Reduce, Recycle, Reuse

 
An elderly Vietnamese man goes through our trash daily. No gloves, no concerns. He walks up our driveway, opens the lid of the big, blue recycling bin, and makes me feel bad for discarding what is valuable. I’ve seen him on and off over the five years since we bought the house, but I wasn’t aware of the frequency of his visits until the pandemic kept us inside, watching unquarantined life from our windows, protected by curtains and the inherent isolation of a Bay Area bedroom community.
 
I am remembered back to Orange County, California in the 90s, when my mom and I would recycle cans and bottles to make it to payday. We had bags full of aluminum and glass. Towers of Bud Light and the odd peach Snapple Iced Tea bottle. We’d stow the cans and bottles in white 10-gallon trash bags, then awkwardly lug the leaky vessels to our beat-up-but-works-just-fine Toyota Corolla and drive to the grocery store’s self-serve compactor to work our way through each bag, can-by-can.
 
Imagine: A single Black mother and her only daughter gleefully collecting fists full of coins from the machines, looking impoverished to passersby who didn’t know the machines worked, let alone that they gave you money for recycling. Affluent shoppers, clutching their children’s hands and Safeway cards in the suburban strip mall, worried they might catch our poverty if they got too close.
 
But we were too busy watching the payout number get higher and higher, with every 5-cent increase imagining what it meant for dinner. Italian sub from the pizza place instead of Arby’s 2 for $5? Hamburger Helper? An avocado for the ground beef tacos? Klondike Bars? Please let it be enough for Klondike Bars!
 
For hours afterward, our hands smelled like lite beer, which meant they smelled like sewage, which meant they smelled like home. Sticky beer hands now full of money. Lunch or Lotto ticket?
 

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I both did and did not experience those trips with indignity.
 
On the one hand, it was great because it meant newfound money. It also meant being rewarded for waiting until we had a good bounty so the payout would be high and most useful. It took discipline not to slip into the stash when we wanted a snack. It was the marshmallow test every two weeks.
 
On the other hand, it also meant rewarding my mom for drinking lots of beer. Lots.
 
Yes: Every week, my mother bought a six-pack, intending it to last the whole week. It never did. So, without fail, we found ourselves making almost daily trips to 7-Eleven to buy single cans until she could afford another six-pack. This routine turned into mother-daughter bonding time because, inevitably, it involved a thorough search for loose change around our apartment and under the seats of the car.
 
And: I never thought about my mother as an alcoholic. I understood that the beer drinking might be considered a problem by my wealthy, white friends who lived in McMansions, but for me, Budweiser was something my mother liked to drink just like my friend’s parents liked to drink Diet Coke. I wouldn’t say my mom was addicted, but I also knew, of course, that my mom was addicted. On TV, addiction always looks scary and loud and belligerent, whereas my mom’s addiction looked sunny, hygge, and in control—the only significant impact was her staying up late to watch old Cary Grant movies or to read Archeology Magazine or a Stephen King novel.
 
I always want people to understand that, yes, my mother and I recycled beer cans and occasionally rummaged through the dumpster in our apartment complex looking for easily reachable recyclables. And yes, I shared a room with her up until high school. And yes, we were living paycheck-to-paycheck, and sometimes not even successfully doing that.
 
Yes/And:
 
We also lived like non-trashdiggers lived. We had a home. We had a pet rabbit and floor-to-almost-ceiling bookcases in our living room. We had an expansive VHS collection, both legally bought and illegally recorded off TV. We sang along to Ashford & Simpson, Prince, Queen, and Anita Baker on Sunday mornings while we cleaned the apartment. I had art supplies and a Nintendo, and even a pager that I paid for with my own paycheck from my part-time job at See’s Candies and my other part-time job at Hollywood Video. My mom once spent an entire summer learning how to make the perfect omelet when she got obsessed with the idea after watching a show on the Food Network because, you know what, we had cable TV!
 
We weren’t impoverished, but we also couldn’t make it two weeks without digging for couch coins or cashing in our recycling—buoys to keep us afloat until we made the bi-weekly, Friday drive to the payday loan place in Santa Ana, so Mom could cash her check.
 
Because yeah, my mother never had her own bank account. At least not in the timeline where I existed.
 
I lived a strange duality.
 
I was raised by a single mother.
 
Yes/And: Being asked about my mom always gives me pause because in my world, “Mom” is a trio—Grammy, her twin sister Baba, and the mother that gave birth to me. Grammy and Baba played an outsized role in raising me, not just because we were part of the same household, but because my mom had a habit of “disappearing” every so often, reducing my trio of mothers to a mirrored pair, proving just how elastic maternal bonds can be.
 
I never knew my father; didn’t even know his name until I applied for a passport when I was twenty and saw his name on my birth certificate.
 
Yes/And: I am the product of a multigenerational, fiercely matriarchal household—growing up, I did not bemoan the absence of men or a father figure. In general, men were not to be trusted. Only recently have I realized that half of me remains a mystery—a genetic cliffhanger, a broken lineage. But when I look at family photos, I am so clearly the mirror image of my motherly trio that I wonder if my unknown half was simply disposed of after birth, like placenta, reduced to waste.
 
My mother struggled to keep a job.
 
Yes/And: I’ve switched jobs every few years since I was sixteen, yet I don’t think anyone would describe me as struggling to keep a job. Why is that?
 
Growing up, I lived in many apartments—we moved every few years.
 
Yes/And: My second great-grandfather, and then my great-grandfather owned a home on Euclid Street in Santa Monica for at least twenty years. You can see the ownership of the home documented in the 1930, 1940, and 1950 census records. I think my second great-grandfather bought the house sometime around 1925 because he and my second great-grandmother are listed at the Euclid address in the 1925 Santa Monica, California City Directory. In 1940, the census listed the house as valued at $2,000. But, predictably, in the 1950s, Urban Renewal rolled through Santa Monica as it did the rest of the United States, determining who and what had value and methodically reducing my family’s hard-earned generational wealth to a memory. By the time I entered our family history, Grammy, Baba, and Mom were still navigating the aftermath, still recovering, still rebuilding.
 
There’s a common stereotype that single Black mothers live off of welfare in the ghetto.
 
Yes/And: My freshman year of high school, I attended three different schools in a single semester. A few weeks into the third school, one of the guys in the circle of friends I’d wedged myself into asked where I lived, and I said, “Across the street,” and he said, “In those apartments? With the rats?” and then he complained about having had to live in my apartment complex for a few months while the renovations on his house were finished, and he said, “That place is ghetto!” and I laughed, “Yeah, that place.” And everyone laughed, but it wasn’t funny, not really, because we didn’t have rats, and it wasn’t a ghetto. Those rich white kids, they didn’t know ghetto. And his stupid, smug comic relief comment stuck with me every single day for four years until we moved out because of the roaches and mice, not rats. But even as we packed and left, disgusted, I kept thinking: We don’t have rats. We don’t live in the ghetto.
 

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To be human is to exist in an overlap of contrasting truths, each vying for acknowledgment.
 

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As I watch the elderly Vietnamese man dig through our trash, I’m hypnotized by the determination and resoluteness of his methodical searching. Yes, I want to believe that I am bearing witness, that I’m aware of the cycles of American poverty and the underground market economy, and I also know his daily ritual could be born out of choice, not necessity.
 
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency makes it clear that a product should only be recycled if it can’t be reduced or reused, which makes sense. But then I think about myself as a product that has at times been reduced to a simple impression—used and then re-used—and I wonder who benefits.
 
Unlike the blue bins now sitting virtuously in our driveway, my mom and I didn’t recycle because we wanted to reduce our carbon footprint or save the planet; we recycled because we needed money so we could buy more stuff. If our used bottles and cans weren’t deemed valuable, we would have just let them rot in the landfill, the dregs of lite beer and artificial peach flavoring wafting into the ozone layer with the rest of our garbage.
 
I think about who and what determines value. I think about the fact that in recycling bins across America, you’ll find our necessities, wants, routines, and addictions, ready to be sorted, smashed, and melted into something else. We discard the waste of our lived experiences, believing it holds no inherent value. Yet that waste, when recovered, is reshaped into our future selves, our multitudes left to converge into a sticky, complicated heap of contradictions.
 
I watch the elderly Vietnamese man leave our driveway and push his cart of recyclables up the street, stopping at each house on the block until he rounds the corner, out of sight.