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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, latest_stories, shantou highlight

“Pen” selling

(pen selling)

“Pen” is the common call for “surambi water” in Chaoshan dialect. “Pen selling” was a familiar calling to many Chaoshan people. Usually in the past years, the “pen” buyers came to take the “pen” early in the morning and their yell “pen selling” broke people’s sleeping dream.

Years ago, peasants, suburbanites and urbanites usually fed pigs, and “pen” was one of the main feedstuffs. Therefore, “pen” became a well-selling stuff. Each family set a jar for pouring “pen”in front of their house to let the buyer take it away.

Buyers in the 1950s often carried two buckets on a yoke, yelling “pen selling, pen selling” and buying “pen” from the different families.
(Someone also yelled “buying pen”. Actually, it should have been “buying pen” because the yeller would pay money to buy “pen”. When he called “pen selling”, that meant “come out to sell your pen” in Chaoshan dialect.)

In the 1960s buyers usually rode a bike, with one plastic bucket on each side of the backseat. Those who came to buy “pen” were often acquaintances of the providers, and they often came to buy “pen” at a certain time of the day.

Once the pig was sold (often called as “marrying pig “), “pen” buyer would bring two pieces of bread, which had been used for worship, to the “pen” sellors. At that time, a family (usually held four or five people) could make one or two cents a day through selling pen.

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

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