Every morning, just before the first motorbike rattles down the road and the monks begin their barefoot alms walk, Mali opens her stall. She lays out her goods carefully: spices and treats packed in plastic bags of all sizes. In one corner, she sets a metal pot of sticky rice with banana wrapped in palm leaves—her mother’s recipe, passed down without ever touching paper.
Mali has worked this roadside market since she was a girl, first helping her mother, now running the stall herself. She knows every face that passes—who likes bitter melon candy, who prefers young ginger treats, who always asks for a little extra coriander “for luck.” Her customers are neighbors, monks, tuk-tuk drivers, university students, and, more and more often now, the occasional foreigner who stumbles in wide-eyed and camera-dangling. She greets each with the same small bow, the same quiet grace:
“Sawasdee ka.”
The market hums around her—children chase each other between crates of mangosteens and old men sip sweet coffee at folding tables. The air smells of basil, charcoal, and warm dust.
Mali rarely looks up for long, but she sees everything. She sees the old man pretending not to limp. She sees the teenage girl hiding a smile behind her phone. She sees the tourist woman who lingers by the sticky rice, unsure, curious. Sometimes they speak. Sometimes they just share a nod.
Mali doesn’t speak much English, but she understands more than most realize: tone, hands, eyes, hesitation. She has lived her whole life reading people without needing their words.
By late morning, the sun burns hot and bright, and the market begins to thin. Mali counts her coins, wraps the leftovers, wipes the table clean. Her day continues—laundry, cooking, tending to the garden—but the market is her favorite part. It is where the world still feels small and warm. Where routine becomes ritual, and business becomes care. She is not rich. Her stall is not famous. But she is known. She is trusted. She is essential.
In the roadside market of Chiang Mai, Mali is not just a seller of locally-made treats.
She is part of the morning itself.