Junk Business

The internet connection in my place is getting worse... usually it got disconnected every 20 mins to 1hr, this month no connection for the whole day seemed to be normal, until i turned off the power on wireless box and restarted again. I, therefore, have been having trouble updating this blog frequently.

So these weeks before chinese new year are cleaning weeks, that people are allowed to throw away huge trash like furnitures or household appliances at some street corners for recycle collection. For our apartment complex the collecting schedules are tonight and tomorrow night. Since i'm moving out soon i've got some big stuff to be thrown away and so i got home early for this matter.

When i got home around 9pm, i saw a lot of people gathering in our alley working on some furnitures aside the car lane. I didn't know what they were doing until i saw their recycle trolley. I was very surprised that people didn't follow the official time (10pm to 6am) to take out the trash, also that those recycle people have been waiting there snatching those "valuable junks" at this freezing cold night!

I've never seen things like this before. At my grandma's place where we grew up from, there's only one recycle "beibei" ("uncle" in chinese) and for whatever recyclable stuff we intended to throw away, my grandma would ask us to leave to that beibei. I know there're some other guys or ladies in that area but seems everyone has his/her territory. Also those recycle beibei or ladies normally are old like over 60's, and don't have skills so have to collect junks then sell for living. However, what i saw tonight was like 7-8 of middle aged guys or ladies, looking for the most valuable parts of junks (they don't take the whole thing but only "valuable parts"!), rushing to grab those from people's hands and put into their trolley, then starring at the next potential "customers". They reminded me the last scene of the movie "perfume".

Before this kind of work was normally done by the poor, retired people, old veterans... those from bottom social class, now it seems a lot of younger stronger smarter people joining in to divvy the resource. They look more aggressive, snobbish, materialistic, and less friendly, which makes me uncomfortable and unwilling to give them any "business". In front of them i'm no longer a person with mercy, instead, i'm like a yummy lamb to them.

Tonight when i took the box of junks downstairs, one guy came up to ask me what's inside the box. I only gave him a cold answer:"why don't you check out yourself?", then put the box on the ground and left. I tried not to look back and care what's gonna happen behind me.