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Hucksters, peddlers and vendors around the streets and small lanes

Wednesday, 12. 3. 2008  –  Category: Arts, Entertainment & Culture, Issue One, cover story, shantou highlight

Index:

1. Recycling scrap metal and toothpaste shell
2. Facial threading
3. Foot bucket and waist bucket selling
4. Renew bucket bottom
5. Castration of roosters and pigs
6. “Pen” selling
7. Drug drum
8. Clothes-dyer
9. Fish sauce and soy sauce selling
10. Repair forging hearth or change the windows
11. Repair copper pots, galvanized pots and metal pails
12. The Verdigris Plaster Medicine
13. Snacks in the evening
14. Gallery

In the past ages, saying 1950s to 1990s, the hucksters, peddlers, vendors around the streets and small lanes in downtown in Chaoshan area were widespread and enjoyed great popularity. Their business took an important role in our life. They severed us from selling daily necessary articles to recycling used things, from reparing appliances to offering beauty treatment. Once we felt we could not live without these street services. However, as scores of years went by, most of them have steped down from the history stage. The rest are still struggling to survive.

But they has never gone away from our memery. To some extent, they reflected the real life of the Chaoshan people in those ages. In the following, we translated this fabulous description about the former street business with literature and art pictures done by Xiao Sheng, a retired stage designer of the Shantou TV Station.

Recycling scrap metal and toothpaste shell

（Recycling scrap metal and used paper and toothpaste shells in the 1950s and 1960s.）

When go downtown, no matter in main streets or small lanes, we can easily hear the sound “recycling scrap metal, used electric appliances” from the recorder of the hucksters. This reminds me of some other hucksters who were ever quite familiar to us.

In the 1950s, “recycle scrap metal, used paper and toothpaste shells”, from a long distance, a huckster who was always carrying two wicker Baskets shouted. Then residents might carry out a pile of waste paper and a few toothpaste shells to exchange money. You may wonder why the huckster recycled toothpaste shells. The reason is that toothpaste shells were mainly made of lead, a metal which was short of in that period. In those days, you couldn’t buy a new toothpaste just using money but had to took along with a toothpaste shell as well.

(The waste collecting trolley appeared in the 1960s and 1970s.)

In the 1970s, however, waste collecting trolley appeared. With this equiment, huckster could collect more scraps and carry them much more easily. At this time, with the development of secondary industry, they could recycle more scarp metal and used paper than ever before. And more people joined this group.

（They began to ride the tricycle in the 1990s.）

In the 1990s, Huckster had a new equiment. They began to ride a tricycle, by which they could collect and carry wastes easily and quickly. They not only recycled scrap metal and used paper, but used washers and TV sets as well. If you had these things to handle, you just needed to call them, then they would collect these things themselves from yours house. This kind of huckster is still very common in the rural areas now. Nowadays, the huckster wants more things, such as used computers and refrigerators. They use a recorder to do their advertisments instead of shouting out  to be heard by themselves.

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