17. Street vendors
In the 1970s, Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province, was a small city with no name, located between the south of the Huai River and the north of the Yangtze River. The people who live here are often called southerners by northerners, and the real southerners say that they are northern "old servants".
At that time, there were almost no high-rise buildings on the streets of Hefei, only two commercial circles of Sanxiaokou and Sipailou, and the entire urban area was not small east gate in the east, but the big west gate in the west, the south but the south Qili Station, and the north was not Shuanggang. The urban style is simple and low-key, the people living here are idyllic and gentle, the big cities in their minds are Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou, and the capital Beijing and Tiananmen are infinitely yearning.
Walk through the alleys of the block, you will find shoes to repair tires, shovels to sharpen scissors, shaking the waves and drumming and shouting "chicken (zi) hair (ye) hair to sell ah" waste collection products. In front of the theater or in the square there are sellers of melon seeds and peanuts, and people watching movies will buy a bag of melon seeds and peanuts wrapped in newspapers or book pages, and while watching the movie, they will sniff melon seeds, chattering children, and whispering to couples. At the end of the movie, the top lights are on, and melon seeds and peanut shells are everywhere, walking under the feet and "clicking".
In the compound where I lived as a child, whenever the fried rice came, there was a long queue in front of the small turntable. The master pulled the bellows in one hand, turned the puffed pot in the other hand, the red charcoal fire roasted the black pot body, and as the number of the barometer rose in place, it was the highlight of the opening of the pot, we nervously held our breath, covered our ears, and waited for a loud noise to arrive. With a "bang", Shi Chuan started to open the pot, and a pot of rice flowers poured into the net basket like a thousand cannons, and a thick smoke was emitted in the air, filled with a refreshing aroma of rice flowers.
Peasant women carrying bamboo baskets containing eggs often appear at the doorstep of their homes, covered with cloth scarves, cautiously, or sophisticated or shy, asking if there are cloth tickets and food stamps. At that time, the supply of living supplies was planned supply, and the people in the city were rationed by issuing tickets. The peasants, on the other hand, did not have such benefits and could only guarantee their demand by exchanging their surplus tickets with the local specialties they produced with the townspeople.
When I was in School at Anqing Road No. 3 Elementary School, there were vendors selling melon seeds, peanuts, peas, syrup, marshmallows, sugar cane, or they were squatting or seasonal. For the characteristics of students with less money and more frequency, smart vendors adopt the strategy of making whole and zero, one penny and one cup of melon seeds and peas, and one penny and one throw away sugar. Especially for those who sell popsicles in the summer, the shout of "banana popsicles for three points, one banana popsicle for three points" always arouses our desire for coolness in the hot summer. But the homeroom teacher often criticized and taught us not to eat food from small stalls and small vendors, saying that it was unhygienic and that we should eat bad stomachs.
What I can still remember is an old woman and peddler who was blind in one eye, who always sat on a small stool on the side of the school gate, guarding a bamboo basket containing melon seeds, peas, peanut rice, jelly beans, mouse, etc., and trading a cup of melon seeds and peas for a penny, until I left Ansan to urinate and never saw it again. At that time, she lived in the southeast corner of the intersection of Jinxiang and Anqing Road, a low house, which was dark and messy. Living with her was her husband, a stout man who lived by pedaling a tricycle to solicit customers. As he passed by his doorstep after school, the summer afterglow reflected the house, dim and dim, and a rickshaw stood alone on the side of the road. He splashed water on the street side of his house to cool down, or took a shower on the street. When everything stopped, a small table was placed next to the tricycle, three or two plates were placed, shirtless, sweating and drinking, eating large pieces of meat, but also fast! I heard that this old couple had a high birth, and there were no children to interact with them, only two people who were in love with each other and did not say anything.
The small traders and peddlers who seemed to coexist with the city and the association were actually incompatible with the economic system of the society at that time, and with the cutting of the "capitalist tail", they were operating illegally and were to be "cracked down". In the southwest of the Anhui Provincial Museum, in the southwest corner of the intersection of Anqing Road and Jinzhai Road, on the west side of a sugar industry tobacco and alcohol distribution store, there is a private house, and a row of bungalows with a sign of "Anti-Speculation Office" is the location of the "Office of the Government Agency" that maintained the socialist economic order at that time. It is close to Anqing Road, and the huge sycamore branches cover a clearing in front of the house, and there are often people squatting on the ground and sighing or beating their chests or wailing, and there are few disputes and rebels. Someone in the room squatted in the corner, silently waiting to be dealt with, and law enforcement officers were reprimanding someone. Among these people are second-tier vendors who sell live chickens and ducks and food crops, as well as small traders and peddlers who set up street stalls and sell mobile goods. For them, they criticize education at worst, and confiscate goods and means of production. The "Office of The Office" was the predecessor of the later establishment of the Industrial and Commercial Bureau, and some functions were transferred to the "Chengguan" department. With the establishment of the market economic system, the crime of speculation was not officially abolished until 1997.
In 1981, in the early days of reform and opening up, the individual economy was still a new thing, and Huang Jiayuan, who lived next to the Old City God Temple in Hefei, declared himself the "King of Spiced Beans" and pushed a trolley along the street to buy spiced beans. He is famous not only for the delicious five-spice beans, but also for the sound of shouting and drinking, which is unforgettable, "five-spiced broad beans, a dime, eat (qie, Hefei dialect pronounced "cut" sound) hot", quickly spread throughout the streets and alleys, everyone shouted "a dime, eat (cut) hot!" ”。 The people who dared to engage in the individual economy at the beginning were by no means people with family and country feelings, but more of a forced by life and the needs of survival. At the beginning of the opening of the Hefei City God Temple in 1986, I heard that eighty-nine out of ten people who settled in it were "two laborers" who were released, which could not be verified, but only showed that the self-employed people were doing business to maintain their livelihood. Inadvertently, small traders and hawkers became the tide of the times, and the first batch of "ten thousand yuan households" were born from these street vendors who had been hit by the "office", from which some famous figures who later influenced the Chinese business community, such as Huang Guangyu, were a representative.
Nowadays, the socialist market economic system has been established, and the non-public economy such as the individual economy, the private economy, and the private economy have become an important part of it, and they form an inseparable whole from the public economy.
I came on the waves, and I said that I was a random wavemaker, and when my feet got wet, I jumped away quickly, and I was never a tidemaker. Looking back on the process, there are many feelings; those who give words have the courage to toss. In a society where you can eat lightly, in today's gradual solidification of a class, you can't fight your father, you can't become a rich second generation, what are your feelings, and what is your ideal? Only do not accept the status quo, break the stereotype, do not take the house ticket as a shackle, when the future hero theory of success or failure, although the defeat is also happy, life is like this!
He Zhiming may 29, 2021 in Hefei