“What flavour would you like?” enquired Ms Zhang.  

“What flavours do you have,” I asked.  I stood open-mouthed as she reeled off an impressive list of exotic flavours – so exotic that I had no idea what half of them were.  Of the ones I did have some idea about, the Hami melon flavour was the most enticing.

“Are the Hami melons from Xinjiang,” I asked. “I guess so,” she said, “Where else would they be from?”  Her brusque riposte was exactly what I deserved (serves me right for trying to show off that I actually knew that Hami is a town in Xinjiang).

She handed me the Hami ice cream cornet. “What do you think?” she asked. I wanted to say it was good, but with a mouthful of ice cream I had to make do with nodding enthusiastically. 

I must confess that the reason I had gone in to the “Aike Gelato Italiano” (literally: Love Customers Italian Ice Cream) shop was to find out about the post-it notes on the wall.  As I had been walking by, the sight of hundreds of brightly coloured post-its had stopped me in my tracks.  “Who had put them there, and what did they say?” I wondered. The three yuan I had just paid for the ice cream had also bought me the opportunity to find out the answers to these questions.

Ms Zhang told me that most of her customers were from the high school opposite, and that she encourages them to decorate her walls with post-it note graffiti (she supplies the post-its, in several different colours). "What do they write about,” I asked.  She looked at me as if to say what a silly question, but answered it nevertheless.  The messages that her 15, 16, 17 and 18 year-old customers had pinned up mostly fall in to two categories.  Love notes, it seemed, were the most popular leave-behinds (for the girls).  While "fighting talk" was the boys' preferred subject.  “I guess teenagers are the same the world over,” I joked.

“Why did you decide to open an ice cream shop,” I asked. “I live nearby and was looking to open a shop in this area after the one I had before (a clothes boutique) was demolished.” I knew what she meant without asking.  Chengdu, along with all the other Chinese cities, is busy knocking down old neighbourhoods and replacing them with shiny new apartment and office blocks, shopping centres, and arcades.  Ms Zhang’s clothes shop was one of many thousands of houses and businesses that had been sledge-hammered to the ground (cheaper than bulldozers) in the name of modernisation and economic development.  But, rather than feeling sorry for herself and thinking about how good things used to be, she (and countless others) had bounced back and had gone on to better things.