From needles and thread to ploughshares and scythes, from red hair-string to spirit paper — this shop holds four hundred and seventy-two kinds of goods, and every one of them lives in my head. Test me. Third shelf, third tier, second slot from the left? Sewing needles. Four large to a string of cash, six small.
The general-store trade lives by one rule: "miscellaneous, never messy." The Dongjing Meng Hua Lu — a Song book — describes the night market at Zhou Bridge, roast tea and candied fruit going strong past midnight. My ancestors were in that trade. No genealogy to prove it; the craft itself is proof.
This plague year, my shelves learned to read the wind. Red string, spirit paper, cinnabar, peachwood swords — three sold in a good year before; now they vanish every market day. Ploughshares gather dust. Self-defense knives tripled in price, and I refuse to stock them — I need to sleep at night. What hurts most is children's long-life lockets: twenty-odd ordered in a normal year, forty this year. Every family is afraid.
I give credit. Granny Tian has run a needle-and-thread tab for three years. Captain Tie Chong's spear tassel has been replaced four times, unpaid. The schoolchildren's brushes and ink live in a separate ledger. People ask: aren't you afraid the money never comes back? I am. But I fear one thing more: if the town loses its needles and notions, does daily life go on at all?
The Song books call my kind "traveling merchants" — that one word, "traveling," says it all. We don't sell goods. We keep the days moving forward.
So when you come in, don't ask "do you have it," ask "how much." Do I have it? Always. How much? Depends who you are. Bounty-taker — twenty percent off. Refugee — put it on the tab. Got fresh news from Flower-Fruit Mountain —
You get a quarter-hour of my rambling, free of charge. Congratulations.