As I am walking on a sunny May day–the sort of day that makes you believe you will find happiness around the corner–I see a long queue outside of a sports store–I scrutinized, as well as I could while fast walking, everyone in the line. “All of them want something sporty, and all of them got money to buy it.” I thought to myself–for it is an expensive brand.

A block further, a sign board in front of another sports store, more expensive still, says it offers “Groundbreaking Spring Sweatpants”. As I hastily glanced in, I see that it has attracted a crowd.

Hours later, it’s my turn, in a noiser and more packed area, to be the buyer.

The busyness of the street, the passing crowd, loudly and continuously reminds me of a new reality which makes quite a contrast with the year-long silence and stillness: there is a relief and long-repressed liveliness in the bustle, and you feel New York is New York still.

The Chinese word for buy “买mǎi”, it’s said in the dictionary, originally means “to market, to trade” and the word for market “市shì“ in Chinese is the same word for city.

And if you, indeed in the middle of any city, looked around, you would see that the Chinese has a good reason to make these two words one.

And in the very, very beginning–when they still had to find a sharp flint to scratch the character on a piece of bone–there was only the word “买 mǎi”: to buy; and not the word “卖mài“: to sell.

At that time, 买 mǎi also had a different sense of “buying” than we think of today: mainly as individual customers. Back then, it meant more like a merchant (the word “merchant” which shares the same root with “market” —mercari, to buy–might be said the more accurate equivalent to the Chinese character 买), it meant more like a merchant who ‘nets in’, who purchases goods and properties to gain profit. And the Chinese word for monopoly “垄断lǒngduàn” which came to existence about two thousand and five hundred years ago, the original sense is “ridge in field” — and that, as strange as it sounds, could be easily explained: the merchant climbs up to the highest point of the filed near the trading place to have an overview of the market so to “net in” all the profit he could get.

And it really is a real net:

And a thousand or two years later, it became this:

And who says human evolves and becomes wiser, surely the buyers nowadays fritter their money away while the buyers (and certainly the same sort are still here today and becomes bigger and stronger and globalised: they no longer stand on the ‘ridge of field’, but the ‘ridge of the world’), while the buyers then “net the seashells in”.

Well, well, methinks we should find that ridge.