In the coastal province of Zhejiang, what can you buy with 0.5 yuan (8 cents)?
In Huangtankou, the answer is breakfast. For the past 24 years, 83-year-old Mao Shihua has been selling breakfast for 0.5 yuan each item to primary students.
Every day, Mao gets up at 1 am to prepare ingredients for the breakfast. At 5 am, she rides a tricycle loaded with her stall equipment to a place hundreds of meters away from Huangtankou Primary School, where she waits for her customers.
Four coal stoves, three frying pans, three aluminum pots and several plastic stools… the stall of Mao Shihua is simple, but it is quite popular with the students at the Huangtankou Primary School.
"I started having breakfast here since I was a second-grader. The food here is the most affordable. In other places, merely a zongzi costs two or three yuan," said six-grader Lyv Zhihao.
Mao Shihua is picky about the quality of her food. She insists on using the best ingredients. The soybean milk is freshly ground and the eggs are cherry-picked. But she does not care about the money very much.
Asked about the profit her business makes, she could not give an exact answer. "I can roughly recover the cost," she says. Mao receives 1,040 yuan of pension each month and she spends some to cook breakfast for the students.
"We all know she could not make money. She even loses money," said Mao Yongsen, the owner of a neighboring breakfast stall. "The costs for ingredients today are not comparable with that of 24 years ago."
It is the love for children that lies behind Mao's affordable breakfast.
"I love kids. Even when I see kids on TV, I want to hug them," she said.
Mao says she wants to cook breakfast for those students coming to school early in the morning from their home in mountainous regions and she wants to make her breakfast available to every student, even those from poor families.
Mao would call each student coming to her food stall "mei", which is a nickname for children in the local dialect. "Boys are my grandson and girls are my granddaughter," she said.
For students at the Huangtankou Primary School, the taste and smell of Mao's food has become their shared memory for the hometown.
After retiring from the army and coming back to Huangtankou in 2011, Mao Lei found the breakfast stall of Mao Shihua was still there with the familiar tastes and smile, just like when he was a student. That made him feel the hometown has not changed.
The food on the breakfast stall are not special in flavor, said Mao Lei, "but they are full of affection."
Mao Shihua has declined her four children's persuasion that she goes to live with them in cities. "I have not stopped laboring for my life. I will fall ill if I just watch TV and stroll all day," she said.
Although the business is toiling for an elderly woman, Mao says the three hours she sells breakfast every morning is the time she feels the most happiness in a day.
