Everyone Searching for a Living on the Streets Is Reading the Same Book street-search-reading-en

 If you've ever been to a traditional teahouse in Guangzhou's old town on a weekend morning, you've witnessed a curious scene: elderly patrons, one newspaper per person, rustling pages amid the steam rising from har gow and chicken feet, while young people beside them swipe furiously at phone screens. At first glance they're reading entirely different things, but look closer — they're all doing the same thing: searching the city's crevices for their own portion of "spiritual sustenance."

A while back I came across an article about how the Cantonese song "The Streets Are Full of People Searching for a Living" echoes the bustling street culture of the Song Dynasty from a thousand years ago. The piece quotes Meng Yuanlao's Dreams of Splendor of the Eastern Capital, which describes the streets of Bianjing: "The night market lasted until the third watch, and reopened again by the fifth watch. Places of amusement bustled without end through the night" — a scene remarkably similar to today's streets full of hustling workers (see City Streets and Livelihood in Classical Literature). After reading it, I suddenly realized that "searching for a living" has never been just about mouths — it requires eyes too. Reading is the map by which city dwellers navigate their hunt for sustenance.

In the Northern Song capital of Bianjing, Liu Yong's lyrics were the equivalent of today's Xiaohongshu restaurant reviews. He wrote of "markets displaying pearls, households overflowing with silk, vying in extravagance," and readers combed through every line to find the best taverns and the liveliest entertainment quarters. Zhang Zeduan's Along the River During the Qingming Festival is essentially a static, panoramic food-and-culture crawl — what are the vendors selling on Rainbow Bridge? Where is the porter beneath the city gate heading? Has the boat tracker on the riverbank had lunch yet? The more carefully you "read" this painting, the more you feel the pulse of the city beating beneath the ink.

By the Ming and Qing dynasties, the rise of the novel made "urban reading" even more vivid. The shops Ximen Qing browsed on Lion Street in The Plum in the Golden Vase, the restaurants Du Shaoqing dined at along the Qinhuai River in The Scholars, the dishes that Granny Liu marveled at in the Grand View Garden in Dream of the Red Chamber — these were all the liveliest portraits of city life at the time. When readers pored over these pages, weren't they effectively doing homework for their own future "food-seeking expeditions"?

Today, we're fundamentally no different from the people of Bianjing a thousand years ago. You search for "hidden food gems in urban villages" on Xiaohongshu, someone else checks "where to go alone on a weekend" on Zhihu, I browse "the ten best books to read on a rainy day" on Douban — essentially, we're all using reading to find an exit in the city's labyrinth. Sima Qian once wrote, "All the hustle and bustle in the world is for profit; all the rushing and scrambling is for gain." It sounds cold, but readers "searching for a living" between the lines have never been driven solely by profit — more often, it's about finding kindred spirits who are also out there searching, just like you.

A friend once told me something I've never forgotten: his most cherished reading moments aren't on quiet afternoons on the sofa at home, but on the subway, in a cha chaan teng, on a roadside bench — because in those moments, reading makes him feel like he's not searching alone. The strangers around him, likewise buried in books or scrolling through their phones, form a silent but warm community.

So the next time you spot someone reading in a street-corner café, or catch a glimpse of a long article on a fellow passenger's phone screen on the bus — silently wish them well. Hope you find the bite you're looking for in those words.

After all, the streets are full of people searching for a living — and reading is the most faithful compass on that journey.

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