Street Stall

After three years of pandemic controls, restrictions were finally lifted in 2023. I don't want to look back on those three years, because they will remain an indelible page in human history. All I want to talk about now is how those of us at the bottom of society struggled to survive after three years of restrictions.

The protagonist, Lou Yi, spent ten years drifting in Beijing, chasing his dream of becoming a great writer, but got nowhere. After three years of the pandemic, he was buried in debt, owing hundreds of thousands on his credit cards and bombarded every day with collection calls and text messages. Desperate to survive, he agonized over what to do. He left Beijing and returned to Guangdong, where he had first gone to work, and found a job selling jewelry. But his wages couldn't even cover rent, let alone food and other necessities, with debts piling up on top of that. Every day, as he sat there fretting and struggling to get by, Lou Yi suddenly noticed that the road outside the jewelry store was always packed with traffic and pedestrians, with vendors setting up stalls one after another. There was a large shopping mall nearby, right by a subway entrance, and local residents had to pass down this road on their way home. The number of people coming here to shop every day ranked among the highest in Anbao District. More importantly, Lou Yi noticed a girl selling freshly squeezed juice outside the jewelry store. Every night, she sold several baskets of oranges and packed up at nine. So he quit his job without hesitation and joined the ranks of the street vendors.

The vendors here came from all walks of life: the old, the weak, the sick and the disabled, business owners, and wage workers. At first, everyone set up their stalls wherever they could. Once business picked up, the community saw a chance to profit and started organizing a night market, setting off a battle over the spoils. For people at the bottom of society, making a living is always hard