many of which I could not even identify. I remembered the front of the store lined with sacks of grains and beans. There were white rice, glutinous rice, brown rice, soybeans, mung beans, red beans and others. There were also rows of glass canisters filled with dried mushroom, cuttlefish, squid, scallop, and all kinds of seafood. And then there were the individual cellophane packages of dried plums, nuts and Chinese fruit candies strewn all over the counters. We used to buy them by the jin, which is a Chinese weight unit still used in Singapore then. This is my memory of the Seng Hock market.
