Everyday Fun

Recently, when I have relaxed and thought about things other than grading and finals and lesson planning, I have tried to pick up a little Cantonese. Not much, but enough to ask prices at a Cantonese market. My favorite vendors here in Tangjia are all native Cantonese speakers, so it makes the task not only a bit easier, but a lot more fun. They get a kick out of my attempts to juggle the local accents and languages, and, really, so do I. I love laughing with people, even if it requires laughing at myself most of the time. =)

Since I began this new venture, more of the vendors at the open-air market have begun starting conversations with me. Most of these are simply more detailed forms of "Are you a student?" and "Buy my peaches!", but it feels like a big step to me that so many more people seem interested in interacting with me, not just staring and saying 好高! (Hao3 gao1! So tall!) Some of the conversations are of a slightly deeper form. Vendors know which foods I like (tomatoes, bell peppers, red onions, green onions, broccoli, eggplant, pumpkin, winter melon, cabbage, bok choy, ...) and which I do not (pig skin, dog meat, sweet breads, dried fish, pre-peeled vegetables...), and will tell me when they have something that I or my roommate have been looking for. For example, I got a cob of baby corn waved in my face the other day when one vendor got it back in stock. I bought the equivalent of about 10 cans of corn for less than a dollar without bargaining. (I generally do not bargain at the open-air market because the prices are pretty much standardized. However, my favorite vendors love to say (roughly), "It's 4.5 RMB a pound, but I'll give it to you for 4 RMB a pound." I assume that every vendor will say the same thing, but it feels nice to thank them for their generosity.
Some vendors really are generous in various ways. Some are giving, like the fruit vendor who gives me a handful of miniature citrus fruits every time I walk by. Others go out of their way to make sure I am not being ripped off. My favorite vegetable vendor, a stout lady who sits atop her counter with a kind of pride I adore, will take the bags of fruit I have purchased before arriving at her station, weigh them, and ask how much I paid for them. She is always surprised by how cheap my fruits are, so I think she may stop doing that soon.
All of this was actually inspired by my wanting to tell a story of one of the Cantonese vendors who started talking to me recently due to my new linguistic exploits. She is a shrimp monger. My fear of my shrimp allergy has grown rapidly since last year, when I broke out into a full-blown hive attack that would not be calmed even by an anti-histamine overdose and standing in the freezing cold air outside. In China, if that kind of inflammatory response affected my throat the way that it did my skin last Christmas, I am pretty sure I would be dead. There is no way I would get proper medical attention in time. So, yeah, I don't really want to come in contact with the seafood that this region is famous for. Shrimp is in everything, but I think it is only fresh shrimp that causes major reactions, and fresh shrimp is much easier to avoid than dried shrimp... unless a shrimp monger begins to chase me with a live shrimp in hand screeching "好吃！Tasty!"

This is a picture I took the first day I walked through the open-air market... so long ago...

The funniest thing about being chased with a shrimp directed right at me is that the way she held the shrimp made that one shrimp simultaneously the scariest and cutest shrimp of all time. It practically made puppy eyes at me, at which I would have cooed if its flipping tail were not threatening to spray me with instant death (or, at least, extreme discomfort).
This same saleswoman came up to me three days later to inform me that it is, in fact, winter; hence, I should be wearing something more than a tank top and jeans. To demonstrate to me where I should add more layers of clothing, she rubbed her wet rubber fish-handling gloves down the back of my left arm. The vegetable vendor from whom I was purchasing sweet red peppers and cilantro shooed the fish woman away and kindly tried to dry my arms with her sweater sleeve. Each of them was genuinely well-intended towards me, but, I must admit, it was the vegetable vendor's way of expressing her kindness that I appreciated more.
I would have been curious to see if my skin would have broken out from direct contact with shrimp water, but the vendor was only selling scaly fish that day, so my question remains contendedly unanswered.