Illustration by Yeng Chee Gwynne Siak.

Market Street, first published in China in 1936, was written by the young woman writer Xiao Hong, who is best known for her two short novels, Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River. In Market Street, the twenty-year-old author recounts in fictional autobiographical form two years of her short life when she lived in Harbin between 1932 and 1934.