A vibrant street market scene featuring a fusion of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure characters in avant-garde streetwear. A teenager in asymmetrical clothing, blending traditional Asian market elements with modern fashion, stands near a tofu stall. The warm light from the awning casts soft shadows, highlighting the texture of his eclectic outfit. Surrounding details include colorful spices, wet tiles, and an elderly woman with wet hair, embodying the lively atmosphere. The essence of creativity and cultural exchange fills the air, with contrasting designs and textures that reflect individuality and tradition

I rent my corner the way a man rents a second life: three meters of chipped tile at the market’s edge, between the fishmonger’s metallic brine and the spice aunties who crack dried chilies like knuckles. The awning flaps. The floor is always damp. My hands are always warm.

Once, I lectured on Plato with clean cuffs and a dead marker. Now I sell tofu and yuba and a soy milk so pale it looks like morning trying to remember itself. The neighborhood calls me Tofu Socrates, partly as a joke, partly because people still bring their riddles here the way they bring bruised peaches: quietly, with hope that a firm thumb can tell them what’s still good.

Today the riddles arrive dressed.

A teenager in a jacket with sleeves of different lengths—one cuff swallowing the wrist, the other stopping shy—leans over my vats. His pants are a trouser on the left, a skirt panel on the right, stitched with a zipper that goes nowhere. He tells me he’s “doing a fusion”: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure characters meet avant-garde streetwear. He says it like a spell. His earrings clink; one is a safety pin, the other a tiny horseshoe. He smells of laundry powder and heat from a phone.

I nod and scoop soybeans into the sieve. Dry beans sound like rain on a tin roof. “Fusion,” I say, “is just two hungers learning to share a bowl.”

I rinse the beans until the water stops blushing yellow. You can tell a bean’s mood by the way it absorbs—some swallow water greedily, some resist like old men refusing help. The boy watches as if I’m about to reveal a secret pocket in reality.

“Look,” I tell him, “JoJo is a world where the body becomes an argument. A pose is not decoration; it’s a claim. Streetwear is the same, but with cheaper gods—logos, drops, the rumor of scarcity.”

I press the soaked beans between my fingers. They split with a faint snap, like a thought breaking in two. “If you want Jotaro in an avant-garde silhouette, don’t print a hat on a hoodie. Give him negative space. Give him a coat with a collar that stands like a refusal. A chain that isn’t jewelry but a boundary. Make the fabric heavy the way silence is heavy.”

A housewife—Auntie Lin—comes for yuba. She always arrives with wet hair tucked under a cap, smelling of ginger and dishwater. She is the kind of woman who can peel garlic faster than other people can decide. She points at the teenager’s asymmetrical hem.

“He looks like he got dressed in the dark,” she says, but her eyes are curious, not cruel.

“In the dark,” I answer, “we all dress according to what we fear will be seen.”

I lift the cloth bag, pour the ground slurry in, and twist. Soy milk runs down my wrists, warm and slick, as intimate as sweat. The pulp inside—okara—presses back like a stubborn doubt.

“Tell me,” I ask the boy, “which JoJo are you today?”

He hesitates. His bravado cracks. “Giorno,” he says, almost whispering, “because I want to remake everything.”

Auntie Lin snorts. “Remake? I want to survive the price of pork.”

She taps her phone. A news alert flashes: the last small parts factory in the district has closed. No more cheap hinges, no more screws, no more the little metal rings that fix rice cookers and fans. A quiet system collapses and the collapse doesn’t look like fire; it looks like a locked shutter and a sign that says FOR RENT.

Here is a detail outsiders don’t collect because they don’t live where the failure lands: the old men who used to loiter outside that factory—men with hands permanently blackened at the creases—will now drift to the market at 5:17 a.m., not 5:00, because 5:00 was the factory whistle, and the body keeps time even after the bell is buried. They’ll stand by my tofu, staring not at me but at their own palms, as if expecting a missing bolt to appear.

When a system dies, it does not ask permission; it simply stops answering your questions.

The teenager touches the edge of my stainless-steel vat, as if to feel a pulse. “So what do they do?” he asks. “When the thing they leaned on is gone?”

I pour coagulant into the hot soy milk. The liquid is glossy, then suddenly it stutters, then it gathers itself into soft clouds—curds forming like a decision that happens all at once, after long delay. I stir gently. If you are rough, you get bitter tofu. If you are timid, you get soup.

“Some people,” I say, “become bitter. They call it realism.” I watch the curds, trembling. “Others become porous. They absorb a new life even if it tastes strange at first.”

Auntie Lin’s face tightens. She has her own collapse: her husband’s job is shrinking by inches, like fabric washed too hot. She stands too straight when she’s afraid.

Here is another thing outsiders don’t know: the women who run the market have a mutual-aid notebook hidden inside a hollowed-out ledger labeled ‘Frozen Dumplings Inventory.’ It isn’t charity; it’s geometry. If someone can’t pay for rice this week, they write it down in pencil with a code—one dot means a child, two dots means a sick parent, three means eviction looming. Nobody says thank you. They repay when they can, sometimes with cash, sometimes with labor: scrubbing the drain at midnight, carrying boxes until their shoulders burn. Pride is kept intact by the secrecy, like tofu kept intact by the cloth.

I wrap the curds, press them. The weight on top is a stone I found by the river, smooth and indifferent. The tofu slowly firms, becoming itself under pressure. People think that firmness is confidence. Often it is just endurance.

The teenager asks about styling again, but his voice has changed. He isn’t performing now; he’s asking how to live inside cloth without lying.

“Josuke,” I say, “is a love letter to repair. That’s a tailoring story. Raw hems, visible mending, patchwork that doesn’t pretend it was always whole. You can wear seams on the outside like scars. Let the stitches be loud. Avant-garde isn’t only alien shapes; it’s honesty about construction.”

“And Diavolo?” he asks, half-grinning, eager to return to fandom.

“Diavolo is all lining,” I say. “A reversible coat where the inside is brighter than the outside. A hood that hides the face, but the cut still reveals the throat—vulnerability pretending to be menace.” I hand him a cup of soy milk. It’s hot enough to wake the tongue. “Drink. Fashion is philosophy only when it has consequences. Otherwise it’s decoration for boredom.”

He sips and winces, delighted. “It tastes… like beans.”

“It tastes like time,” I correct him. “Beans took months to become beans. I took years to become someone who sells them.”

I remember my last lecture hall: fluorescent lights, the smell of dust baked into old carpet, students scrolling through futures that weren’t mine. I talked about the examined life. Then the university cut my department—quietly, administratively—like trimming a loose thread. The old system didn’t collapse dramatically; it simply stopped funding my sentences.

At the market, questions arrive with muddy shoes and onion breath. They are better questions.

Auntie Lin picks up the fresh tofu block I’ve just turned out. It’s warm, trembling slightly, like an animal that has decided not to run. She presses it lightly with her thumb. The surface gives, then returns, obedient.

“Teacher,” she says—she still calls me that—“when the meaning of what you’ve been doing gets questioned right to your face, what do you choose? Keep insisting? Or change?”

I wipe my hands on my apron. Soy smell clings, sweet and faintly raw, like a promise that hasn’t been cooked yet.

“There is a mistake,” I tell her, “in thinking meaning is something you defend like property. Meaning is something you practice like a craft.”

I nod toward the tofu. “If the bean insists on staying a bean, it will die dry. If it dissolves completely, you get nothing but thin water. The bean has to risk being ground, heated, strained—humiliated—so it can become something that feeds.”

The teenager looks down at his mismatched sleeves. “So the fusion isn’t about being clever,” he says.

“It can be clever,” I allow, “but cleverness is cheap here. Even the fish are clever; they make their eyes look alive.” I lower my voice, as if confessing to the soy vats. “Fusion is about carrying two worlds without dropping either.”

Outside, the market roars: knives thudding, vendors shouting prices, scooters whining like angry insects. A gust brings the sharp green of cilantro, the sour sting of pickled mustard, the petrol ghost from the street.

The teenager straightens his collar—one side higher, one side lower—like a deliberate contradiction. He smiles, not at me, but at the possibility of walking out of here different.

Auntie Lin tucks the tofu into her bag as carefully as if it were a sleeping child.

I return to my beans. I pick out the cracked ones, the ones with tiny holes where insects once tried to live. I don’t judge them. I remove them because they will sour the whole batch.

In philosophy, we called this discrimination. In tofu-making, we call it survival.

And somewhere between Jotaro’s stubborn silhouette and a jacket stitched like a question mark, between the market’s wet tiles and the quiet collapse of factories, I keep doing the only thing I know how to do: grind what is hard, heat what is cold, and answer people with something they can actually swallow.