Chen Ye, seventeen years old, lives in Huaishu Town, a small southern county. My father died from a work-related injury three years ago. His pension of 800 yuan was taken away by his uncle Chen Youfu and his family. My mother remarried to a neighboring province without him. He lived with his grandmother in an adobe house, and the roof was covered with linoleum paper, which leaked even when it rained.
He worked as a helper at the town's scrapyard, earning 80 cents a day and taking care of lunch. Lunch consisted of steamed buns with pickles, and the steamed buns were mixed with noodles, which hurt my throat. Everyone called him a "rag collector", and even the school guard stopped him from entering.
But he has poisonous eyes. You can tell which one is the Republic of China version of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" from the pile of rotten paper, you can smell the patina which piece is the incense burner leg from the Qianlong period, and you can pull out the full-page monkey ticket from a pile of old newspapers.
In the winter of 1982, my uncle came to ask for my grandma's last piece of homestead land, saying it was "borrowed" to build a pig pen. Chen Ye was pushed into the mud and his face was buried in chicken feces. He got up and dug out an iron box from the garbage pile in the backyard. Inside is a version of eighty monkey tickets from 1980, which his grandmother collected as waste paper.
This version of the monkey ticket was later worth a courtyard house.
From this day on, Chen Ye began to collect rags. Instead of standing around waiting for others to come to your door, you ride on a big pole and go from village to village, exchanging food stamps for old books and enamel jars for scrap copper. He knew which house had porcelain hidden in the "four old" piles, and which educated youth burned a rosewood box as firewood when he returned to the city.
Along the way, he went from being a junk collector, to being a dealer in used goods, to opening a scrap collection station, to being engaged in recycling resources. Someone stopped him at every step: the secretary of the brigade asked for his business license, the director of the supply and marketing cooperative pressed down on the purchase price, and the gangsters from the county town snatched his copper wire.
