Money Brand
The availability of counterfeit products and identity through monograms replaces the community identity that was once a source of happiness for its people. A people who are now too quick to reassociate themselves with the symbols of value and disassociate with their previous social identity.
Over the past six years, Pi County has become highly commercialized into an industrial and estate development center, mostly during the upward trend of economic growth. As I introduced in my example, my friend and I successfully requested an appointment to meet a local leather goods maker whose workshop is in Pi County. Xiao Luo, who is the lead tailor of this workshop, hosted my visit and shared with me how he moved from village to the Pi county to open his business.
He told of how in two years, many new factories were being built in rural areas quite fast, replacing the rural homeland and coming out of the ground like crop, and how in two years, most small villages have become small towns. Their farmland disappears replaced by real estate development they cannot afford. People in Pi County no longer wait for the beans to grow, to mature, to be fermented, and hence they lose the identity in the process of making, the identity that I attribute to their happiness. Business is replacing the calm of this rural area and the new houses and cars represent the changing perception of quantity of money to provide their happiness.