Market · Boon Lay

A Colour at Boon Lay That Opened Everything

8 February 2026 · written by Aisha

I went to Boon Lay market for ginger and came back with nothing except a colour I couldn't stop looking at — a blue-green tarp stretched over a vegetable stall, faded by sun until it held light the way old glass does. Not turquoise exactly. Not teal. Something in between that made the carrots below look more orange than physics allows.

Saturdays at this market are organised chaos: wheels on wet floor, stallholders calling prices in three languages, the smell of fried shallots mixing with detergent from the nearby shop. I know the layout by repetition — fish on the left if you enter from the MRT side, fruits under the fan that drops water sometimes, the uncle who always gives me an extra chilli even when I say one is enough.

But I had never noticed that tarp before, which seems impossible given how many times I've walked that aisle. Maybe it was new. Maybe the light hit at the right hour — late morning, sun high enough to bleach the edges but not yet flattening everything white. The colour pulled at something old: a school bag I had in Secondary Two, a plastic folder, the same unlikely blue-green. I hadn't thought about that bag in years.

One tarp shade and suddenly I was twelve again, counting coins for fried bee hoon before tuition.

I stood there longer than a normal person buys vegetables, letting the memory arrive in pieces. The bag's broken zip. The bee hoon uncle who always asked whether I'd eaten. The walk to tuition with oily paper warming my palm. None of it was sad. It was just there, resurfacing because a market tarp echoed it across two decades.

A stallholder asked if I wanted chye sim. I bought a bunch without checking the price — unusual for me — and added ginger after all, because once you're already holding a bag you might as well finish the errand. The tarp fluttered when a truck passed outside, and the colour shifted one degree cooler, like turning a dial barely perceptible.

I thought about how many colours live in this market that I walk past because I'm hunting items, not seeing surfaces. Red plastic baskets stacked high. Yellow price tags handwritten in thick marker. The silver of fish scales under fluorescent light. We talk about food here — rightly — but the place is also a museum of pigments and textures if you slow down enough to let them register.

On the 179 home I kept seeing flashes of blue-green against the bus window reflection, overlaid on passing blocks and billboards. At my stop I looked at the sky — ordinary grey-white — and felt slightly disappointed, which is ridiculous. Not every hour owes you a perfect colour. Still, I was glad the market had offered one without asking permission.

I washed the chye sim and ginger when I got in. Put them in the fridge. Sat down to write this before the shade faded from whatever part of the brain stores things that aren't useful but won't leave. My mother called while I was typing. I told her about the tarp. She said markets always had colours like that when she was young too — you just forget until one reminds you.

Maybe that's the whole entry: a reminder that memory doesn't always arrive through photographs or songs. Sometimes it's a piece of plastic overhead, filtering light onto carrots, opening a door you didn't know was still there.