Chen Ye is seventeen, living in Huai Shu Town, a small county town in the south. His father died in a workplace accident three years ago, and his uncle Chen Youfu’s family pocketed the 800 yuan in compensation. His mother remarried in a neighboring province and left him behind. He lives with his grandmother in a mud-brick house with a roof of tar paper that leaks whether it rains or not.
He works at the town’s junkyard, earning eighty fen a day and one lunch. Lunch is steamed bread with pickled vegetables; the bread is made from coarse flour and scratches his throat. Everyone calls him “the junk collector.” Even the school gatekeeper stops him from going inside.
But he has a keen eye. He can spot a Republican-era edition of Romance of the Three Kingdoms in a pile of waste paper, identify a Qianlong-era incense burner leg by the smell of its patina, and pick out the newspaper hiding a full sheet of Monkey stamps from a stack of old papers.
In the winter of 1982, his uncle shows up with a group of men and demands his grandmother’s last plot of homestead land, supposedly to “borrow” it for a pigsty. Chen Ye is pinned to the muddy ground, his face shoved into chicken droppings. He gets back up and digs a tin box out of the rubbish heap behind the house. Inside is a sheet of 1980 Monkey stamps, eighty stamps in all, which his grandmother had once collected as waste paper.
That sheet of Monkey stamps would later be worth an entire courtyard house.
From that day on, Chen Ye starts collecting scrap. He doesn’t sit around waiting for people to come to him. He rides his old bicycle from village to village, trading grain coupons for old books and enamel mugs for scrap copper. He knows which piles from the “Destroy the Four Olds” campaign hide porcelain, and which returning sent-down youth burned a rosewood chest for firewood.
He goes from scrap collector to secondhand dealer, then opens a scrap-collection depot and moves into recycling. At every step, someone tries to stop him: the village secretary blocks his business license, the supply-and-marketing cooperative director pushes down his purchase prices, and local thugs in the county town steal his copper wire.
