A Henan Grandma's Stools, Sewn From Building Scrap, Have Sold as Far as the US

Wang Shuqin is in her seventies and cannot read. For more than a decade she ran a scrap-collection station in a community in Zhongmu, on the edge of Zhengzhou, and from the construction waste and packaging foam that came through it she began sewing squat little stools — dun-dun (墩墩) — sturdy enough that her elderly neighbours carry them along on walks and sit down wherever they stop.

The stools have outgrown the neighbourhood. They have sold in Tianjin, Guangzhou and Shanghai, been exhibited in Shanghai, and — most improbably — been ordered from the United States, as Henan's Dahe Daily reported this week. The story also climbed Baidu's trending board.

At home, a sewing machine that is itself more than forty years old clatters away under her feet. She jokes that she has known nothing but handiwork her whole life — the handiwork that, as she tells it, raised her children and held the family up. The stools are stitched from salvaged boards, foam and coarse cloth, one seam at a time.

Recently she started a short-video account, “Traditional Old Craftswoman Shuqin” (传统老手艺人淑琴), run day to day by her daughter because she cannot read or type. Videos of her making dun-dun have passed half a million views, and she says she hopes to sell them further afield — and, in her own words, to make friends and build connections (想和更多人交朋友，产生连接). The account, as Henan Net's report put it, carries her name on stools that were once just a way of dealing with other people's rubbish.

The story is being folded into a running joke about the province — that “Henan is one giant Pang Donglai,” a reference to the supermarket chain celebrated nationwide for obsessive customer service, now shorthand for Henan's bid to build its reputation on ordinary decency rather than slogans. A scrap collector's stools selling to America slots neatly into that narrative: it is the province's people, not its tourism board, doing the impressing.

The account that could not spell its owner's name now does her exporting — with her daughter's typing and a forty-year-old sewing machine that shows no sign of stopping.