Singing and sweets
(Man making sweets: Zhouzuang, China)
This gentleman making sweets was irresistible – I had to take a photograph of him as he swung from the sugary rope, cooling in the crisp afternoon air of this early autumn day. At another stall, I had been cajoled in Chinese until I had tasted one of the fresh sweets, snipped from a thin twine of twirled sugar, it was still warm and melted into a clean, buttery banana taste in my mouth. The man was singing loudly to himself, possibly a well-known Chinese rhyme or a personal old favourite, either way he was rather jolly and completely unperturbed by my presence. Ying’s mum was behind me talking to an artist who was working in his open-air studio shop on the opposite side of the alleyway. He was very talented, though he drew our attention once too often to a well-executed self-portrait that unfortunately belied his regrettable premature aging.
I however had tired of the conversation between him and Ying’s mum since I could understand almost nothing, merely guess at the gestures and facial expressions. Instead I concentrated on the jolly, crooning sweetshop owner across the cobblestones. A girl (just out of shot) had been bartering for some bags of sweets and he has answered her cheeky requests with a shake of the head. She shrugged and wandered off, leaving him easing the sugar rope with a desperate look. She had moved some way down the lane before he dropped the twisted end and called her back to make her selection. I thought the whole transaction was hilarious, but satisfied myself with just a picture to remember him by.
