BEIJING — Not long after daybreak, before the city begins its full-throated roar, the shouts and calls can be heard up and down the old alleyways and deep within the walled courtyards that form the crowded heart of the Chinese capital.
“Goat meat, goat meat!”
“Eggs, rice, eggs, rice!”
“Scrap, household scrap!”
With more emphasis on song than lyric, they are the marketing jingles of itinerant fruit vendors, sellers of roasted duck, and stooped men who have mastered the art of resuscitating blunt kitchen knives. Like the familiar whine of cicadas in August, their garbled calls are the soundtrack of the Beijing summer, and many residents look forward to the return of the hawkers’ glutinous rice cakes, mismatched crockery and pet grasshoppers that sing.
Even more numerous than the hawkers are the recyclers, sun-scorched migrants from the countryside who survive by collecting yesterday’s newspapers, spent computers or tattered cotton blankets that will be spun into next winter’s comforters.
“If you can’t yell loudly, you’ll starve,” said Chen Lin, 37, a bony, animated man who earns about $5 a day salvaging dead appliances and anything else containing metal.
“No one really knows what I’m yelling,” he said, “but they remember my song and this brings them out of their house.”
The singing hawkers and recyclers are reminders of the days when Beijing was a thickly populated maze of hutongs, or alleys, that crept outward from the grandiose imperial quarters occupied by China’s emperors and the officials and artisans who served them.
Cao Huiping, 45, a taxi driver whose childhood compound was stuffed with 17 unrelated families, recalls when vendors filled the air with a cacophony of competing tunes.
“One minute it would be someone selling sugar, then as soon as their song faded it would be the flour dealer, then the fabric salesman,” said Mr. Cao, whose home has since been replaced by an upscale mall. “Now I live in a building where people don’t even know each other and everyone shops at the supermarket.”
Gated apartment complexes are the hawker’s enemy. So, too, are the air-conditioners that drown out sales calls and keep residents inside.
The city authorities are no friends of the street vendors either. Stringent laws and urban management officials, known as chengguan, keep them on the run with fines and harassment. “The best time to be out is lunchtime, when the chengguan are on break,” said Meng Xiandong, 54, a vendor of dried sweet potatoes, as he nervously scanned the crowds.
A good place to get a taste of old Beijing is Qianmen, a poor but colorful quarter south of Tiananmen Square that is a jumble of twisting hutongs and ramshackle houses. On most days, one can find peddlers selling meticulously skinned pineapples, a man offering two kinds of honey — plain and medicinal — and an ornery cobbler who can resole a pair of shoes in as much time as it takes to down a steaming bowl of hand-shaved noodles.
Cradling a brass teapot and watching over three pairs of caged lovebirds, Wu Xiulong, 76, sat in front of the doorway of his courtyard and reminisced about the vendors whose arrival he used to await as a child: the bean-cake man, the corncob seller, the baker who produced the flakiest flatbread. “Oh, back then they were baked on both sides, so crunchy, with sesame seeds,” he said. “It was so delicious. Now they’re all gone.”
Zhao Cai, a 66-year-old knife sharpener, is one of the old-timers who can still be found wandering around with a beaten-up toolbox that doubles as a bench. His call is bracing but melodious, although once he sets to work on a blade, the noise of grindstone on metal brings out the old women with their beloved worn-out cleavers.
“I hate stainless steel,” he said as he pedaled the grindstone. “No one makes knives like they used to.”
Unsentimental and gruff, his accent betraying his hometown in China’s far northeast, Mr. Zhao has been plying his trade for more than 30 years.
“When you’re good at sharpening knives, you get to know everyone,” he said.
How good is he? Customers sometimes foolishly test his handiwork by touching the sharpened edge. “I’ve had ladies draw blood and swear they didn’t feel a thing,” he said.
As he spoke, there was a loud crash behind him, followed by a choking plume of dust. Workers in orange vests were tearing signs off nearby buildings, part of a government campaign to make the neighborhood more attractive to tourists who like a bit less visual chaos in their Old Beijing experience. “I don’t recognize some of the streets around here anymore,” he said before fleeing the advance of the demolition crew.
One man who needs no vocal announcement is Li Hailun, a grasshopper salesman whose wares, hundreds of wingless insects imprisoned in round, woven enclosures, produce a deafening, high-pitched symphony. From July to October, Mr. Li, 28, bikes around the city with his chirping quarry, each of which sells for 50 cents to a dollar, depending on the quality of the song and the gullibility of the buyer. Add a dollar if the critter comes in a graceful wooden cage.
Much of Mr. Li’s village, about a two-hour drive from the capital, is engaged in the grasshopper trade: women weave the cages, boys catch the insects and the men pedal them to nostalgic city dwellers. When sales lag, he heads to the gates of the nearest children’s hospital. Subtracting the occasional fine for vending without a license, Mr. Li pockets $200 a week, a tidy sum for a sorghum farmer biding his time between planting and harvest.
The bugs draw a crowd wherever Mr. Li goes. On a recent day, passers-by debated whether to feed them carrots, scallions or rice. A woman said that toddlers raised alongside a trilling insect were not easily startled by noise.
“When the grasshopper guy comes out, you know summer has arrived,” said a man who was seeking to replace the one, tethered to his rear-view mirror, that was on its last legs.
Mr. Li, ever the salesman, added his own poetic pitch. He declared that the Chinese had been raising grasshoppers for hundreds of years. Even Qianlong, a Qing dynasty emperor, was a connoisseur of the fighting variety.
“Everyone loves grasshoppers,” Mr. Li said. “When they sing, you can’t help but feel happy.”
Xiyun Yang contributed research.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tShKPB_qkVAo8_Pc007ilzUQ-1Nw3zlCIuw6OoAxbOpzdkYkMSqw55nf5gzqVmQBf_w0-6SDuGXmTZpLaErlQSdj_pPAMa1xDBxWEa7yK3HQ5-10zTkRI0FLxjzQat3icr_dPP8ZO3bIhpjpXmiZOe=s0-d)
