Hey there:
I hope 2024 and the Year of the Dragon have been treating you and your loved ones well.
In my first issue of the year, I feature Shen Wei’s moving tribute to his mother, whose tiny street stall in a small northwestern county seat was the family’s main breadwinner for 13 years. Here’s an excerpt that sums up the piece beautifully, where Shen Wei’s mother reflects on her hawker career after moving into a permanent shop space:
The stall gone, Mom and Dad didn’t wax nostalgic. They only ruminated on the vicissitudes of life. Mom would occasionally say to herself: “I worked my ass off every single day for 13 full years. That’s how I got ahead. How many people made fun of your father and I? How many people looked down on our tiny stall? Running a business is hard. Living is even harder. You can’t waste your precious time on this planet. Even though your mom isn’t well-educated, I could still make a mark, propelling you and your sister to uni by working a tricycle, building a home that isn’t that great but not too shabby, don’t you agree?”
She made these comments as she sat on a tiny stool and examined her hands, picking at the coarse flesh in her palms with her fingernails. Beneath her fingers were a series of round calluses. Those calluses were our shield, our brick wall, the umbrella that sheltered Big Sis and I all these years.
The source material was first published by The Livings on Jan. 9, 2023.
As usual, feel free to share your thoughts and comments by responding to this email or sending a separate message to gushi20215@gmail.com.
Take care and see you soon.
—ML
My Mom, the Most Brilliant Street Vendor in the World
By Shen Wei
Edited by Wu Yao
Introduction
My home province of Gansu, which perennially reports the lowest GDP in China’s northwest, has a population of some 1 million people. From its desolate industrial towns, abandoned coal mines and meager agricultural sector—greatly hampered by geography and climate—to its still nation-leading factory pollution levels, this piece of territory has found a way to distinguish itself throughout history time and again. It seems stuck in the Silk Road era of camel bells ringing along the Hexi Corridor and bugles sounding in far-flung corners.
My hometown Jicheng is undoubtedly a microcosm of Gansu. My mom worked as a street vendor in this microcosm. If you spend two or three minutes to observe when you walk past hawkers like my mom, you’ll soon realize that not only do street stalls contribute to the hustle and bustle depicted in works of art, they are also a reflection of ordinary people and the state of a nation.
Like its extended history, Gansu’s hawker economy and hawker culture are characterized by doses of endurance and tragedy. They’re not as sizzling spicy as similar scenes in Sichuan or Chongqing, nor do they boast the uniquely subtle and mesmerizing quality their counterparts in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong do. In the 10-plus years I worked alongside my mom on her stall, I got a glimpse of country seat enterprise at its most dynamic, as well as the lowest of lows during slower times after dusk.
1.
Prior to 2019, my family led a life that was drastically different.
Hawkers were ubiquitous in our town. It was never clear where the sidewalk ended and where the road began. Come Lunar New Year, our streets were effectively paralyzed by traffic. Cars butted against cars, people were packed like sardines and street stalls were crammed together. It was hot and chaotic. Honks alternated with the yelling of street vendors while pickpockets male and female had a field day.
Our stall was situated on the main thoroughfare that led to the town’s western pass, which was a prime location. Staking out the spot was a major triumph. There were tons of hawkers and thus plenty of competition. Where there are people, there’s politics. The street vendors also had their own code of honor. If you didn’t follow it, you suffered. People and cars streamed in from and left in every direction, every single one of them passing my mom’s stall. Urban management officials breathed down her neck while beggars asked for their share. Travelers swept by on their way to other parts of Gansu and the neighboring regions of Saanxi, Ningxia and Sichuan. My mom was absolutely fearless. Her motto: “Everyone is a customer.”
The main thoroughfare intersected with another major road, where a spur line sprouted sideways in the north, which led to the old market for wooden and bamboo household goods. That street was populated mainly by snack stalls. An overwhelming aroma started drifting well before 6 a.m. every morning. Among the offerings: cold rice noodles, bean jelly and regular noodles mixed with bean sprouts and slivers of turnip; fried potato chunks lifted from a big metal wok with a bamboo strainer, served with a side of jellied tofu; steamers full of Chinese leek buns mixed with fried pork lard, which were emptied instantly; buckwheat noodles mixed with chili oil sauce; wontons filled with shreds of chicken and Chinese pancakes cooked in oil.
My family started its street stall in 2007. Initially, our repertoire was limited to homemade soybean products made in our own workshop, rice cakes and handmade flour from my maternal aunt. The first step to hawking is occupying a good location. When we first started our business, we had to go through a phase of roaming around. Securing a spot during regular times was easy enough, but when locals who failed to earning a living elsewhere returned for Lunar New Year, the competition became fierce instantly.
All stalls were makeshift, set up in the morning and taken down at night, just like a nomad’s tent. Typically everyone was open for business at 5 a.m. To make sure we kept our spot, Mom usually got up at 4 a.m. to consolidate her inventory and make breakfast for the family. By the time I got up at 6 a.m., Mom’s calls for delivery runs would start coming. Winters in the northwest are bitterly cold. As I pressed my frozen fingers on frozen items, it was impossible to rub a plastic bag lose. I would get a fire going in our honeycomb briquette stove and warm my fingers over the flames. As my fingers softened, a weird itchy feeling followed. Only when I joined the army did I learn that putting frozen fingers over a fire was taboo. You had to dip them in cold water or rub them with snow first to prevent chilblain or gangrene.
Despite getting up early, we still got into fights with other vendors over location. Everyone wanted to improve sales and earn money for Lunar New Year. But space was finite and if you took up more space, that meant less space for me. Grievances naturally bred resentment.
Initially, our stall didn’t generate that much business. Every few days thugs would come looking for trouble. Other hawkers also frequently took over our spot. Once Mom and I arrived at the market first thing in the morning, only to discover our usual location had been taken. The hawker who had snatched our position had hired two or three men to serve as security. Wearing fake leather jackets and cigarettes sticking out of their mouths, they stood together in skewered poses. The men summoned me in a gesture of mock politeness, gangster-style. I was only in third grade at the time, timid, weak and afraid of trouble. I was mad and scared at the same time. I gripped the handles of our cart and stayed put. Mom stood behind me. Noticing I was just a kid primed for bullying, the men glared at me, spit to the ground and yelled: “Country bumpkins should head back to the countryside. There’s no place for you in the city.”
At that point Mom came over. She thought I had been attacked. Mom roared and pounced on the men, their limbs intertwining. Terrified, I tried to pull her away, but I was too small and weak. I turned around to call Dad and a few aunts and uncles for reinforcement. Luckily, a passerby called the police and nothing came out of the fight. In the end, both stalls had to share the same space.
Mom was the equivalent of the character Hu Sanniang, aka “Deadly First Strike,” from the classic Chinese novel Outlaws of the Marsh. She knew well that surviving on the street meant being mean and aggressive. Weakness only led to bullying. Dad, on the other hand, was cowardly. When it came to situations like this, he held Mom back, asking her not to stir trouble, sometimes even taking the side of our opponents. In the next 10-plus years, territorial disputes were common (although most went unresolved). Eventually, Mom deferred to the saying “the greatest characters are the most magnanimous” and started to rein herself in.
But it took an argument that happened I was in senior high to shut up Mom entirely. Again, it was a territorial dispute that sparked a major battle. The odd thing was shortly after the fight, our rivals disappeared, leaving the spot in contention empty. Later on Mom heard from several old customers that the female vendor we were competing against, who cursed Mom viciously, came down with facial paralysis and her family fell on hard times. A firm believer that God is always watching, I warned Mom to cut down on her arguments. Verbal lashings affect one’s finances and you couldn’t be ruthless just because you were in the right, I told her. Even though she didn’t say anything, I know Mom got the message. I even wanted to visit our rival and bring her a few gifts. Mom said I was crazy and proceeded to return to work and ignoring me.
Later on, I ran into the female vendor’s husband. Sporting a small felt cap, he hawked goods while treading a tricyle. Gone was his fierce look. He also had lost a lot of weight, his facial expression clouded by depression. Others said he was already very sick. I walked by with my head lowered, pretending I didn’t see him.
2.
Jicheng had no industry to speak of, nor was its agricultural sector anything to write home about. Sichuan peppers, apples and regular peppers counted as its trademarks. Massive numbers of locals worked elsewhere during the year and they were regurgitated by inbound trains ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday. During their annual pilgrimage home, all these people did was eat and sport new clothes—what they had to show for was their appearance and their appetites.
Starting in 2010, building on our foundation of soybean products, we expanded our business to retailing and wholesaling of hotpot and barbecue ingredients—crab sticks, crab steak, shrimp rolls, fish rolls, osmanthus pork sausages, oden, soup bases, as well as all sorts of in-season veggies. In the winter, we also offered pork skin jelly and a form of giant pork sausages, while in the summer we had konjaku flour. We supplied snack stalls and barbecue stands in the county seat and surrounding townships. In Mom’s words, we sold everything under the sun. Whatever inventory moved was fine by us.
Our stall comprised an expanded tricycle and a detachable foldable tent. Our hours were 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. When business was brisk, there was no telling when we closed.
Even though I started working the street stall scene with Mom at a young age, I was no fan of the industry. Hawking was tough work. Who’s born to enjoy hard work? Even though I was exposed to cartoons that extolled “to labor is glorious,” when I actually became a laborer, I realized there was no glory to be had. Meanwhile, there was never a shortage of suffering.
Mom was different. Even though she was hawking to make a living and any stoppage would lead to an empty stomach, in her you couldn’t find the extreme pain of a heavy physical laborer. In contrast, what I detected was a peace of mind when it came to daily life. Mom hadn’t received much by way of formal education. As a Buddhist, she was extremely pragmatic. The intricacies of Buddhist scripture eluded her. Meditation wasn’t as reassuring as making money and an apron was a better fit than a monk’s robe. She said: “Mount Wutai is Manjusri Buddha’s ashram. My stall is my ashram. Not cheating the customer of weight is also a spiritual practice. If you’re a true Buddhist, you don’t necessarily need to go to a temple. Being a honorable person is hard work itself.”
Mom loved to laugh and enjoyed a good argument and dissing others. When she argued, she did it with laughter and mixed in catchy phrases, making for a singsong effect. Haggling with a customer over a bill, she’d belt: “The bank has plenty of cash, none of which belongs to you and me.” When someone questioned if they were given a sufficient amount of tofu, she’d retort: “A catty of tofu costs 2.5 yuan (30 U.S. cents), which makes me neither poor nor rich.” When urban management officials warned that her umbrella was too close to the road, she’d take her time moving it and say: “On a sweltering August day, the county magistrate’s women gotta block the sun. On a pouring February day, the county magistrate’s mom can mind her own business.”
Because Mom was both tough and kind, our stall quickly stood out among neighboring vendors. Old and returning customers were common. While others cheated on their scales, Mom often gave customers a little extra. While others mixed in overnight produce with fresh goods, Mom didn’t. She stuck to the golden rule that integrity was everything, refusing to cut costs just to make an extra buck.
Once a regular sought Mom out after buying fruit from another vendor, insisting Mom check the weight for her. On one hand, Mom didn’t want to offend an old customer; on the other, she was worried about breaking hawker code. Despite multiple pleadings, the customer wouldn’t back down. Mom had no choice but to weigh the purchase. The batch of bananas came up 60 cents short. Even though Mom repeatedly advised the customer not to raise a stink and the customer promised not to do so, the regular immediately confronted the fruit vendor next door loudly, using some particularly nasty language. Mom and I lowered our heads in sync. “Mom, you shouldn’t have done the favor. Someone else cheated on weight and we take the blame,” I thought to myself. Mom stayed silent. After a while, she sliced a piece of tofu and brought it over to the fruit vendor. The angry chatter gradually died down. Soon my mom returned, her bad mood having vanished.
A mere 60 cents sparked a major incident and hurt three parties. “Money plays tricks on the human mind,” I moaned. Mom frowned and responded: “How can money stir such trouble? The problem is the human heart. Sixty cents is enough to breed greed. Greed is like salt. It looks white and innocent but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”
**
Mom is about 1.7 meters tall, both tall and chubby. She was always wearing a red apron. In a seated position, she resembled the Maitreya Buddha. Her tricycle was always equipped with a broom. Before setting up shop, she always swept the floor, treating her spot on the street like her own bedroom. To old customers, Mom was the radiant A Dream in Red Mansions character Wang Xifeng. When they approached our stall early in the morning, they could hear Mom’s laughter before they saw her in person. As long as Mom laughed, the customers kept coming. It’s as if people weren’t showing up to buy stuff—they were there to watch and listen to her laugh. As a junior high student, I found the phenomenon fascinating.
Mom had her own unique approach to hawking. When a customer approaches, she avoided the hard sell. On the contrary, she’d keep busy with her own chores while the customer picked and chose. Only when the prospective buyer couldn’t make up his or her mind did Mom intervene. It was personally tailored advice. For example, if a customer was looking for hotpot ingredients, Mom asked if he or she had children and whether they can handle spicy food, as well as inquiring about diet restrictions. She’d then explain the difference between beef tallow and edible vegetable oil. Only after she had a sense of the customer’s palate does she recommend a few specific ingredients.
Mom never recommended expensive stuff to customers. When a customer arrived, she could tell his or her standard of living with a single glance, without the customer uttering a single grunt. “First, check out their hair, then their shoes,” she said. Poor people are too busy maintaining their livelihoods to bother with these two aspects of appearance. Farmers have a tough time making a living, so she suggested items that are good bargains. Whether they came decked out in gold or dressed in rags, every arrival was a customer, Mom believed. As a businessperson, if you’re out to milk for profits and cheat, customers can feel the evil and grease. Customers will remember each time they are taken advantage of. When these debts add up, you’re bound to lose all your luck and suffer grave misfortune.
Sometimes Mom was able to pull out what a customer is searching for in vain before he or she opened his or her mouth. “Amazing! Amazing!” the customers exclaimed.
One old patron joked: “You’ve become a mind reader, chubby auntie! You even know what I’m thinking.”
Mom responded with a smile: “You judge a person’s voice by its tone and the sound of drums by their beat. When it comes to business, it’s about reading the human heart. An instant glance at a person reveals their station in life. How can you become a businessperson without that basic level of intelligence?”
I always thought that Mom was uniquely blessed by the gods of wealth. She could close deals that other vendors couldn’t and negotiate prices others found impossible to attain. I grew up on the streets. When my friends were busy playing marbles, I was already spending time in our tofu workshop and at out stall. In terms of sales technique, I dare say no supermarket salesperson is my match.
3.
Hawking is a very precise skill. It’s not a talent that everyone can acquire. “What’s the key to making money?” many people asked Mom. She typically responds with a smile and raises her voice to say: “How do I make money? Look at my hands and you know how I make money.
I bet you are unable to imagine the condition of her hands. During military service in my university years, my hands also went from their delicate student state to being callus- and scar-filled. But in contrast, Mom’s hands make me cringe in shame. Born in 1975, Mom isn’t that old but her hands had started to deteriorate by the time I was in junior high, just like the plastic runner belt in a beating machine. The more it churned, the coarser and more broken it became.
As a woman, Mom endured pain that most men couldn’t bear. Every time we visited my maternal grandmother, Granny would tell me the story behind Mom’s hands as she criticized my father.
Mom has three siblings. Male favoritism was extremely prevalent in Gansu. After a mere month studying in the classrooms of their village primary school, Mom was forced to quit and carry her family’s livelihood. By the time she was 13, Mom had already become a renowned saleslady among her home and neighboring villages. Hauling eggs, bits of thread and needle, veggies and other items, her routine was to scale two mountains and hawk her goods at a neighboring town. By the time the local market ended, most vendors had leftovers. Meanwhile, Mom would have been sold out long ago and had already returned home to attend to farming tasks. By the time other adults spotted her, she had already completed a round of sales.
Two years later, she climbed aboard a southbound train, finding work in Wuhan.
After Mom and Dad got married, they rented an apartment in the family quarters of a government entity in the county seat. Initially, Mom worked at a textile factory in the county and Dad drove long-haul vehicles. Life was steady, but alas, good things never last. Dad incurred some debt after getting into an accident during one of his trips. By that time Mom was pregnant with me, so she quit her factory job. After I was born, our finances became increasingly tight. To clear his debt, Dad borrowed money to rent a small shop space, where we started a snack business that sold cold rice noodles, tea eggs and tofu jelly.
And thus five or six years went by. I started primary school. By that age, I was helping Mom out as a busboy, washing cucumbers, sweeping the floor and entertaining customers. As a kid, I found such work amusing. Mom said I tugged the sleeve of whomever I ran into and dragged him or her to our stand. Me being tiny and adorable, adults were happy to comply and sit down for a bowl of cold rice noodles.
Later, Dad got into the tofu business. She convinced Mom to close the snack shop and focus on making tofu, while Dad handled sales. That way they could save on rent and utility bills, Dad reasoned. With our family still heavily in debt, Mom dropped the shop space and began hawking instead.
Initially, Mom roamed the streets on an old-fashioned tricycle. Tofu is an optional delicacy and times were tough, so business was hard to come by. Drawing from her experience, Mom decided that only selling tofu didn’t suffice and began expanding her offerings to seasonings for cold noodles. When customers asked for a product that she didn’t carry, Mom made note of the item and tried to acquire it through an agent or wholeseller. As her inventory increased, the old-fashioned tricycle became overloaded. Being a handy person, Dad added another level to the tricycle using a wooden board and tin sheet and installed shelves. The capacity of the tricycle grew significantly, beginning to resemble a mobile grocery store.
As business took a turn for the better, Mom began looking for a permanent location. That way clients would remember her. Calling in a favor, Mom secured a small spot on Western Pass Street with two packs of cigarettes. The location actually wasn’t that great, but Mom was extremely happy with it. Location is a finite quantity while human talent has infinite potential, she said. Business came down to 30 percent geography and 70 percent hard work. As long as she had a solid work ethic, she could make a name for herself, Mom said.
Once a customer lost some cash and insisted that Mom gave her the wrong change. The client was a man in his 40s dressed like a laborer. He rode an old Jialing motorbike. Fuming, the man blurted: “You domestic woman, how come you are so dishonest that you resort to such a misdeed when you are short on cash? I just bought stuff from your store and noticed cash missing as soon I got home. I carry a fixed amount of cash in my pocket and I spend a fixed amount on groceries. If I’m missing cash, it’s bound to have gone missing from your stall.”
Unmoved, Mom responded in a sarcastic tone: “You come here looking for your money when you lose it. Do you also come looking for your woman in the middle of the night when she’s missing? Let me ask you, did you just give me a 100 yuan bill and I gave you 25.5 yuan in change?” Squinting his eyes, the man nodded.
Mom’s gaze immediately gained confidence and she raised her voice to go over the man’s shopping list: “Eight yuan of potato balls, 4 yuan of tofu sheets, 16 yuan of seafood balls, a 18-yuan pack of chicken wings, 10.5 yuan for Hong Jiujiu hotpot soup base, another 19 yuan of enoki mushroom, lotus slices and gluten rolls for a total of 75.5 yuan. Is that the right rundown?”
“And you say that for a purchase of 75.5 yuan, I gave you 25.5 yuan in change. That’s an extra yuan. Not only do you ignore the gesture but you come asking for money. What money? Don’t think that I’m overwhelmed by the sheer volume of sales each day. I’m crystal clear on every single transaction. How am I able to run this stall without this bit of mental ability? Whatever money I’m entitled to, I earn by getting up early and working late. Whatever money that I don’t deserve, I won’t pick it up even if it’s scattered on the ground.”
As Mom built momentum, the customer froze. Other clients urged him to direct his search elsewhere. Unable to maintain face, the man rode away on his motorbike dejectedly.
The man returned the next day to tell Mom that he had found the missing cash. It turns out his son, who’s in primary school, stole it to buy snacks. He said he was there that day as a returning patron. When it was time for the man to settle his bill, Mom asked him to double check the amount. The man waved his hand and said: “You’re a competent woman with good integrity. I trust you.”
**
Before the age of WeChat Pay, what hawkers feared the most was counterfeit bills. A catty of tofu cost 2.5 yuan and the same amount of soybeans cost 94 cents. A fake bill meant a day’s earnings down the drain and more. Mom, Big Sis and I often brainstormed over how to spot fake cash—feeling the braille on the bill and the texture of the print, observing how the denomination changes color under the sun and checking the watermark on the bill’s blank spaces. Mom was the most proficient among the three of us. All she had to do was rub a bill with two fingers. Naturally, she also played it by ear. Sometimes she returned fake bills with the excuse that she didn’t have change. On other occasions, she simply glared at or poured scorn on the customer. A rookie like me was incapable of such a nuanced approach. When I was tending shop was when we were most prone to accepting fake bills. People took advantage of the fact that I was a kid. Sometimes I could detect a fake note. Sometimes my eye-hand coordination simply vanished. Even when I caught a fake bill, more often than not the transaction happened so quickly the customer who used the fake note had already disappeared in the crowd.
During the lead-up to Lunar New Year one year, Mom and I were hawking on Western Pass Street as usual. Big Sis, who was in senior high, hadn’t started vacation yet. The Tibetan auntie we hired for our tofu workshop had to take time off, so Mom had to head back to help Dad out, leaving me alone to man the stall. A woman wearing a woven cap and a red down jacket approached. She took her time browsing, which aroused my suspicion. Because there were other customers, I could only keep an eye on her while handling other sales. When the woman was done shopping, initially she gave me a 50-yuan bill. But after I had calculated her change, the woman gave me a 100-yuan bill instead. It was an exceptionally amateur con, but all it took was a simple move to cheat me.
When Mom returned and checked our money box, she spotted the fake bill instantly. Back home, I had to endure Dad’s sarcastic tirade. He had a knack for pinpointing people’s weaknesses. He said my unobservant eye stemmed from poor intelligence, that I was neither cut out for academics or business, adding I should just learn how to make tofu from him. Lord knows I hated his spiel but there was also nothing I could do about it. I was a 13- or 14-year-old teenager who didn’t even want to make a fuss when I was beaten up by the bullies at school. So when I was hawking goods in open air at a stall covered by a mere umbrella, all I hoped for was Lunar New Year to arrive immediately and for those days to be over.
When I lost my senses, I often asked Mom when we could stop hawking. Mom always called me an idiot and asked me what we were supposed to live off of if we quit the business. Back then I didn’t realize that our bustling business and long hours were the result of years of Mom’s hard work. In the jealous eyes our our neighboring vendors, our shop was a perennial moneymaker on Western Pass Street.
4.
In 2020, during a trip home from my PLA unit, I ran into a fellow townsman on the train. He sat across from me. As we conversed in our local dialect, I learned that the old man, who was near 60, had worked in our county seat for 16 years. When he asked about my family background and I said “the woman hawking tofu near the western pass is my mom,” he laughed and went onto relay a story about how Mom worked as a street vendor in front of the local PLA barracks.
Back then, a PLA unit was stationed at the foot of the mountain where Granny’s home was located. The mischievous girl that she was, Mom often hauled merchandise over to the entrance of the barracks to sell. The soldiers were intrigued by the scene—a young girl sweeping the floor in front of their barracks early morning every day, slowly laying down a bedsheet and then arranging her goods on top. Uncle said he and his fellow soldiers were blown away.
I felt the same way. Why would it strike an average person to set up shop in front of the local PLA barracks?
Uncle said Mom would always show up with a basket of eggs. Even though it was a small PLA unit, a basket of eggs would hardly suffice. Plus the barracks had a dedicated officer in charge of procurement. Anyone who sold to him had to issue a formal bill. What did a teenage girl know about that? But Mom saw a way in by offering free a sewing service along with the purchase of eggs. In that era, there wasn’t much in the way of PLA equipment maintenance and soldiers had an intense training regimen, which led to inevitable wear or tear on their uniforms. So Mom placed a sewing kit among her eggs. She had a delicate pair of hands that patched up torn clothing beautifully, which impressed the soldiers. And thus Mom launched her egg business in front of the barracks.
Uncle added with a smile: “Your mother is a kind person. I’ve bought stuff from her stall. She’s someone with a conscience. She still recognized me after all these years. Whenever I buy stuff, she always gives me freebies. How has your mother been?
“Her health is so-so. Bad back.”
Uncle shook his head. “That’s the result of hard work. Your mother has had a tough life, Luckily, she has a son and daughter to take care of her now. She’s finally made it.”
I began to feel ashamed. I thought back to comments I had made to Mom that were hurtful. I was a naughty kid who didn’t like to suffer, frequently ducking household chores. Dad beat me for it, but Mom always protected me. Mom could tell that I wasn’t cut out for the customer-oriented trade of hawking and knew it was a tough way of making a living, so she urged me to study hard and make a name for myself with an office job. Since I was a child, I also knew well that even though working as a street vendor was no walk in the park, it was taken lightly and that there were differences between professions. But there is no such thing as inherently high-class and low-class work—it’s people who make the distinction.
On that day, Uncle heaped praise on Mom while I remembered how I detested the shame that our street stall business brought upon us. It dawned on me then that Mom resembled the character Luo Yuzhu from the 2017 Chinese TV series Feather Fly. She had a tragic life but was durable. She was a savvy and decisive businesswoman who took on responsibilities that were beyond her purview. It was precisely these factors that transformed a mischievous young girl into a feisty northwestern woman.
**
But customers were quite fond of Mom. While she was feisty, she wore her heart on her sleeve. Even though she was calculating, she empathized with the poor. For a businesswoman, she placed a great premium on loyalty.
Mom was different from other vendors. To steal her business, they would joke around with Mom while openly ushering and shoving our clients to their own establishments. Mom didn’t mind. She always said: “In business, what you are actually dealing with is people. Only when your heart is in the right place will your business prosper.” By simply going with the flow, she too earned her fair share of regulars and friends.
Many old customers visited our stall not to buy stuff, but also to listen to Mom bullshit and offer kind advice. More often than not, they wanted to confide. Mom’s stall was more like a “grocery store for the soul.” Not only did she sell kitchen ingredients, she also contemplated matters of the heart.
Mom’s friend Teacher Song was a math teacher at the local county secondary school. She often sought Mom’s counsel for her marital troubles. More often than not she arrived with a desperate frown and left with her heart content. I asked Mom why she never got fed up with Teacher Song. She responded: “What’s there to be fed up about? She does her talking while I go about my business. She comes here not to listen to me, but to dump her emotional garbage. On every visit, she sheds a bit of her pain. Don’t look down on the fact that your mother is a hawker. She’s also a psychologist.”
Surrounding customers were left in stitches by the comment, but I took it in. Why does Mom always have such great perspective when it comes to other people’s personal matters and not her own? I was too young at the time and mocked her for being self-delusional. Little did I know years later I would fall in the same trap when I realized that surviving the adult world requires a bit of delusion. Too much sobriety means pain—learning how to fool yourself wasn’t a bad strategy at all.
Mom also had to deal with affairs outside of her stall. As her inventory grew and became more diverse, shipping and delivery became a major priority. Our shop juggled both retail and wholesale operations. Barbecue vendors in neighboring townships counted on passenger buses to deliver their food. Mom had to load these buses at fixed times. She lived on a clock, shuttling between home, her stall and the bus station.
When I was in home, I was in charge of delivery. I actually quite enjoyed the gig, racing along the long county highway in an electric tricycle as I passed East Ring Road and subsequent silent streets, crisscrossing town from one neighboring village to another. My days normally ended amid the rapid honking of rush hour traffic in the late afternoon.
As commuters rushed home, I admired the lingering northwestern sun drag its orange-red tail across the sky, resembling an elderly person near death turning around to take one last breath before his final destination. I felt a sense of peace as I drove toward the end of another road. Behind my tricycle, my hometown faded into the distance, as if zapping the pain from my mundane existence. By the time the falling sun had vanished and darkness and street lights prevailed, I was finally done with my runs and headed home in the overwhelming evening mist.
5.
Hawking, a mode of business that started thriving in the Song Dynasty, remains a vibrant presence on our land today.
Rent doesn’t factor into the equation, nor do utility bills or walls. There’s also no insurance. A wicker basket and a piece o tarp a street stall doth make. Our family started out with a single wicker basket and a plastic sheet. As we gradually gained popularity, we added an umbrella, a tricycle and a portable refrigerator. That’s how we expanded, inch by inch. Amid the swirling street dust, we battled extreme winters and blistering summers while enduring winds, rain, thunder and lightning. We also had to do battle with other people.
When you’re doing business on the streets, sometimes arguments are inevitable. Poor people aren’t necessarily kind and money doesn’t remove the evil in human nature. Making a living on the streets means confronting both the good and bad in human nature. If the human heart can be eclipsed, then a mere bank note can make for a formidable obstacle. In my own experience, as long as you master two of the following three skills, you can survive on the streets: a loud voice, no shame and persistence. Reasoning is pointless. Two neighboring stalls can fight to the death over a single customer. Yet Mom’s approach always deviated from the distillation of my own experience. She too had a loud voice and a high pitch, but she always tried to reason. Her arguments resemble a debate contest.
Our foremost concern wasn’t urban management officials. It was our fellow hawkers.
Human nature is weird. When you’re down and out, everyone pities you. When you’re on the rise, the dark hand that seeks to strike you down comes lurking from the shadows. It’s not that you’ve done anything wrong. It’s the mere fact that you’re doing well, that you’re different. The street vendor scene was the cruelest arena of them all.
Our stall was the first to sell hotpot ingredients on Western Pass Street. After 2010, as incomes improved, business took off, which naturally drew jealously. The vendor situated across from our stall furtively got in touch with our supplier and started selling various types of meatballs, chicken fillet and chicken steak, meat still attached to the bone and so on. Still, our business wasn’t affected in a major way as we kept busy.
My elder sister and I were furious. Mom said with a laugh: “Jicheng County has several streets worth of hawkers. Hotpot meatballs are available at the supermarket and the agricultural produce market. Who’s to say we’re the only ones allowed to make some money?’
“A successful business hinges on credibility and conscience. If you’re equipped with these two qualities, you’ll be able to launch any kind of business. People without a conscience or morals won’t succeed at anything. Mom isn’t well-educated, but running a business is like being a person with integrity. Your Mom measures up to anyone.”
Later on, on several occasions our clients complained the stall opposite ours cheated on them using a rigged scale. A supposed 2 catty purchase often ended up one or two liang short. Mom shared her life philosophy and gifted these customers an extra 50 cents or 1 yuan in produce from our end, which sent them away beaming.
But on one of these occasions after consoling a customer, trouble erupted the next day. Our two stalls were separated by a narrow road. In the afternoon, Mom was returning from picking up a shipment in her electric tricycle. When she passed our neighbor and was about to make a turn, she was stopped by our rival. The hawker claimed that Mom has obstructed her business and that Mom’s tricycle had damaged veggies on display in her stall. She wanted compensation.
“How much?” Mom asked.
“Give me 30 yuan,” the woman said with a glare.
“People who yearn for riches earn it in the proper way. Aren’t you afraid of payback, ripping someone off this way?” Mom spewed as she tossed a 20 yuan to the ground, adding: “Use this cash to buy some medication, although I’m not sure what kind of medication can treat a faulty conscience.”
The woman leapt from her stool and held up Mom’s tricycle. “Are you blind? You don’t watch the traffic driving that crappy bike of yours but you sure know how to talk. You clearly ran into my wicker basket unwittingly. Were you born without eyes or did your eyeballs fall into a dung pit? How did you miss such a big basket of veggies?”
Mom responded with a tirade. Normally she keeps her temper in check, but when things come to a head she doesn’t back down, bringing to bear her total agility and full wit. “The Qin Emperor’s Great Wall was 44,000 meters long. Are you telling me that such a wide road can’t contain your tiny wicker basket? How is it possible for me to veer into your veggies with a mere turn? The veggies are in the basket. How is it possible for the basket to be intact and the veggies damaged? Did your veggies grow legs, or is it you’re acting in such poor faith?”
When tempers flare in a small town, nasty language emerges. Regardless of how busy the road is, the ugly words come flying out. People who were shopping for their groceries stopped to observe. An old customer tried to hold Mom back and another auntie told me to drive our tricycle away.
As our rival vendor kept up the verbal abuse, she started making a move on Mom. Me and a few pedestrians stepped up to intervene. I started blushing like crazy. I once thought that arguing in public was an extremely embarrassing thing. I always urged Mom to avoid disputes and even resented her for them. Mom felt my position was a major grievance and accused me of being spineless. Big Sis was different. If she saw someone attacking Mom, she wouldn’t bother intervening and would fight back immediately. For the longest time, I felt guilty about my cowardice.
**
The vendor next to ours sold pancackes. The owner was Auntie Liu. Her two sons were unmarried but her three daughters married early. Our relationship with her fluctuated. When business was good, we patronized each other, helped with change and covered for each other. It was a courteous reciprocal relationship. When I was a kid, I believed if a person gave me a good impression, he or she would always been kind. I lacked my Mom’s jadedness, her ability to pierce through the surface. All I could untangle was superficialities, my skill level similar to my ability to detect fake notes.
One day, Auntie Liu asked Mom to cover for her. When business was slow, that was manageable, but once trade picked up, it was a tall order. When Auntie Liu returned, Mom was busy entertaining our customers and ignoring the pancake buyers. She accused Mom of being two-faced, pretending to be helpful but letting things slide when there was business for us.
Mom knew she was in the wrong, so she could only smile. Meanwhile, I was furious. You can only help out to the extent you can. How many times had Mom helped her with change, carrying and picking up deliveries? Plus Auntie Liu went home for a nap every afternoon and had Mom cover for her during her absence. Mom agreed to all her demands and yet she exploded over one missed sale that day. The insults exploded from her foul, mean mouth like peas from a split pod.
People always blow things out of proportion, magnifying others’ faults while downplaying their own mistakes. From that day onward, Auntie Liu was always looking for a reason to criticize. One day it was we took up too much space and the next we infringed on her spot. She even complained about the height of our umbrella, alleging that it was so low it blocked the line of sight to her stall.
Whatever went down, for Mom, it was all a matter of negotiation and compromise. When it came to our disputes with Auntie Liu, she tried to be as tolerant as she could. Sometimes she fought and on other occasions made peace. In this tiny square space, she racked her womanly brain to its max to deal with every problem that arose. Without her, the stall wouldn’t have survived. And we managed to weather the turbulence all these years. Only we know the hardship we endured and the highs and lows.
6.
What made up for our difficult finances was the burgeoning business of our stall. At its peak, business was so good we clogged half our street.
In my hometown, there’s the tradition of shopping for food and snacks for Lunar New Year on the penultimate day of the lunar calendar. The main towns in Jicheng County are located on a plain, but they are surrounded by mountains of varying size. Some 200,000-plus people live in that terrain. They flock to the county seat by passenger bus to do their shopping, with food making up the bulk of their purchases. Every year during that time period, our stall was mobbed. The tiny kindnesses Mom extended day in day out were returned with a never-ending stream of demand for Lunar New Year food.
During the Lunar New Year breaks for all six years in my secondary career, Dad’s tofu workshop operated from 5 a.m. to midnight every day. From the moment Mom’s stall started business hours, our electric tricycle was constantly on the move. I was in charge of negotiating narrow alleyways in the tricycle, traversing multiple locations on multiple routes to pick up inventory and make deliveries. To improve my efficiency, Dad installed twin batteries under the seat of the bike. Still, the tricycle often ran out of battery.
The Tibetan auntie who was our regular hire would have to return home for Lunar New Year, which left us shorthanded. At that point, Big Sis and I stepped up. We ran double shifts at the tofu workshop and at the stall. For the stall, Mom hired two aunties to help out. Sometimes the street was so crowded there would be feuding for our stock, so Mom brought in his father—my grandfather—from the countryside to keep an eye on inventory. With our whole family in action, the period resembled a war. To this day, I can never forget the scene every evening when we closed shop. By our stall rested a staggering pile of cardboard boxes that took the electric tricycle two fully packed rides to transport.
As a result, our family rarely enjoyed Lunar New Year for ourselves. On Lunar New Year’s Eve, we’d be making sales until 6 or 7 p.m., at which point we’d drag our exhausted bodies home, stumbling. Mom would still insist on preparing a feast for dinner. Everyone slept in on Lunar New Year’s Day. Mom was always the exception. She never rested. I never saw her take a break in any given 365 days of the year. While Big Sis, Dad and I traded accusations of laziness prone in our beds, Mom would already have finished sweeping the courtyard and the washing machine would be humming, laundering the dirty clothes that had accumulated for days. Our Lunar New Year dishes would be simmering on the kitchen stove and the furnace in our living room would be firing brightly. Year after the year the same scenario unfolded.
**
We made improvements to our tiny stall incrementally. The biggest change was setting up a permanent structure for our spot.
Mom decided to buy two square tents and asked several relatives to secure the tents to the ground. When the bright blue canvas was erected, it felt like we had built a home. After that, we were no longer vulnerable to the open skies bisected by power lines. Mom and I didn’t have to get drenched any more. Mom made a point of updating Grandpa on the development. He said on the phone: “Now that we have tiles over our heads, the birds have a nest and we no longer have to suffer.”
But the tents brought a new problem—now someone had to keep vigil overnight. We sold a wide variety of food items. The expansion raised Mom’s expectations and we started buying a lot more inventory. Seasoned bums were always roaming the streets at night and there was talk of shops being robbed. Even though our tiny stall didn’t carry any expensive merchandise, Mom was worried and suggested we take turns spending the night at the stall.
“If you surround the stall with a piece of tarp, sleeping in the tricycle is like sleeping at home.” Mom had it all figured out.
But how could sleeping outdoors compare to sleeping in our warm, comfy beds? I opposed the idea. Mom was already bogged down by various chronic illnesses and was constantly taking medication. If we robbed her of a good night’s sleep, her body was bound to collapse at some point. So the graveyard shift fell to Dad and I.
Dad took the first two nights. He placed a piece of tarp on the flatbed of the tricycle and added two layers of comforters. Dad told me not to take off my socks when I slept—the tailgate at the end of the tricycle could be propped up with a stool and used as a footrest. But I was tall and had to bend my legs to make the footrest.
I wasn’t that scared on my first night outdoors. After lifting the curtain to our stall—similar to the entrance of a Mongolian-style tent—and driving the tricycle in, I climbed into the flatbed from the front of the tricycle. The streets weren’t as quiet as I expected at night. The sound of barking stray dogs was irritating while scattered footsteps and motorbikes zooming by kept interrupting my sleep. I only fell asleep after burying my head under my blanket drowsily in the second half of the night.
As I worked more overnight shifts, I occasionally came across people tossing beer bottles to the ground and pissing into our stall. One night, I was awoken from the cab of our tricycle by a slithering slicing sound. I held my nerve and listened for a while, only turning on my flashlight when I was sure it was a thief. I saw a hand stick in from the hole that was cut open. I screamed, the hand shrunk and the merchandise on our shelves came tumbling to the ground. I stayed up the rest of the night, sitting in the tricycle with a lit flashlight until dawn.
Sometimes, sleeping outdoors wasn’t that bad. I spent many nights eavesdropping on people talking outside our tent—the sound of couples squabbling got on my nerves but the occasional words of intimacy stoked my fantasy. I tried to picture the faces of the speakers based on their voices. If it was a soft, attractive voice, then the person was good-looking. If he or she spewed foul language, then the person was ugly. That’s how I killed time on many a sleepless evening.
On other occasions, I borrowed Mom’s old-school cell phone and read online novels like The Grave Robbers’ Chronicles. I have long since lost track of how many novels I read during those overnight vigils.
Later on, when I had night guard duty at a rural base as a soldier, I would think back to the nights sleeping in our stall as a source of encouragement. As tough as military life is, it’s collectively hard. Even in the middle of nowhere, I have so many people to keep me company.
7.
In the second year of my military service, I got a call from Big Sis. She said our stall was gone—a government renovation project got rid of all the mobile and lone stalls on Western Pass Street. The gods were looking out for Mom. It just happened that a shop space on a neighboring street was up for sale. She pulled all stops, scrapping together a whole bunch of loans and bought the shop.
And thus our family bid farewell to the stall that had fed us for a dozen or so years, moving into a shop space equipped with water and electricity and one that wasn’t exposed to wind or rain. We also never had to fight others for space again. We literally put tiles above our heads.
I was so happy I was incoherent when I got the news. I spent my whole childhood and teen years on the street, growing up on that stall. Now the stall that was ever-so-critical to our family, which put us through the wringer, was gone, thanks to a new government policy.
I was thankful. I could finally answer the question I posed as a child: “Mom, when can we stop hawking?” Dad also breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn’t as diligent as Mom. For him, the life of a street vendor was decidedly painful, not generally enjoyable as Mom found it.
The stall gone, Mom and Dad didn’t wax nostalgic. They only ruminated on the vicissitudes of life. Mom would occasionally say to herself: “I worked my ass off every single day for 13 full years. That’s how I got ahead. How many people made fun of your father and I? How many people looked down on our tiny stall? Running a business is hard. Living is even harder. You can’t waste your precious time on this planet. Even though your mom isn’t well-educated, I could still make a mark, propelling you and your sister to uni by working a tricycle, building a home that isn’t that great but not too shabby, don’t you agree?”
She made these comments as she sat on a tiny stool and examined her hands, picking at the coarse flesh in her palms with her fingernails. Beneath her fingers were a series of round calluses. Those calluses were our shield, our brick wall, the umbrella that sheltered Big Sis and I all these years.
The shop space Mom bought was sold because the previous owner’s business failed. After some time, not only did Mom build up her business, the shop thrived, just like she did. The stubborn woman that she was, even though she was hampered by a lack of education, she never complained about life’s challenges. Instead, she embraced them with gratitude.
**
After I returned home from military service, Big Sis gave me two updates, which left me both bemused and wondering about karma.
The first incident involved the owners of the veggies stall that used to be across from our stall, with whom we had feuded. Their son and Big Sis were high school classmates, but he dropped out after a year and took over the family business. He was now married with a son. His mom, the one that attacked my mom, also rented a shop space and got into the wholesale business after the government banned hawkers. The funny thing is she actually used Mom’s name for marketing. Longtime customers of ours were asking about our whereabouts at our old location, so our rival vendor put up a notice on the power line pole nearby advertising her own shop. Big Sis and I exchanged smiles every time we passed her shop.
The second update was about Auntie Liu, the pancake vendor. She asked Mom for a favor. After Western Pass Street was rezoned by the county government, the affected hawkers were left with two options: either move their operations to the agricultural produce market, or roam the streets. Auntie Liu wanted to set up shop in front of Mom’s new store. Her two sons, who had dropped out of school a long time ago, hadn’t made that much money even after becoming a member of the county seat’s massive migrant worker class. Their family of five still had to rely on selling pancakes to make a living.
Auntie Liu herself was already near 60 and had to support an elderly mother. Mom said she and her husband treated the old woman poorly, often flashing stern faces at her, serving her cold rice and complaining that she was “old and useless.” Their two sons followed suit. Auntie Liu occasionally appeared with bruises on her face. Nearly 30, her older son was a delinquent. He stole from the money box where they kept their earnings from pancake sales and Auntie Liu would catch him red-handed. Fights ensued.
In retrospect, the fact that Mom was able to easily buy a shop and keep maintaining a livelihood after hawking was banned had to do with karma. The universe was watching every single one of her actions.
As diplomatically as Auntie Liu put forward her request, Mom refused, not bothering to compromise this time.
The next time I walked by Western Pass Street, the place where our entire family had lived and endured, it was dead quiet, the hustle and bustle had long gone and asphalt covered the road surface, burying the old town and old memories along with it. A lyric from a pop song emerged in my head: “When you look back, the moonlight of yesteryear transformed into today’s sunshine overnight.”