Man, Chickens, Ducks

This man was standing by a road in the Pudong section of Shanghai. I couldn't tell if he had broken down, was waiting for a friend, or simply had chosen to rest. What I most liked was the juxtaposition of his working materials with the chickens and ducks. Were they his animals? Was he delivering them to friends? Was he headed home for a gargantuan feast? We were waiting for a traffic light to change so there was no opportunity to ask him.  He saw me taking the picture yet his expression did not change.

Drain Cover

The character on the storm drain cover is yu, the Chinese for rain.  Despite how arcane the Chinese script can seem, its innate beauty somehow transcends the cursing and self-loathing that accompanies the process of learning it. In this particular character, the four dashes represent rain drops falling from a cloud.  In its original form as recorded on oracle bones, the character had six horizontal dashes descending from a single horizontal line.

Mr. Deng, Fruit Seller

This is Mr. Deng, the man who sells a wide range of fruit off the back of a small truck near our home. He's usually on our corner from 4 or 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.  Deng xiansheng gets a little aggrieved when you demand that he remove bruised bananas from a bunch, and he can affect an indignant air if he spots fruit in shopping you purchased elsewhere. Still, he's pleasant, usually happy, curious about the world beyond China's borders, and a daily fixture of our lives. Below is a picture of Mr. Deng and his truck.

A Flower Seller

One of the delights of Shanghai is the continued existence of small shops and street-side retailers. Despite the presence of western behemoths like Carrefour, these independent entrepreneurs continue to hawk their wares to pedestrians.  On weekends especially, scores of flower sellers descend on our street. We gravitate to one man (not the one pictured above), a fellow whose marketing strategy extends to giving out free flowers to passing children so as to cultivate emotional ties to their parents. Many of the flower sellers are migrants from Anhui Province, one of China's poorest, and a perennial source of cheap labour for the building sites and restaurants of Shanghai.