Snack “cures”

Having quit from a textile mill in her hometown, Guangdong, where she spent more than 20 years as a line-manager, Zhu Aihua, at her

Icecreams are sold in the snack store

49, changed into a shop assistant in a snack shop in Hong Kong to reunite with her family.

“I’d prefer the muffins packed in dozen. It offers a fair price and my son is so fund of it !” Zhu pointed at the fancy boxes piling up in front of the counter and introduced me warmly in standard mandarin. While leaning on the counter, she wore a sunny smile and looked into my eyes in a way that finally made me take it.

Six days in a week, at 3 pm, Zhu walks from her home two blocks away to the snack shop to relieve the shop owner for the next seven hours. The daily routine: mopping the floor, arranging the shelves and also acting as a cashier, for Zhu, earns her a much easier life than her first year in Hong Kong working as a waitress in a tea dining room, which allowed no time for her to take care of her ill mother-in-law.

“Though it all settled now, it was a huge shift for me in the beginning,” Zhu grinned with a sign, “I did plan for moving to Hong Kong for quite a long time, but with my Popo’s (mother-in-law in Chinese) sudden illness, it still turned out to be a bump.”

Working in the center of “snack mountain”, Zhu gradually picked up herself from the culture shock. Even if she doesn’t taste many of the snacks, she enjoys memorizing most of their names, sometimes making recommendations for customers and sometimes buying her son his favorite. As Zhu said, the job gave her not allowance, rather the happiness to be with her family.