Secondhand Goods

Chen Shu inherited a secondhand goods shop that was on the verge of closing. He owed five thousand in rent, the courtyard was piled high with old furniture no one would buy, the shop across the street knew more about prices than he did, and people who came to sell things could always talk him into paying twenty yuan for something worth eighteen. Of all the things he was bad at, doing business was the one he was worst at. Then one day, he came across an old object and saw a moment from someone else’s past. There was no sound, no sense of time, and he had no idea who the people in the scene were. He could only be sure of one thing: It had really happened. But the vision never told him how much an old object was worth, who it belonged to, whether he should buy it, or who he should sell it to. So Chen Shu still had to negotiate prices, buy goods, find buyers, clear out sites, calculate transport costs, and pay again and again for his own decisions. Before long, more and more people began entrusting old things to him. Some wanted to sell. Some couldn’t be sold. Some wanted to forget. Some only wanted to know where it had ended up. And Chen Shu gradually realized: In the secondhand trade, the hardest things to deal with were never just the objects themselves.