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Making a Living in Old China
A Geomancer dispenses fengshui advice.
As unemployment roils the once complacent masses, let us remember the street peddler, for both perspective and inspiration. No one ever guaranteed cubicle careers as an inaliable right, saints be praised, and no one likes even the cleverest marketer more than he does the guy who carries his nightsoil away. Painter Sheng Xishan wields a brush that sweeps you back to the streets of Chinese cities a century ago.
Many fortune tellers wrote as persuasively as they talked. Brushing out important letters for the illiterati made a much-welcome value-added service, street style.
On the right cheek, they might bring fortune. On the neck, they promised death by hanging. Either way, moles were generally considered either unsightly or unlucky enough to support at least one removal expert per marketplace.
What with toilet scarcity and cooked oil disposal, good clean yellow earth, the kind you needed for repairing houses, building stoves or planting flowers, was best found in the sacks of enterprising, broad-backed farmers.
The original sh---y job, night soil collection also fell to impoverished peasants from outside the city walls. Some were lucky enough to get tips from the courtyards they serviced, on major festival days.
The long, pliant leaves of the iris made perfect rope material, and were cheap enough that clever-fingered entrepreneurs could weave them into toys for a tiny profit.
In Old China, a leaky tea kettle could bring a household to a standstill. Kettle repair men roamed the streets with tin plates to patch up copper and iron ware, and make sure you never had to throw out the family wok, impregnated with the essence of ten thousand meals, to start all over again.
Before Cold Stone Creamery, there was snow flake cheese. An iron bucket within a wooden bucket, ice and salt filling the gap between, and water with sugar inside the metal pail. The cheesemaker twirled that pail with a piece of string until sweet ice formed inside, and then gave a call as distinctive as the bell of an ice cream truck roving a suburban neighborhood.
But snow flake cheese is for dessert. For dinner, perhaps some frosted lamb intestine? Lamb innards were filled with blood, then left in cold water until jello-like. A layer of thick white grease would rise on the outside for that "frosted" effect. Cut into small sections, then boiled with salt, frosted intestine was served with sesame paste, chopped coriander, and enough other seasonings to make Tony the Tiger admit they tasted grrrrrrreat!
Dogs can be fun, but they eat so much, and like children, their noise only pleases their owners. Now a katydid was not only easy to feed, but a challenge to keep through the winter. Owners would keep the katydids' gourd homes close to the bosom, and let them out for a little sunshine. The care was rewarded when the long-horned grasshoppers turned from bright green to a deep, rich purple-brown.
Of course, birdsong rewards a pet-owner's ears more than bug-chirps. Pigeons, parrots, siskins, and the ever-popular nightingale peered from tiny cages at the brik markets that sprang up at every temple fair.
By the 1920s and 30s, both Beijing and Shanghai had movie houses. Street entrepreneurs would collect rejected reels from them, and set up makeshift cinemas like the one above, the projector a jerry-rigged wonder of broken, colored glass and tiny electric generators.
With the kung fu flick as yet uninvented, action fans could always watch the local strong man twirl his massive ninety kilogram sword, holding it horizontally, flipping it, and twirling it across his back.
Those cross-talk performances on Chinese TV are rarely memorable, especially if your dialect comprehension is poor. But in live street shows, the performers only got paid if they made people laugh. Cross talkers would insult onlookers, revel in the obscene and vulgar, and beat the straight man on the head for being a fool.
"Sorry son, the peep show is only for adults." True, for the steroscopic pictures depicting opera scenes, current affairs, and scenic locales would have held little interest for most children.
Blow that suona, fearless guinea pig tamer. Here he comes now, out of his chest, scaling ladders and twirling atop his mini-umbrella. Forget Sigfried and Roy, kids - that's entertainment.
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