One morning, I woke up to the sound of Ayi's voice, unusually loud outside the courtyard. Quickly getting up and hurrying out, I saw her standing at the gate angrily waving one arm; a stream of curses flew from her mouth. A dead chicken that had been dumped near her gate the night before that had sparked her anger. This anonymous “polluting” act immediately enraged Ayi. She was furious, and her fury could be heard in the whole neighborhood. Other neighbors seemed to have chosen to stay inside to avoid Ayi's sharp tongue; only Lihua and Shaoli were standing nearby. About ten minutes later, Ayi took a spade out to pick up the chicken. She carried it to the main north-south road and threw the dead chicken into the roadside ditch. On the face of it, this was nothing more than another polluting act, but, as it turned out, “pollution” in the form of more trash in a public area was not her main concern at that moment. In fact, Ayi was angry about this quede (immoral) behavior because she feared her own chickens might be infected by the diseases that might have killed the dead bird. She later admitted that she could have buried the chicken instead of throwing it in the ditch, but Ayi justified herself, “at least on that part of the main road there were not any households nearby.” She was, in a sense, acting according to the principles of hygiene mentioned in the previous chapter; she established a distance between village bodies (those of humans and healthy chickens) and a polluting substance. In such events, pollution is re-defined in local terms.

As illustrated in the previous chapter, in practice, the privatization of cleanliness and the recent trash problem in public areas, with its relationship to the idea of the “dirty” peasant, is complex. On the other hand, the prevailing public media narratives of “modernization indoors, disorder outdoors”, used to describe environmental problems in rural areas, has likewise stirred up criticism among urban intellectuals of “Chinese peasants” as being selfish, and lacking a sense of the collective (quefa jiti yishi).