Hua was thinking about buying a big softshell turtle to cook for her husband Ping when she spotted a seafood stand full of dried fish maw. Approaching the stall, she found another woman of her age talking with the vendor while making her careful selections from the basket.
“How do you sell it?” asked Hua in a casual voice.
“Eighty yuan per jin!” replied the middle-aged fish woman, with as much warmth as pride. “My fish maw is the best in this market.”
“It looks really good,” Hua told herself, “Ping’ll surely have a treat today.”
“It is really a good buy at this price,” said another woman in her late fifties, who had joined Hua from her back and begun to do the picking.
“You really think so?” Hua asked in a friendly tone. “Which pieces are better picks?”
After giving Hua some good tips, the third woman began to chat with her by asking where she had come from, since her accent did not sound like anything local.
“I am from Jingzhou, Hubei,” Hua answered.
“What a coincidence!” exclaimed the third woman. “We two share the same place of origin. I am from Gong-An.”
As they kept chatting and picking the maw pieces at the same time, the first woman asked the seller to weigh all the maw pieces she had finished picking. At her request, the fish woman stepped over from behind the stall and put her picks on the scale first, and then Hua’s and the Gong-An woman’s in turn one by one, singing quite loudly as a rule, “Okay, the first weighs 1.05 jin; the second 1.15; and third 1.92 or, rather, 1.9.”
After all the three woman confirmed the vendor’s weighing and calculating respectively, the first woman took out her cell phone to make the payment through AliPay. While Hua was getting ready to make her payment, she saw, to her great astonishment, the Gong-An woman trying blatantly to put more maw pieces into her bag stealthily after both the weight and price had already been confirmed. Seeing Hua’s response, the third woman spent no time stuffing a few extra pieces into Hua’s bag, apparently in the hope of bribing her into silence about the theft at the fish woman’s cost. Hua’s initial idea was to call the seller’s attention to this shoplifting behavior, but if the fisherwoman turned around, she would fail to catch the Gong-An woman red-handedly; worse still, Hua would have difficulty explaining the situation on the one hand and evoked hatred from the thief on the other, who might do something really nasty to her down the road. While Hua felt nervous and awkward about herself being made a thief, or a thief’s accomplice, the first woman complained that though her picks and Hua’s were roughly of the same weight, it was obvious that Hua’s picks looked much more than her own while Hua was making the payment. Before the vendor realized what was going on, the Gong-an woman told the first woman to shup up. “Butt out! You’ve paid your maw, why bother about other people’s picks?”
Hua was feeling extremely guilty about the underpayment she was forced to make when the fish woman said in an amicable voice to the Gong-an woman, “You’re right, everyone mind their own business. Now you’re paying me in cash instead of AliPay, Ma’am?”
“Yes, my cell phone doesn’t work properly this morning, but I got enough cash here,” said she.
After the three women left the scene, the seller returned to her seat behind the stall, happy and joyful about the three quite big sales she had just made on a single morning. In the meantime, Hua felt both guilty and nervous. Guilty because she was a thief though coerced by the circumstance; nervous because she feared that she would be caught sooner or later somehow by someone. But more than guilty or nervous was an overwhelming sense of disturbance in the heart of her soul. Having never done anything like this before, she was suffering from a bad conscience for the first time in her entire life. Cornered into this awkward situation, she had no idea about what she should or could do. To get some peace of her mind, she stopped shopping and hurriedly left the market.
Arriving home, Hua asked Ping to shut the door tight as if she were to be picked out of the crowd like a maw piece.
“What happened to you?” Ping asked, surprised to see Hua panting with nervousness.
“Something really bad, I was made a shoplifter today!”
“How come?”
“Someone put extra maw pieces into my bag after the seller verified my purchase.”
“Easey peasey! All you need to do is weigh them again now, and pay the balance tomorrow.”
“Gee, I’ve never thought of that!”
Following Ping’s advice, Hua took out their electric scale and weigh the maw pieces carefully. For reasons not readily clear, Hua found that the weight was precisely what she was supposed to pay for.
[Author’s note: This story was inspired by Helena Qi Hong (祁红).]
