I immediately noticed a certain state of hygiene on arrival in Zhaozhou, the county seat. Trash heaps, complete with odours, were everywhere, occasionally right next to the streetside tables of storefront restaurants. Polluted streams flow through the town – this was obvious from the greenish color of the putrid water. On the streets of the county seat everyone spits indiscriminately. Zhaozhou's new urban character did not include a scrubbed or disciplined urban facade. Despite what seemed to me the relatively chaotic nature of their own semi-urban environment, the people I met in the county seat were amazed by my plan to live in a rural village for nine months; though most of them had grown up in farming villages, they claimed that they could “no longer stand” the dirt in such places. My friend Luo asked, “Do you know they keep cows in the living areas at night? You’ll literally sleep with a cow!” Rong, another friend, said, “When it rains, your boots get so heavy walking on the country roads from all the mud stuck on the bottom, you can't move a single step!” I was puzzled by these remarks. When I walked through the back alleys of the county seat where these friends lived, the trash heaps on the street and the dilapidated bungalows looked quite “country” to my eyes, and quite muddy enough. How much worse could it be in a “real” village?

The observations in this chapter stem from my own adjustments to unfamiliar living conditions both in Shang village and its county seat, and from my experiences coming to terms with situated perceptions of hygiene. My own adjustment process productively directed my attention to down-to-earth bodily concerns and everyday details involved in eating, dressing, talking, and manual labor. Here, I take Bourdieu's notion of habitus as a site where bodily dispositions and everyday practices interplay. In this chapter, I aim to depict the contours of everyday life in Shang village: people's lived relationships with space (house, land, market, public space), and their practical understandings of hygiene.