Zhao Ping, a senior in college, set up a stall selling vegetables in an alley off campus. His life was quiet and steady. One evening, as he was packing up, he found Lin Zhao, a lost freshman, in the bed of his three-wheeled cart. Exhausted and hungry, the young woman had curled up in a basket and fallen asleep clutching a wilted cabbage.
Naturally bad with directions, Lin Zhao started waiting by his vegetable stall every day. She helped hand out plastic bags and check the accounts. She even noticed that the weight on his old wooden scale was off, and quietly saved up her spare change to buy him a new one.
Others saw only how hard and ordinary life as a street vendor was. Only Lin Zhao understood the tenderness beneath his silence. She remembered how he always gave customers an extra handful of scallions, how he tried to be fair and generous whenever he weighed the vegetables, and how he always arranged the baskets neatly when he packed up.
A mishap that left them lost at a night market, a worn wooden scale, and an unremarkable cabbage brought two ordinary young people slowly closer in the evening breeze of the vegetable market.
He was packing up his stall, and taking her home too.
She got lost on her way there, and somehow found her way into his life.
