Popcorn in China

To know me is to know I love popcorn.
The first 6 years of my working life I worked in a movie theater and there are only two kinds of people that work at a movie theater; those who hate popcorn and those that love it. You can probably guess which category I fall under.
My favorite popcorn is nice and salty smothered with butter (the real stuff–but I’ll take the movie theater goo if that’s the only thing available).
But I also like kettle corn, the crispy sugary and sweet treat you get at fairs. You can now buy a bag of it at the supermarket, but a few years back I waited in line, by myself, for almost 2 hours to get some kettle corn at the Keene Pumpkin Festival. That’s how much I love it.
So imagine my happy surprise to learn that in China, popcorn is a popular treat. And not just regular popcorn, but kettle corn! It’s not cooked in a giant kettle stirred with a wooden paddle like it is back home. Instead, it is sold by middle aged ladies on the back of rusty old motorized bicycle cart. (You might think that sounds sketchy, but plenty of things are sold from the back of a rusty motorized cart here.)
They have a small metal popper, and some heat source underneath, and each popper makes about one bags worth of popcorn. I haven’t seen what they actually pour into the popper, some sort of sugar oil I assume, but they do stir the popcorn in the container with a metal stirrer as it begins to pop. They make 2-3 bags worth and then don’t pop anymore until they have sold them so you know the bag is nice and fresh.
It seems salty popcorn is just an unknown thing here. I told my students that Westerners eat salty popcorn and they just looked at me confused. “Salty popcorn? Could there be such a thing?”