A young boy peers from a basket perched on his mother's back. As debris rains down from five stories up, I dart into a disintegrating stairwell and pick my way to the roof of an old building, or at least what is left of it. Two dozen men and women are hard at it, reducing the old apartment house to its component parts. Men in plastic sandals straddle brick walls, swinging sledge hammers between their own legs in great arcs, breaking apart the very walls they stand on. Rather than chucking it all in the nearest landfill, workers clean the bricks of their old mortar, string 100 pounds worth from bamboo poles, and scramble down five flights of rubble-strewn stairs to the street.
Human labor is cheap in China.
Bricks are not, so everything that can be re-used most assuredly will be. Demolition workers carry loads of bricks to be recycled from the remains of an old apartment building in downtown Chongqing. Two floors down, as dust drifts down from the ceiling, rice cookers steam under a bare light bulb dangling from a pirate extension cord. This will serve as the work crew's kitchen and home until it too falls to the hammers. I often feel drawn back to the Yangtze's muddy shore in my last days in Chongqing.