The Veggie Vendors

The sun sets on the High-Tech Zone as a hazy-orange disk sinking beneath a blanket of smog. It is soon replaced by a muted moon shining down on the day's last surge of activity. Gradually the traffic clears, the glitzy shops close, and the interminable construction work grinds to a halt. The last stragglers head home shortly after midnight and finally even the ever-present battalion of taxis camps along the empty roadways for the night.

By 3:00 a.m., the High-Tech Zone is a dead zone.

Suddenly, out of the silence bursts Li Donghua, reining in his three-wheeled motorcycle as it bounces and lurches along the city's deserted avenues. His wife, Chuan Shuanghai, sits behind him in a rickety metal cart, head tucked between her knees to avoid the brutal autumn wind. As they whiz through the district, they catch up with a nearly identical vehicle—right down to the tightly bundled woman riding in the back. Another three-wheeler cuts in from a side street, and then another, and another. Donghua guns ahead, jockeying for position at the front of the caravan.

Within minutes they pull into a sprawling, iron-gated compound and their daily trek comes to an end. Bright stadium lights extinguish the early-morning darkness and the clamor of frenzied business transactions engulfs them from every side. Donghua squeezes the motorcycle into a parking space and peers off toward a sea of flatbed trucks filled with eggplant, zucchini, cucumbers, and countless other vegetables, all stacked high and selling fast.

This is rush hour at the High-Tech Zone's wholesale market, an outdoor foodstuff super center of sorts where Donghua and Shuanghai start each day. They have a little over three hours to stock up on veggies, load them into the cart, race back to their local retail market, and unpack everything before their own customers start trickling in. Donghua looks at the throng of other small-time vegetable peddlers already scouring for deals and starts to feel antsy. It's 3:30 a.m., time to get to work.

When Donghua and Shuanghai finally arrive at their own neighborhood market, their three-wheeler stacked high with the morning's freshly purchased produce, it's nearly 7:40 a.m. and they are running late. They navigate through the mob at the front entrance and push their motorcycle toward the interior, where small-time entrepreneurs stand over coal-block heated woks, cooking up local specialties hot and fast throughout the day and late into the night. With the cheapest breakfast selections in the neighborhood—piping-hot soy milk, tea-boiled eggs, and a batch of salty fried donuts, all for well under a dollar—business is already booming. Donghua's stomach growls faintly, but there's no time to stop and eat today.

Instead the couple moves past the dining area to the rickety, market-supplied wooden tables where more than twenty vegetable merchants display their wares. If there's one thing that makes Shuanghai and Donghua extraordinary, it's how painfully ordinary they are among their peers. Like all the other vendors here, they grew up in the countryside; they have low education and even lower life expectations. They dress simply, clad most often in hand-knit sweaters and old-style cloth shoes. And though the circumstances that compelled each of these peddlers to head city-ward vary, their purpose here in the market—and, for that matter, the purpose of the more than 200 million rural migrants residing in China's burgeoning cities at any given time—is very often the same: a quest for financial stability and opportunity that simply doesn't exist back in their villages.

And so for 200 yuan a month—the equivalent of about $30—Donghua and Shuanghai rent out one of the market's shaky little tables and hope for the best. Seeing that the other tables are already overflowing with a potpourri of red, green, yellow, and orange vegetables, Donghua quickly parks the motorcycle beside a small cement fish pond and then makes a beeline for the last and arguably worst spot in the market—the table right across from the dinky, hardly used back entrance, the table they call home.

They scramble for the next twenty minutes to lay out their produce, Donghua muttering all the while about the morning's already lost opportunities. They're not usually late—in fact, they almost always arrive first so that they can snatch up as many early-bird customers as possible. But tomorrow is October 1, the beginning of China's week-long National Day celebration, and they had spent a little extra time at the wholesale market stocking up for what they hope will be a big holiday rush.

Among the last items to make it onto the table are dried red pepper strings—hot sellers as popular as they are hard to get. As soon as Donghua sets them out, a customer materializes and, without even asking the price, snaps up two jin, a standard half-kilo measure used across China. An older lady with hair cut in a trendy Japanese-style shag and streaked with color scoots down the aisle, with grandson in tow, eager to get a look at their peppers. Donghua stretches a string between his arms. "I can cut this to any length you want," he encourages her.

"How much?" Grandma asks.

"1.5 per jin."

"1.5?" she says. "That can't be. That's way too expensive."

From across the table, Shuanghai looks up from the Chinese cabbage she's preening. "They were 1.3 wholesale," she says flatly.

Grandma isn't ready to pay that much and so she shuffles away, pointy-toed shoes clacking against the pitted concrete floor. Shuanghai returns to her cabbage, while Donghua moves on to the yams. But a minute later, Granny's back, arguing for a price of 1.3 yuan and hinting that anything more would be a rip-off.

Shuanghai's cheeks flush red. It doesn't bother her so much that these wealthy city people want everything so cheap. What really gets to her is their impression that all small-time vegetable peddlers are dishonest. Sure, some sellers—especially those with a prime location up front—mark prices way up when they think they can get away with it. Those are the same people who slide the market's management extra money to secure the best tables. But other than that, for the most part, they're all just people like Shuanghai and Donghua, trying to squeak out a decent living. That's hard enough without all these rich folk wanting their peppers and potatoes practically for free and yet still feeling like they're getting cheated over every cent. "We bought these peppers for 1.3, so how can we sell them to you for that price?" Shuanghai snaps at Grandma. "We should be selling them for 1.8, but we're only asking 1.5."

"Yesterday I saw them for ..."

"Yesterday? Yesterday!" Shuanghai brews. "Today's wholesale prices are not the same as yesterday's!"

Donghua pipes in, voice calm,...