After the glorious parade to Tonglu, everything in Shang Village seemed to return to normal. With the Spring Festival season fading away, younger villagers began to leave for their work in the cities, while the elders who stayed behind returned to complaining about the poplar-planting project due to the advent of spring. With the commencement of the new school term, Li Shu was again greeted by friends every morning as he swept his front yard, when the grandparents resumed escorting their grandchildren past his house to the village kindergarten and elementary school.

Changes were underway, as always. In my visit to Shang village in 2010, I found that Ayi had rented out her land and left Shang Village for Beijing, to take care of her eldest daughter's twin babies. Villagers told me that after Lihua got married, Ayi had no one to care for at home. Her children persuaded her to leave her small piece of land behind, because it required too much labour and generated too little income. No one in the village had any idea when she might return. As for Li Shu, his son, Hui, had moved to the Zhaozhou county town; both he and his wife found sub-contracting jobs in the Number Three County Hospital, leaving the old couple in their village clinic to take care of their home, business, and land, mostly by themselves. The reason for their move, Li Shu told me, was mainly to achieve a better (urban) education for his two grandsons, then both in elementary school.

As for the Culture Plaza, Zhishu told me he had been responsible for re-designing the pavilions standing on the four corners of the plaza. He decided to install a round instead of a quadrangular roof, as had originally been called for in the plan. He was proud of designing the whole plaza on his own. He reminded me of a trip I took with him and others to the county seat back in 2006, which was still vivid in my mind. We had gone to learn about what city parks look like, as preparation for building Wenhua Guangchang, the Culture Plaza. The trip was not very informative in the end, and Zhishu was left to imagine the urban style his “plaza” could achieve.