I really do not like my neighbor. I refer to her as Chinese Grandma – she is Chinese, and she is a grandmother, and we’ve never introduced ourselves so I do not know her name. Not only do I not like her, I actively dislike her. She’s pushy, and she’s sneaky.
She arrived on my block a few years ago when a weedy vacant lot was replaced by a truly ugly house, thrown together quickly and cheaply with vinyl windows and colorless vinyl siding. She lives with a married couple – one of them is her child, I presume – and a rotating assortment of – again, I presume – relatives. I’d say she’s close to six feet tall and very skinny. She usually wears gray pants and a blue shirt, short-sleeved or long, depending on the weather, and a Gilligan hat. I saw her once without the hat. Her hair, shoulder length and a shade of gray that reminds me of yarn, parts on the side in a way that seems almost regal. I do wonder about her life, but just making eye contact is difficult. Her English comes and goes, depending, and I don't speak Mandarin or Cantonese, so we’ve never had a conversation. I’d guess she’s about 75.
The territory marking began not long after the family arrived. Chinese Grandma, you see, is the Donald Trump of the recycling biz. Long before sunrise and long after sunset my neighborhood creaks and groans with the sound of her enterprise: shopping carts overflowing with cans and bottles pushed up and down the street, the middle of the street, across lawns if it’s a corner lot, through intersections, across parking lots. She stops from time to time and reconfigures everything, sorting into different bags and boxes according to some system, I suppose. I have no idea how far Chinese Grandma’s daily orbit takes her, but I do know that she has been officially banned from a number of grocery stores for taking recyclables from other people’s carts. In Oregon, there is a legal limit on how many cans and bottles you can bring in per day, so Chinese Grandma makes the rounds, stopping at Safeway, QFC and Fred Meyer. There are probably many more stores on her itinerary, but those are the ones I’m aware of. More than once I’ve seen her just ignore a car coming right at her. For a while there was another woman who trolled the recycling bins in the neighborhood. She wore capes and one of those traditional Asian hats that looks like an upside-down basket. She and Chinese Grandma faced off one day in the street and played a shopping cart version of chicken. The other woman hasn’t been seen on my street for years. Some say she died.
Chinese Grandma has done a couple of things that irritate me. First, she told her obnoxious little granddaughters, who used to spend the summer in Portland, where they attended English classes, that the devil was my roommate. Then she sent them to my house one afternoon. They took a couple of things off my front porch, including a plaster imprint of the foot of the little boy, Riley, who was born when his off-the-charts insane parents lived next door. I wasn’t that crazy about it, actually, but still. When I rapped my knuckles against their tinny metal screen door, Chinese Grandma’s granddaughters told me that I could not have my belongings back until I put my bin of bottles out on the curb for them.
It’s also annoying that she leaves her carts tucked in here and there. One is usually docked for the night in the shrubbery in front of the apartment building across the street. Another is often hidden, sort of, beneath a tree in front of my house. You never see a cart in Chinese Grandma’s yard, which is all rock except for a patch of hot pink zinnias. For a while, every time I saw one of her auxiliary carts I considered taking it back to Safeway, but the chance to be mean was the only real motive I had, so I left them.
I think there’s something intrinsically personal about garbage, and that’s what really annoys me about Chinese Grandma: I’m under surveillance. After living three doors down from her for a few years, it seems normal to assume that she’ll review everything I throw away.
One day this summer another shopping cart came clanking down the middle of the street. The woman, who walked a few paces ahead of the cart, wore jeans, hiking boots and a leather vest. Her dark brown hair was pulled back from her face and fell halfway down her back in a single, ropey ponytail. She nodded from time to time, made broad, sweeping gestures towards different houses in a low, inaudible voice. The man who pushed the cart had hair as long as hers but his was the color of early rust and unkempt. They picked up a couple of the bright yellow bins that say “Portland Recycles!” and, finding them empty, threw them down to the curbside, where they landed with a hollow thud. Without thinking about why, I went out on my front porch and busied myself picking scabby remnants of blossoms from one of the canes of the rose bush that’s wrapping itself around one of the columns.
The people who go to the neighborhood association meetings assume that anyone they don’t know – and many they do – is a criminal. Sometimes they are right, often they are wrong. I would much rather say that I was outside to make eye contact with the man and the woman pushing the shopping cart so that they’d know that I knew what they were up to, which would, of course, cause them to think twice before breaking into my house or my car or taking anything off the porch or out of the yard. But the truth of the matter is that I went out there because I felt like we were being invaded by colonizers who were scoping out their newfound territory and rejoicing in their discovery. Without even thinking about it, I felt obligated to let them know, with one glance, that anything that can be recycled for cash in this neighborhood has been spoken for until further notice.
She arrived on my block a few years ago when a weedy vacant lot was replaced by a truly ugly house, thrown together quickly and cheaply with vinyl windows and colorless vinyl siding. She lives with a married couple – one of them is her child, I presume – and a rotating assortment of – again, I presume – relatives. I’d say she’s close to six feet tall and very skinny. She usually wears gray pants and a blue shirt, short-sleeved or long, depending on the weather, and a Gilligan hat. I saw her once without the hat. Her hair, shoulder length and a shade of gray that reminds me of yarn, parts on the side in a way that seems almost regal. I do wonder about her life, but just making eye contact is difficult. Her English comes and goes, depending, and I don't speak Mandarin or Cantonese, so we’ve never had a conversation. I’d guess she’s about 75.
The territory marking began not long after the family arrived. Chinese Grandma, you see, is the Donald Trump of the recycling biz. Long before sunrise and long after sunset my neighborhood creaks and groans with the sound of her enterprise: shopping carts overflowing with cans and bottles pushed up and down the street, the middle of the street, across lawns if it’s a corner lot, through intersections, across parking lots. She stops from time to time and reconfigures everything, sorting into different bags and boxes according to some system, I suppose. I have no idea how far Chinese Grandma’s daily orbit takes her, but I do know that she has been officially banned from a number of grocery stores for taking recyclables from other people’s carts. In Oregon, there is a legal limit on how many cans and bottles you can bring in per day, so Chinese Grandma makes the rounds, stopping at Safeway, QFC and Fred Meyer. There are probably many more stores on her itinerary, but those are the ones I’m aware of. More than once I’ve seen her just ignore a car coming right at her. For a while there was another woman who trolled the recycling bins in the neighborhood. She wore capes and one of those traditional Asian hats that looks like an upside-down basket. She and Chinese Grandma faced off one day in the street and played a shopping cart version of chicken. The other woman hasn’t been seen on my street for years. Some say she died.
Chinese Grandma has done a couple of things that irritate me. First, she told her obnoxious little granddaughters, who used to spend the summer in Portland, where they attended English classes, that the devil was my roommate. Then she sent them to my house one afternoon. They took a couple of things off my front porch, including a plaster imprint of the foot of the little boy, Riley, who was born when his off-the-charts insane parents lived next door. I wasn’t that crazy about it, actually, but still. When I rapped my knuckles against their tinny metal screen door, Chinese Grandma’s granddaughters told me that I could not have my belongings back until I put my bin of bottles out on the curb for them.
It’s also annoying that she leaves her carts tucked in here and there. One is usually docked for the night in the shrubbery in front of the apartment building across the street. Another is often hidden, sort of, beneath a tree in front of my house. You never see a cart in Chinese Grandma’s yard, which is all rock except for a patch of hot pink zinnias. For a while, every time I saw one of her auxiliary carts I considered taking it back to Safeway, but the chance to be mean was the only real motive I had, so I left them.
I think there’s something intrinsically personal about garbage, and that’s what really annoys me about Chinese Grandma: I’m under surveillance. After living three doors down from her for a few years, it seems normal to assume that she’ll review everything I throw away.
One day this summer another shopping cart came clanking down the middle of the street. The woman, who walked a few paces ahead of the cart, wore jeans, hiking boots and a leather vest. Her dark brown hair was pulled back from her face and fell halfway down her back in a single, ropey ponytail. She nodded from time to time, made broad, sweeping gestures towards different houses in a low, inaudible voice. The man who pushed the cart had hair as long as hers but his was the color of early rust and unkempt. They picked up a couple of the bright yellow bins that say “Portland Recycles!” and, finding them empty, threw them down to the curbside, where they landed with a hollow thud. Without thinking about why, I went out on my front porch and busied myself picking scabby remnants of blossoms from one of the canes of the rose bush that’s wrapping itself around one of the columns.
The people who go to the neighborhood association meetings assume that anyone they don’t know – and many they do – is a criminal. Sometimes they are right, often they are wrong. I would much rather say that I was outside to make eye contact with the man and the woman pushing the shopping cart so that they’d know that I knew what they were up to, which would, of course, cause them to think twice before breaking into my house or my car or taking anything off the porch or out of the yard. But the truth of the matter is that I went out there because I felt like we were being invaded by colonizers who were scoping out their newfound territory and rejoicing in their discovery. Without even thinking about it, I felt obligated to let them know, with one glance, that anything that can be recycled for cash in this neighborhood has been spoken for until further notice.
