The China Road Motorcycle Diaries

A Country Market

After a while alone I walk back to buy oranges, pears, and bananas from vendors who make change for my small bills, and it occurs to me that oranges and bananas don't grow in this area so they must be traveling or have a supply chain from the south. Then I buy a stick of dough fried in a wok bubbling with oil. It tastes of honey and cinnamon and, when I smile in appreciation, the cook grins and yells something that makes everyone around us laugh. 

A few steps away, an old woman sits on a tiny stool under a tattered green tarp tied all akimbo to the branches of a big tree above her. The tarp casts a cool green shadow over her skin, and in front of her is a massive wok on a coal fire set into a shallow hole at her feet. She lifts the cover to spoon a dark liquid over dozens and dozens of eggs, their shells cracked all around, and uses a slotted spoon to select one for me and plops it on a crumpled sheet of brown paper. I peel it to find that the whites have a marvelous, marbled pattern from being cooked with their shells cracked in the dark liquid. The egg is delicious, both salty and spicy, with an astringent aftertaste, and as much as I can tell the ingredients are black tea, soy sauce, and cinnamon, or something like anise or fennel. I devour two more, tossing the shells in the pile of trash next to the tree trunk while people go by doing their business. 

I buy six more eggs and hold out a selection of coins that might total 25 cents at the most, hoping it's enough, but the woman picks out a just few of the smaller coins. I thank her and she grins, showing discolored teeth like the eggs she sells. I grin back. Apparently where there there are no tourists, there is no tourist price. And considering that the average farmer probably doesn't make ten dollars a month, unless they take a factory job, which gets them about a hundred, well, I try to pay more, but she waves me off.

A scent of almonds leads me past piles of pea shoots, stacks of spinach, a pile of tightly woven brooms with short handles, and cartons of twiggy branches. A flimsy card table is covered in hand-woven basketfuls of warm yellow cookies glistening with a coating of egg whites. I buy a dozen from the middle-aged woman selling them. She can barely take my money for giggling at me, and the vendors on either side rib her about it.

People are still leaving me in relative peace to wander the market and they all seem lively and happy to be here with the notable exception of a teenager with a long black braid that trails over her shoulder and dark circles under her eyes. She sits on a stool next to some cardboard boxes, hands in her lap, staring vacantly into space. 

I don't see what she's selling until a little girl of about 5 or 6 skips over in a yellow dress to hand the teenager some coins. Without even looking she reaches into a box under the table and drops a handful of tiny yellow chicks on the tabletop. The bewildered chicks, so unceremoniously plopped from the darkness into the bright sunlight, peep and stumble like wind-up toys. The little girl in yellow selects three of them and skips back off into the crowd as the teenager scoops up the coins and tosses the remaining chicks back into the box.

I recognize her despair, the general malaise of an adolescent with the additional burden of not fitting in. I was a similarly sullen teenager stuck in rural North Carolina, surrounded by other teens whose career plans were to drop out at age 16 to help with the family tobacco farms. I was not so limited in opportunities, even though I was not brought up to have a career but to get married and have babies, like my mother.

My dad, an engineer at IBM, had been brought up on a farm in the area and fit in with the locals, but my mother was raised in Seattle and had gone to college in North Carolina after my grandfather's company transferred him there. Because mom was not "from here" and we did not attend any of the many local Baptist churches, we were could both be proclaimed "Damn Yankees" at any convenient moment, as well as heathens who were "going straight to hell."