"Absent for three days and you should view each other with new eyes."
Jiang He, quite pleased with herself, separated a portion of the dried sweet potatoes. For this task, she even purchased a small scale—not an electronic one, but the kind with a balance beam and weights.
She often weighed the groceries she bought, just to check if the seller had cheated her with short weights.
The marketplace was a jumble of fish and dragons, where anything could happen. Without staying on guard, although it wouldn't do much good to complain after finding a shortage upon returning home, she simply wouldn't patronize that shop again. By doing this, she also figured out which stall owners were honest and which ones weren't.
Now that she was a shop owner herself, of course she couldn't be dishonest. Jiang He carefully weighed out a pound, then added just a little more, packed it in a bag, and followed Xu Qing to mail it, where she paid for postage exactly—neither losing nor gaining.
