人棄我取
rén qì wǒ qǔ
“people abandon I take”
This was originally about buying grain when it is at a low price (the “people abandon” bit is about the grain not being in demand / sales stagnating), and selling it when the demand goes up.
(baidu.com says it first emerged in 西漢·司馬遷《史記·貨殖列傳》/ Biographies of Merchants, in the Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian, Han dynasty.)
It is now used for referring to not competing with people (for something), happy to take whatever people don’t want.
This reminds me of Freddie, the Administrative Assistant at Conoco Taiwan, a native of Hunan. He had been in the air force of the Republic of China, fighting alongside the Americans in Vietnam against the communists.
One day, he told me, an American came along with a whole box of watches for handing out for free. One of the watches fell out of the box in the jostle, so nobody wanted it. Freddie thought, “It’s free anyway, so I’ll take it.” He said, when he told me the story in 1975, quite a few years later: “Those who’d got one of those watches said theirs had given up the ghost. Mine’s still working — perfectly.”
In this day and age, this saying could be applied to recycling: picking up things other people throw away and re-using them. Very green.
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