After touring the art collection of the hotel I was staying at, by the time I got the subway to the antique market, most of the stallholders were packing up.
Judgement regarding the stalls aside, I realized, not for the first time, that I have no desire to collect things.
I admire the collection of the hotel owner. He has great taste and great art, and also great wealth. Maybe if I had great wealth, or if I could achieve great wealth by collecting, I would be interested. For now I am content to collect experiences.
I wandered around the stall holders as they wrapped their treasures in paper and packed their packages in boxes and loaded their boxes on their bicycle trailers, resigned that the cold weather meant slow sales. Some, who falsely recognised me as a foreign mark, asked me to look and called me friend. I looked and tried to imagined how I would use their objects save displaying and dusting, but after I looked and walked on, it wasn’t friend they called me.
A woman offered to help me find what i was looking for. I wasn’t looking for anything I told her, but she had things to show me.
She had a warehouse full of special antiques and showed me a video on her phone panning around her collection. She used to have a shop at the market, but everything changed. Now all they sell is beads and walnuts.
This is what I needed to know from her. Why walnuts? Why were there hundreds of vendors with walnuts carefully packaged and displayed, and why were they brushing their walnuts?
It’s a game from Ching dynasty, she told me. The walnuts look like heads, or some like lions. And the colour, can be deep brown, very beautiful.
But how do you play the game?
You roll them around each other in your hand.
I had seen a man on the subway doing that, but thought they were a substitute for manufactured ones. Maybe he didn’t want to collect things either, I had thought then. But now I wondered, how big was his pile of walnuts at home?
What shapes were his most prized?
Sarah Bonnar 