Revisiting a Beijing vegetable stand, more than 25 years after moving away
Revisiting a Beijing vegetable stand, more than 25 years after moving away
Back in the mid-1990s, when my wife and I lived in an up-and-coming Beijing neighborhood called Sanlitun, we frequented a produce stall called Jenny Lou’s.
It had a bare floor, a tarp for a roof and exposed lightbulbs so you could see what you were buying. The owner, Jenny Lou, sold fruits and vegetables, mostly to Westerners like me.
At that time, the Chinese economy had just started the growth spurt that would make it the second-biggest economy in the world.
I left China in 1997, but when I returned in 2005 on a reporting trip for Marketplace, I toured my old neighborhood and went looking for Jenny Lou.
Big chunks of Sanlitun had been bulldozed, a luxury hotel was going up and a little noodle shop I once loved had been replaced by a five-story Volkswagen dealership.
In the place where Jenny Lou’s produce stall once stood, I found a construction site.
But, as it turned out, Jenny Lou herself was doing all right. She’d moved a few blocks away and built a multimillion-dollar supermarket chain specializing in imported goods.
I asked how she managed to do so well in the changing Chinese economy. “Knowing what your customers want,” she told me.
That was 2005. Today, the economic engine that transformed the lives of hundreds of millions of people like Jenny Lou is slowing down.
So when I was back in Beijing last week covering U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s visit, I went back to Jenny Lou’s.
That store I’d seen in 2005 was closed on a Saturday morning, but I pressed my face to the window and had a look inside.
I saw a selection of meats and cheeses, imported chocolates and a whole wall of freezers. There were shopping carts and a trailer outside advertising door-to-door home delivery service.
The high-end supermarket bore little resemblance to the tarp-covered produce stand from the ’90s. Jenny Lou’s had changed.
And now that the Chinese economy is changing again, I hope Jenny Lou will be all right.
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