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By Sun Shuangjie, Photos by Nicky Almasy
It’s 6am when 79-year-old Yang Qingying steps off the Line 7 Metro at Chanping Lu Station and sets up her stand in the Exit 2 entrance. Yang, a Shanghai native, has two unemployed sons with health problems at home. The family depends on her small government pension and money she makes rising early to sell flowers.
Sitting on a stool behind a foam cooler, Yang picks up four iron wires, bends them in the middle and twists, skillfully forming eight branches. Then, slowly, due to poor eyesight, she threads a fragrant flower on each branch and in a minute a beautiful jasmine pin is made.
“I sell two kinds of flower bracelets,” Yang says, pointing at the freshly formed ones on top of her cooler. One kind is threaded with a dozen jasmine flowers and sells for RMB2. The other is twice as many flowers threaded through double iron wiring and sells for RMB5.
Yang went into business two years ago. She used to be a part-time ayi, but now says she’s too old and nobody wants to hire her. She noticed flower stands around town for years, it seemed like an easy enough business to manage, so she started her own. She gets all her flowers and wires from wholesalers on Hongqiao Lu. Every afternoon jasmine and sweet magnolia flowers are flown in from Guangdong and Yunnan Province and sold by the kilogram to Shanghai vendors.
Days before our interview, she was assaulted by another vendor. “People walked by, but no one would stand up to stop it.”
“A half kilo of jasmine flowers is RMB50, it used to be RMB20 or even less,” Yang says. She nets RMB0.6 profit on a flower bracelet sold for RMB2, making about RMB50 a day.
Usually Yang only buys half a jin (250g) of flowers per day. “These flowers don’t keep fresh for long, they wither in three or four hours if exposed to the hot air,” she says. She keeps them in her home refrigerator and when she heads out for the day puts them in plastic bags wrapped in cold wet towels.
“The flowers last for two days at most,” she says, “when they wither and can’t sell, I’ll dry them in the sun and fill a pillow with them. You can smell the aroma while sleeping, which is good for your health.”
Yang sells at Changping Lu in the morning and transfers to the busy Westgate Mall on Nanjing Xi Lu in the evening. Her best customers are usually women in their fifties and sixties.
“I feel sorry for her because she is so old to be a vendor,” said Ye Feipeng, one of Yang’s few male customers outside Changping Lu Station. “But I also admire how she can still earn money for herself.”
“Once a man gave me an extra hundred yuan for one bracelet. I knew he was sympathetic and wanted to help me, so I thanked him and accepted the money,” Yang says. A couple of customers per day will give her an extra kuai or leave their change. Yang appreciates the kind gesture.
Like other street vendors, Yang has to evade chengguan (city administration officers), but conflicts between others vendors are her real nightmare. Days before our interview, she was assaulted by another vendor selling hair accessories on the other side of the metro passageway. “People walked by, but no one would stand up to stop it.” Yang pulls up her sleeves to show the bruises on her arms.
The jasmine and sweet magnolia season finishes at the end of this month, so Yang will have a few months to rest at home before she starts back up in the spring. She plans to stay in business as long as her health permits.
This article first appeared in the September 2011 issue of That's Shanghai. To see more Throwback Thursday posts, click here.
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