“Put that extra tureen of shrimp-and-ginseng broth on the third table by the jujube tree! The street sweepers from the North District just finished clearing the alley ice, and their fingers are still stiff!”
By 6:00 PM, thirty strings of warm red lanterns illuminated the interconnected courtyards of Lotus-Prince Street.
Grandma Chen (Goodness: 98/100) bustled across the newly laid warm-jade flagstones of Courtyard No. 1, a clean floral apron tied over her wool sweater as she wielded a long-handled brass ladle in front of thirty steaming copper cauldrons.
Just three hours earlier, Lotus-Prince Street had been a forbidden enclave where chaebol heirs threatened to break the legs of anyone who touched their gates.
Now, all thirty-six imperial Siheyuan mansions stood wide open to the working people of Shichahai.
Around fifty long pine tables sat five hundred local hutong street sweepers, night-shift patrol officers, and retired public-school teachers (Goodness: 82–94/100). Qin Haoran (Goodness: 78.4/100) and Tie Niu (Goodness: 93/100) had personally invited every one of them in from the minus-twelve-degree wind.
Many of these veterans and sanitation workers had swept the snow outside Lotus-Prince Street for thirty years without ever being allowed past the stone lions. Watching the red lanterns reflect off the warm-jade courtyard tiles, several elderly street sweepers carefully wiped the soles of their cloth boots three times before stepping inside.
