It is 6: 30 am when I greeted Andy, who runs a grocery store in the neighbourhood where I stay. We had some chat about the persistent rains, and the funeral ritual that has lasted for a week in the neighbourhood. Before we went too deep into the extravagant ritual expenditure in the region, I picked up my breakfast: two steamed buns and a cup of soymilk from her and rush to meet people. I usually start my day with meeting people at a scheduled time or in a short notice. So I could only return to the morning chat with Andy till late night when I am back to where I stay. My field site is a county located at Southeast coast of China where three fourth of the land is mountainous area. The people I am meeting everyday are those who identify themselves as caogen gongyi ren (grassroots philanthropists). These gongyi ren are mostly born in 1960s to 1980s. While they strive hard to make their family’s own ends meet from business or workplaces, they spent a lot of effort and time to doing gongyi - searching, selecting and helping children whom they think urgently needy of help from the “society”. They each own a network or an organisation that has one or several teams of volunteers. I stay in an informant’s rented place in the county’s major town Jia He, where the majority of gongyi ren and volunteers reside. Yet, almost more than half of my time are spent on the ways to and in villages across the county where the children they meet up with reside. The gongyi ren I met up today at 7:10 am is Mr. Shen Hui, whose main source of income comes from a breakfast store run by his parents and his wife. The family got up at 3 am to make steamed buns, cook soymilk and other variety of local favourites to prepare for the morning sale starting at 5am. Today, I am going to follow Shen Hui in his regular one-day activity - conducting household visits to ten listed children in villages of Kai Ping, a region in the West of county, about twenty-five kilometres away from the county’s central town. It is the happy excuse for him to break out from his breakfast business. I am a volunteer driver today. Sitting in my car are three volunteers whom I have known from Shen Hui’s previous activities. Mr. Yu Chen, Shen Hui’s volunteering team leader, who has been working for a small factory owned by his deceased wife’s family. Mr. Zhang Ping, Shen Hui’s primary school classmate, who is staying in another city running his clothing business. And Mrs. Xue Jun, who has known Shen Hui through wechat groups and is a housewife. It could be easy driving today as we got two local guides to lead us finding the homes of the students on the list. When we get to Kai Ping, a local gongyi ren and a local official are already waiting on the sidewalk in their car. With their guidance, we managed to visit eight students’ homes in five dispersed villages in Kai Ping in the morning. When we are driving and walking in the villages, we passed by many lineage ancestral halls (See Image 1) and covered sites where Taoist ritual specialists were performing rituals. The two local guides left after lunch around 1 pm and left us searching for the rest two villages. We used GPS navigation as a guide. Yet, as it often happened, it led us a wrong way to the top of a mountain where there is no residence. We were then directed to enter a bordering county before circling across Kai Ping for over two hours. Along the way, we have also inquired many villagers. Yet, they either did not know about the villages or directed us to another wrong place. It was almost 4:00 pm and there seemed no hope of finding the two villages. So Shen decided to come on another day when the local guides have time to lead him. The trip ended earlier than we have planned. But it was common to change plans during the days as it was directed by my informants. On the way of driving them back to their homes, another gonyi ren Mr. Wu Shuo phoned to ask me joining him at his wife’s make-up salon. Once I arrived at the salon, he asked me to join his meeting with an official near the Education Bureau. So we went there together. During our short meeting, a restaurant manager phoned him to meet up to discuss about cooperation issues in doing gongyi. When we were back to the store, we stayed at for some gossip till 9pm when they finished work. Then we went for a late night dinner at a frequented sidewalk seafood stall together with his wife and two young ladies who are the salon frequents. After several rounds of toasting chilled beers, one of the young lady disclosed her depressed time with her boyfriend over the months. Around 12:30 pm when Wu Shuo called it a day, the depressed young lady invited me to join her in a luxurious bar after the dinner. The bar’s rock music sounded deafening and she had consumed over twenty cans of beers till she got a bit drunk around 2:30 am. I offered to drive her home. This was a typical day in my field with varied length and content. While many grassroots gongyiren need to travel a lot across the villages in the county, they do not have a car and often ask volunteers to provide a ride. This happens to be a great advantage for my fieldwork. Like the day I described above, I usually offered to drive my informants to various places in town and to villages where they meet up with other people to discuss various business relating to their projects. It is common for me to drive up to four hundred kilometres a day across the whole county visiting the listed children in dispersed villages. In those half hour to seven hours of riding time a day inside my car, I got the chance to chat with them about their professional, gongyi and their family lives. The peculiar aspect about doing fieldwork starting from a central town is the uncontrollable rhythm of a day in my field. The day could stretch quite long from 6 am till 4am the next day if I happen to meet two or three groups of people at different times of the day who have different living rhythms. After getting more familiar with my key informants, it is common for me to find myself ending my day unexpectedly in a short notice in a KTV, a nightclub, a late night dinner seafood stall or a bar where it serves as the main entertainment and social space for the locals. Sometimes, if it is in a village setting, the social gathering in a KTV could start as early as noon time in a day and last till midnight. In these occasions, when they are consuming music, beers or food, they tend to take me as “one of us”. Sometimes, the day could start quite late and end quite early when people are busy with their own business. Then, I may enjoy a large sum of controllable time having more chats with Andy about the ritual expenditures, lineage and marriage exchanges, learn some local dialects from a retired teacher, take some rest, make some plans and write my field-notes.Jiazhi Fengjiang is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at LSE. She is currently conducting fieldwork in Southern China, with a focus on lineage and grassroots philanthropy.