Mike Lawrence

While I was buying an apple Tuesday at the big fruit stand near the intersection of Lianhua Road and Jingtian Road, I chatted a bit with the vendor about the heavy clouds and rapidly approaching rain.

I see the vendor just about every weekday while buying a piece of fruit on the way to work. He taught me how to say “apple” in Mandarin and sometimes comments on how my language skills are progressing — even though they never really progress very much. As he was counting out my change, a waitress from the Anhui dumpling restaurant on the corner placed a bunch of bananas on the scale, and I said hello to her, too — I see her about once a week when I go to the restaurant for dinner.

The day before, Monday, I was short a couple of coins while buying a lemonade at the newspaper stand across the street, but the seller gave me the drink anyway and told me not to worry about it.

All of these little, seemingly insignificant interactions are why the public plaza at the Lianhua and Jingtian intersection is one of my favorite places in Futian District.

I walk through the plaza twice every weekday, coming and going between the Jingtian Metro station and the office building where I work on Shangbao Road. About twice a week I’ll walk through the plaza three times in a day, because of a dinner-break trip for dumplings or black pepper chicken.

I’m always amazed at the number of people moving through the plaza, especially in the evenings and at late hours when you wouldn’t expect crowds. People young and old are continually buying things, selling things, hauling things, playing with their children, causing trouble for their parents, relaxing, chatting, and listening to whoever happens to be singing or playing an erhu.

You can tell the season by the fruits the vendors are selling. Right now it’s litchi, of course, and lately a new vendor in the area has set up a cart selling hefty slices of watermelon in plastic cups for 2 yuan (US$0.33).

Nearly every foreigner in China will tell you that they’ve developed friendly relationships with certain people to whom they go for certain things — like my “apple guy” and “dumpling waitress,” for example. These are people whom you see every day, chat with and smile with, even though you have no idea what their name is or where they’re from.

These kinds of people are the difference between feeling like a foreigner and feeling like a member of a community. After more than a year of working for Shenzhen Daily, and after making at least 500 walks through that plaza, I’m lucky to say I have a few such friends there.

There are bigger, more well-known attractions nearby — about two blocks east is Lianhua Hill Park, at the top of which is a huge statue of former Chinese leader Deng Xaoping and a beautiful landscaped square that provides sweeping views of Futian’s urban skyline. The site makes a grand statement about the economic reforms and skyscraping development that transformed Shenzhen into a modern mega-city. And not far south is the Coco Park shopping center and entertainment hub, where noise and traffic is constant and the attractions are many. Futian’s CBD is a bigger, busier, more chaotic urban center than any other place I’ve lived.

But when I think about Futian, the first place that comes to mind is the plaza at Lianhua and Jingtian.

“Yi ge ping guo ma? (One apple, right?)” my apple guy asks.

Yes, please.

(Mike Lawrence has worked as a copy editor at Shenzhen Daily for more than a year. He’s from New Hampshire in the U.S., has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Colorado, and worked for nearly six years at a daily newspaper in Colorado. )