The Jiaozi Maker

Somewhere in a vast Chinese city, there lies a thin street, steep and narrow, lined with restaurants and grocers and junk shops and bicycles. In the summer storms, the street floods with a rapid stream that carries noodle packets, soda cans and melon rinds like tiny boats, and shoos away stray cats and dogs, and sprays dirty water onto cyclists backs. It washes people like flotsam into the restaurants, where they dry their feet on grubby cardboard, hang umbrellas on hooks and are ushered onto tables, menus pressed into their hands.

Old Mrs Yang sits on a stool at the back of her restaurant, watching the rain tumble in heavy silver cords. A single room with four tables and seventeen chairs, white walls decorated with fading red paper cuts, delicate as lace, wilting and peeling at the edges. The shop window empty. There is no menu, no open-closed sign. Only condensation gleaming as the light dies, as the rain bleeds colour from the sky. And a sign above the door whose symbols read "Jiao zi". Dumplings. Nothing more.

Old Mrs Yang sits on her stool all day, making Chinese dumplings. Watching people pass and watching the rain fall.

Each morning she mixes minced pork, garlic, spring onions and spices in a large bowl. Then she rolls out the dough, first into long cylinders, which she slices, then rolls into flat circles. Once this is done, she spends her day folding dumplings, wizened hands covered in soft flour, repeating her deft movements over and over. Firm and delicate, all at once. Placing a round of dough onto her palm, a ball of stuffing, exactly the right size, at its centre. Folding it into a crescent, then pressing the edges into folds, three on each side. Before her on the table lie hundreds of dumplings, little half moons with crimped edges, bone-white dough dusted with chalk-white flour. And when the rain washes up its driftwood customers, sodden and hungry, she nods at them to sit and drops the dumplings into the pot of boiling water to cook.

The dumplings dance and bob, their delicious smell rising as steam to warm the cold noses of her famished guests. When they're ready, Old Mrs Yang scoops them out with a big holey metal spoon, places them on a plate and hobbles over to the table to serve them. They come with a bowl of soy sauce, chilli oil, minced garlic and a myriad of spices, and a cup of green tea. (If you ask her for a beer, she'll wander out to the shop across the street for you, even in the rain.) The dumplings are hot and delicious and always perfect. Always twelve of them. Always fresh and steaming hot.

If you ask Mrs Yang how many dumplings she makes in a day, she'll laugh and say, more than you could make in a week. How many has she made in her lifetime? How long has the she sat there, on her little wooden stool, looking out at people and rain? Folding little moons between her wise fingers like some deity, sculpting the sky.

As though she'd been there forever. As though she'd be there always.