They're all over the raods in Beijing, these fruit and vegetable vendors. Wide carts, wood-bottomed, iron-wheeled, grimy and so covered with blankets. They change according to the season: peaches in the summer, bright or pale yellow, with leafy peach branches stuck in-between the fruits to contrast and make them look more appetizing. In the fall, apples; in the spring, winter-dates. In the winter, tangerines and mandarins and oranges anywhere from two-fist-sized to the size of a human eyeball.
Chestnuts come in the fall and the winter.
The chestnut-lady's cart is not wood, but pale aluminum, or maybe tin, with bicycle-wheels. It's a box-on-wheels with a tiny stove on one side; over this stove sits a wide, shallow iron wok pan. It's filled with black gravel and chestnuts. On the cart's other side, a scale and a pan of chestnuts.
The chestnut-lady doesn't need a coat. In the fall, she wears short sleeves, while everyone around wears jackets. In the winter, she wears long-sleeves, and takes her tall wooden scoop, and leans close to the wok-pan, twisting and shoveling the hot gravel over the cooking chestnuts. She takes oil and drizzles it over everything, and then goes back to turning the rocks, over and over.
When you go to her, and ask for chestnuts, you specify a number -chabuduo shi, ershi: about ten, twenty - or a weight. It you ask by number she leans over her wok to the tray, picks up a scoop, and expertly divides ten, twenty oil-shining chestnuts from the rest, and drops them into a waxed-paper bag. If you ask for weight, she nods and puts the bag on her scale, adding as asked, or shaking nuts out - not into the tray, but into the wok.
The waxed-paper bags darken as you walk, eating: this is how you know they are good. Lots of oil. Every now and then you come upon a chestnut that rattles in its shining shell: the nutmeat is shrunk away from the shell, a dark-brown unchewable raisin. This does not happen often, and people never complain.
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