There are garish supermarkets and shops around the community where I live and work. I shop there for work-related supplies and household appliances. For veg and other produce, I prefer to buy direct from roadside vendors.

The vendors are mobile and temporary, available for only certain periods of day. City Environment Police drive them off streets to ensure a sterile urban look.

The first hours they are found are dawn to approximately 8. 8 is the time the City Environment officers go on the road. In front of the blocks of flats I call home, just along Beijing Road, across from the YYHS campus, there are over 20 vendors, peddling all manner of seasonal produce. Just a look, and you can tell they are farmers-turned vendors, in contrast with pro vendors, who buy in produce wholesale and retail it for a profit.

The vagrant vendors offer fresh produce, raised in their garden and plucked off the plants the same morning. Local cherries, which perish real fast, for instance, are to be got from such amateur vendors. In the big stores, most produce on sale goes through several steps before hitting the shelves. Their exotic produce travels ridiculously long distances, even from overseas, for its final place on a shelf. The food miles are outrageous.

The itinerant vendors are a last vestige of the small-village way of life, which is being pushed by China’s breakneck urbanisation to the brink of extinction. When buying from them, I often strike up a conversation. Those chats let me in on a lot of their family and community anecdotes, and their joys and sorrows. A couple of the vendors, over time, have become almost acquaintances.

The second hours the mobile vendors can come out and trade on the streets are when City Environment Police are knocking off, from 5.30 until after dusk sets in, although their number is way smaller than in the morning.

One evening after work on the way home, I spotted seated by the pavement an old vendor, in a frayed ill-fitting jacket, buttons undone. No customers around, he was nodding off. When I saw pickles in his basket, I greeted him and thus roused him from a doze.

“How much are your pickles?” I asked.

“6 Yuan a kilo,” he replied.

“Half a kilo, please.”

Promptly, he picked some pickles up, stuffed them in a plastic bag, and got them weighed on his scales. I took out the phone to pay. Embarrassed, he said that he could not get paid through QR code. QR code is ubiquitous these days.

No cash about me, I was about to quit when he asked the vendor next to him to take the pay from me through her QR code.

With a scan, the transaction was done. The woman vendor took out her purse, counted out 3 one-Yuan coins, and dropped them into the man’s palm.

“Where are you from, may I ask?” I asked tentatively before I went away. His accent was reminiscent of the folks back in my home village.

“My home is everywhere,” he replied nonchalantly.

“Why don’t you get a QR code like others?” I suggested. “It would save you tonnes of trouble.”

“Oh, you are so humorous, sir,” the old guy chuckled. “You must be from the government.”

Oh Lord. I am no more than a pedagogue.

“Government is your son,” I comforted him. “Why should you fear them?”

“Oh, you are so humorous, sir. I have no phone.”

His home is everywhere. The vendor sounds every way akin to those corrupt Chinese government officials, who confess to their heinously greedy crimes, such as graft and degenerate lifestyles, in CCTV (China Central Television) newscasts on big TV screens, yet a smart gadget is simply beyond his means.