Resigned, but hopeful

It was a cold morning. The gray sky and smog that had engulfed the city for days made me feel that it wasn't a good start to the day. It wasn't. When I arrived at Dongxiaokou village, I realized that the garbage collection center I had seen on the Internet no longer existed. Even though plastic and construction waste had been left in the yard, a wooden sign on the gate proclaimed that the building had been converted into a ceramics factory.

I made several phone calls to numbers I had noted from the Web, but no one answered. So I strolled around the village, trying to locate a recycling center that had yet to be torn down. If not for local ads posted on the wall, I wouldn't have believed I was still in Beijing, even though tall buildings surrounded the small village with its dirty, narrow streets.

Few people care about conditions here because they feel that the village could disappear at anytime. When I heard people talking in dialects spoken in China's less-developed rural regions, I felt like a stranger, an uninvited intruder.