Early this morning, Wang Liansheng and the children all went out; Zhao Erni took little Shi Tou to the nursery and went to the vegetable market with her basket to buy groceries.
At the market, she asked about the cabbage and found it was still three cents a pound. Zhao Erni pursed her lips in a somewhat pained manner: "Just throw some seeds and it can grow hundreds of pounds, and yet you're selling it for three cents."
The man selling cabbage was a sincere fellow. Not annoyed, he chuckled, hands in his pockets, saying, "What the lady says is right; back in our village, that's how it is. But city folks don't have a place to grow them. Seems like you know farming too and understand that it ain't easy to grow cabbage well, with watering, fertilizing, catching bugs, and tying them with a rope so they heart up..."
He rambled on for a while until Zhao Erni had nothing to say. She pulled out twenty cents and bought two big cabbages to take home.
