On the evening of December 31, 2011 in Shanghai, a scavenger returned home happily with a full load and greeted the arrival of the New Year 2012 wearing a giant panda cartoon hat. (CFP Photo - File Image)
No one could tell what had changed about Huang Yibiao, a senior student at the China Youth University for Political Sciences. His roommates and classmates who were familiar with him found it strange that he should have at least become darker.
For 30 days in a suburban area of Guiyang City where most houses were built on mountain slopes, Huang Yibiao ate and slept with dozens of scavengers who lived there permanently: collecting waste during the day and playing mahjong and drinking alcohol at night. In the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep, he pretended to write a diary and secretly recorded everything, eventually forming a nearly 20,000-word investigation report on the living conditions of urban scavengers.
The survey conducted last summer won first prize at the 12th "Challenge Cup" National Contest. As the first author, Huang Yibiao received the "President's Special Award", which was awarded to undergraduates for the first time at his school. He expressed his gratitude to this group of scavengers in Mandarin Chinese with a Guizhou accent.
In the eyes of most people, scavenging is synonymous with "dirty, messy and poor." When Huang Yibiao was young, his parents told him that if he didn't study hard, he would end up collecting garbage in the future. However, he had no concept of what this group was like. After hearing his teacher talk about the group of bathhouse workers in class, he and his teammate Zheng Zehao became curious and thought of Huang Yibiao's third brother far away in his hometown and his group of friends.
When the vacation came, instead of going to a state-owned enterprise for an internship, Huang Yibiao went back to his hometown to find these people.
Huang Yibiao arrived at the scavengers' gathering place adjacent to the garbage.
When he knocked on his third brother's door, he found the house in disarray with piles of unprocessed waste in one corner. Every time it rained heavily, pots, bowls, basins and pans had to be placed all over the house to catch water. Huang Yibiao knew that sitting by the table for a deep interview was out of the question. Hearing his third brother's laughing and jocular tone, using foul language while talking to neighbors, he immediately realized that if he continued to play the role of a bookworm, he would certainly be an oddity, "not only would deep interviews be impossible, even communication might have barriers."
His third brother introduced him to the neighbor across the street as his cousin who was interning nearby. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, the neighbors went about their business and there was no further contact between them.
It wasn't until dusk that Huang Yibiao got the chance to communicate. After dinner, this group dressed no differently from migrant workers began the most relaxing part of their day, with the sound of mahjong tiles and drinking games, "no less than the nightly songs in urban KTVs."
"Little Huang, come and have a drink with us," one of the older scavengers called him over to chat after hearing he was a college student. "An opportunity has arisen," but such conversations were always accompanied by stories unrelated to their own circumstances about winning or losing at the table. The carefully prepared interview outline in his mind had to be broken up and questions inserted wherever possible.
After drinking four or five glasses of white wine, Huang Yibiao's head was spinning, but he still found it difficult to ask questions about economic status or children's education, "We're not close enough yet." Huang Yibiao decided to join their most exciting entertainment project - playing mahjong - in order to get closer to each other.
In this gathering place, mahjong was indeed loved by all. His third brother had an automatic mahjong machine, which served as a "tearoom" where a few close scavengers came to play cards, and he took a small cut from the table. The rent plus utilities here cost 300 yuan per month, and the family of four usually rented a two-bedroom apartment, with the outer room serving as both a tearoom and dining area.
Although it was considered entertainment, the stakes were not small, with at least 300-400 yuan, sometimes 700-800 yuan, even up to a thousand yuan being lost or won in a single night. Over the past two years, his third brother and the neighbor across the street, Ba Qiang, had lost tens of thousands of yuan on this.
Though they often saw each other around, at the gambling table, they were "clear on accounts." Huang Yibiao frequently saw arguments break out among them over things that happened at the table. Since he didn't have much money, his strategy was to lose when he could, making others happy, but not to lose too much himself, at least trying to get his money back.
Gradually, Huang Yibiao became familiar with everyone, chatting warmly during mahjong games, and just a couple of cigarettes could start a conversation. When relations were good, if his third brother went out, Huang Yibiao would simply eat together with his card friends without needing to say polite words.
A Day in the Life of a Scavenger
The life of scavengers is not regular, staying up until two o'clock in the morning playing mahjong is common. Some scavengers don't go out until ten in the morning, while others, feeling too tired, go out in the afternoon. However, the most important business of the day is still in the morning, when their "regular customers" sell them "valuable" waste.
In fact, not all scavengers are "waste collectors." According to industry lingo, "digging is worse than picking, picking is worse than transporting, transporting is worse than exchanging, and exchanging is worse than collecting." Street scavengers are at the bottom, collecting the most miscellaneous items and earning the least; those who go door-to-door collecting waste are next; and waste station bosses have the highest status and income. The group investigated by Huang Yibiao was "transporters," but when their acquisition business was not doing well, they occasionally also picked things up themselves.
His third brother got up at seven in the morning. Due to poor health, after eating breakfast, it was already nine o'clock. His third sister-in-law pushed a tricycle out first, while his third brother carried a basket containing a few Maotai bottles and clothing packaging boxes as samples for acquisition; six or seven plastic bags used to carry goods; a scale; and an advertisement board with the items to be recycled and his third brother's phone number written on it. With everything ready, Huang Yibiao followed him out.
There were many vehicles passing by on the road, and it was easy to be brushed by trucks, which made Huang Yibiao feel that scavenging was a high-risk occupation. Along the way, scavengers generally shouted, "Collecting old appliances! Buy Maotai bottles!" He noticed that women shouted more frequently, while men, due to face-saving, shouted less.
Around ten o'clock, his third sister-in-law called, saying a hotel had some goods to sell, and it was one of his third brother's "regular customers."
After arriving at the hotel's back door, his third brother and sister-in-law went inside to sort through the hotel's clutter, while Huang Yibiao stayed outside to watch their equipment. At this time, a new customer approached to inquire, so he called his third brother out to negotiate the deal together. The new customer was a middle-aged man around forty years old, offering some cardboard and tin cans.
After checking the goods, his third brother asked how much the new customer wanted, who quoted seventy yuan. His third brother countered with forty yuan, saying, "These cardboard pieces don't make money, and there isn't much tin."
The new customer asked for a bit more, but his third brother only increased his offer by five yuan to forty-five yuan. The new customer hesitated, not wanting to lower the price, so his third brother turned to leave. The new customer then asked if he could add a bit more, but his third brother said no. Reluctantly, the new customer settled for fifty yuan, and his third brother accepted the goods. On the way back, his third brother told Huang Yibiao that reselling this batch of goods to the recycling station would earn them at least thirty more yuan.
After the transaction, scavengers would hand out business cards to the seller. If it was a new seller, they would give out more cards to prevent them from losing them, thus cultivating regular customers.
After tying up the goods, Huang Yibiao pushed his third brother's self-made tricycle to load the goods. This kind of vehicle was very common among scavengers: in front was a pole for pulling; behind was a triangular shape with a wooden board laid on top, and each side had a wheel underneath. A full basket plus this cart of goods was the spoils of the entire morning, and the afternoon was the selling phase.
They generally sold the goods to recycling stations, but for valuable items like appliances, sometimes they bought them and immediately resold them to others who needed them; sometimes they transported the goods back home, repaired them if necessary, dismantled them if needed, and then sold them in bulk after accumulating them for a period of time.
That day, his third brother earned over a hundred yuan, "which was considered little." In their trade, who earned more or less depended not on who got up early or worked harder, but on what type of goods they collected. His third brother told Huang Yibiao that Maotai bottles worth a few yuan each could fetch dozens of yuan on the black market; a washing machine bought for two or three hundred yuan could potentially be resold for five or six hundred yuan.
Huang Yibiao discovered that these scavengers earned an average of forty to fifty yuan a day, and in good years, they could make fifty to sixty thousand yuan. This did not align with his previous assumption: scavengers earned little and struggled to make ends meet.
People engaged in this kind of scavenging were typically in their thirties or forties, mainly farmers from counties around Liupanshui and Anshun. Most had a few years of working experience outside, had some idle funds, and possessed a certain level of education and business acumen, "all valuing the high income of this trade."
No threshold, "and you can be your own boss." Xiao Ping, aged twenty-five, had just arrived. With fewer "regular customers" and unable to find business, he also worked on nearby construction sites, doing odd jobs to earn more money to send home.
During one conversation, Peace Brother, aged thirty, told Huang Yibiao about his past experiences: starting to work outside at seventeen, having been a restaurant dishwasher and construction site laborer but never making any money, later earning some money in a construction team digging tunnels, but finding it too dangerous. Introduced by a friend, nineteen-year-old Peace Brother came to Guiyang to start scavenging and has been doing it for eleven years.
Though young, Peace Brother was already the most "senior" figure here, with the most "regular customers" and the highest earnings, having already built a ten-thousand-yuan house in his hometown.
"Urban scavenging has become a career for some migrant workers after transitioning." These people told Huang Yibiao that the best "job" for migrant workers who have children is scavenging.
Huang Yibiao surveyed fifty scavengers in this area, with an average age of around thirty-six. Among them, twenty-nine were male, twenty-one were female, forty-five were married, and twenty-one had their spouses with them. Eighty percent of the married ones had children, with most couples bringing their children along; the children were mostly around seven or eight years old, attending second or third grade in elementary school.
Sister Liu Yang, in her early forties, told Huang Yibiao, "When the kids grow up, it's better to keep them close to us, so we can look after them and manage them." During the day, Sister Liu Yang went out to do business while the child attended school in the nearby suburban area, "Even though the teachers aren't great, at least they can attend school."
Huang Yibiao gradually discovered that although most of these people only had primary school education, they were serious about their children's education issues, especially those who had been in the scavenging business for a long time and had relatively more exposure. Peace Brother told him, "I didn't read much, but I hope my child reads more, goes to university, brings glory to our family, and will have a better life in the future."
However, a concern was that this group occasionally faced discrimination, and Sister Liu Yang was even worried that her child might be bullied by classmates.
Once, a city management officer saw Sister Liu Yang picking up waste paper boxes and scolded her for disrupting urban order. She didn't dare to lift her head, and her nearly seven-year-old son standing beside her said, "Mom, I will study hard and make sure no one bullies you again."
"Some receptionists at hotel entrances look down on us because we don't dress well. We tell them that their salary is nothing compared to ours, which can reach over a thousand yuan in a day, and they don't believe us!" Sister Liu Yang said indignantly.