I have a long, coal-filled rectangular grill built from of scrap metal and I roast goat meat, chicken wings and liver on sticks, called chuan.

The last few days have been slow. The goat meat sells best when the weather's not too hot and not too cold. Now, it's the middle of summer. People won't buy chuan, they're afraid it'll heat up their blood.

I sleep only a few hours everyday. My wife and I stay out here grilling meat and hoping for customers until two in the morning. Then we clear up everything and go back home. It's almost three then. I can sleep until after six. Then I get up and go to the market to buy meat. I take it home and we skewer it.

That's the part I hate the most. The meat slips through my fingers. The pointed ends of the sticks slide off the sides of the meat, never piercing it like you want them to.

My wife and I prepare maybe 1000 chuanr. At two we come out here and roast meat again until two in the morning. My wife helps me, but it's tiring. I'm getting too old and my memory is going bad. I'm over 40 now. Sometimes I get an order and I grill all the meat, and then I look down at the chuan. I can't even remember why I put them there.

I used to farm back in Henan. That's real far away from here. I started after I got married. I was 21. Until then I was a kid, just like my children. They live in Henan, but they're off for the summer now. Next week they can come up to Beijing and see me and their mother.

Back on the farm we grew rice, wheat, peanuts, lots of different things, but we didn't make money. You could grow a whole field and sell it all, and still not make any money. There was barely enough for my wife and I to buy clothes and eat.

I have two kids that have to go to school and school costs money. In China you can have two children if you want, but you have pay a lot of extra fees for the second child. I have a son and a daughter. My daughter just graduated middle school. We had to pay thousands of yuan in fees for her. But it was worth it. You see them now and they've grown so tall...

There was no way to make enough money back in Henan. My wife came up to Beijing first, in 2001. She got a job at a hotel. I found a job doing construction, building all these buildings you see around us. In the summer the sun beat down on you, the air was stifling and heavy, there was almost no water, but you could never stop. In the winter the snow might be over 10 centimeters thick. My hands didn't work so well in the cold, but there was nothing I could do.

The end of the year came around. We were supposed to get paid before Chinese New Year. Our boss said the company hadn't made any money. They had to cut our pay. For one year they were supposed to give me 8000 yuan. He gave me 5000. He was a bad person. I couldn't do that anymore.

I saw people on the street roasting chuan. I bought all the stuff for roasting meat at a market. The first time I grilled chuan it was terrible. I burned all the meat till it was black. It took me a year of cooking outside to get good at it. There were almost no customers that first year. I was down there at the end of the street, near the river. I didn't make any money. But I kept at it. I wasn't worried. I knew I'd get good. My wife stopped working at the hotel and came out to help me. Two winters ago I moved up here, to the head of the street. There are lots of customers here.

Last year the city police came almost everyday and all the vendors had to grab their stuff and run. We don't have permits to be selling things. My wife and I had to hide the cooler with our meat in it because we couldn't carry it when we ran. They found the cooler once and took it. That cost us more than a hundred yuan, a couple days work.

There was a Xinjiang family who roasted chuan down the street. They gave up and went back to Xinjiang. My wife and I never thought about giving up. What would we do if we gave up? How would our kids go to school?

Our son just took the university entrance exam. He got a 510. To get into a good school he needs a grade in the 700s. He needs at least a 550 to go to an okay school. He's smart, he's always near the top of his class, but he didn't perform when the pressure was high. He's going to go back to high school for another year. I don't know how he'll do. Maybe he'll do better. I don't know. He's always depended on himself. He needs to get stronger.

But if he gets into university, I think I can pay for him now. Because I'm busy I make 10 or 20,000 yuan a year. University costs 10,000. We can survive on what's left over. He just needs to get in.

I don't know if I'll do this forever. Maybe one day I can do something a little more relaxed. I don't know what. I haven't really thought about that yet. I'll just keep doing this for the time being. I'm tired, but maybe my kids can go to school. And they're coming up next week to see us.

Yu Yunhua told his story to sweeble correspondent Michael Armstrong, in Beijing.