What Xue Deyu remembers most clearly about the time before economic reforms was falling ill every Lunar New Year from waiting outside in the cold to buy a coveted fish for the holiday table.
The neighbourhood committee, which then controlled many facets of daily life in their Shanghai alley, would distribute special food coupons for the holiday but people still had to queue and pay for the purchases. Hopeful customers would place objects like a brick, a basket or a cup on the ground to hold their places in the queue the night before the local food market even opened.
'When the selling started, suddenly everyone appeared. It was a sea of people. You had to argue or fight with everyone,' she recalled.
Ms Xue, 64, still occasionally pulls a small cart to a vegetable market, but she often takes a free shuttle bus to a nearby hypermarket in which a foreign company has invested.
'Even if you had money then, you couldn't buy things. [Now] economic life is much better. It's only recently that there have been some good years,' she said.
In 1978, she earned 40 yuan a month and her husband 43 yuan as employees of state-owned pharmaceutical companies.
