The Can- Collecting Lady Cometh

BK

As you may have guessed, I love Brooklyn.  Very few things-- any by few, I mean, like five-- make me concede the fact that Brooklyn can be a very difficult place in which to live.  Today, I will be discussing one of those five things. 

In at least my neighborhood of Brooklyn, the recycling is picked up on Mondays, so on Sunday nights, the sidewalks are lined with cans in plastic bags.  And, like clockwork, the Can-Collecting Ladies come out like mole people.  You know them.  They look like this:  

She's so popular, she even has a Facebook page.

They go through people's garbage and take cans that can be recycled and, I assume, recycle them.  The process sounds harmless but the act enrages me, and many other New Yorkers.  A few facets of this seemingly-innocent act drive me to anger.

1) First and foremost, going through people's garbage is illegal.  The police need a permit to search your garbage cans for evidence that you committed a crime.  Yet, these people go through garbages, and commit an actual crime, and people look the other way.  I've even witnessed Brooklynites step out of the way of their garbage cans so these people can rummage through their trash.

2) They leave a mess.  Thanks to the nanny-state that our liberal government has provided for us in Brooklyn, homeowners get fines if their sidewalk is dirty or their garbage is not bagged properly.  The Can-Collecting Ladies often rip open garbage bags and leave the cans that they do not take strewn all over the sidewalk.  And who gets the ticket?  No, not the person committing the crime, but the homeowner, who did nothing other than obey the recycling law.

3) It's an epidemic.  My mother and I noticed that after we witnessed one Can-Collecting Lady rip open our garbage bag and leave cans all over the sidewalk and after we cleaned up those cans, later in the day, the cans were all over the street again.  We cleaned those up and it happened again.  This means that more than one can-collecting lady is going through our garbage.  Furthermore.  My mother does not put out cans that can be recycled.  She religiously returns cans to the supermarket every week.  Yet, every Sunday our garbage bags are ripped open.  This means that it is not the same can-collecting ladies every week.  If it were the same few going down our block every week, then after awhile, they'd realize that there is no booty in front of the White House.  (That's what we call our house.)

Because yeah, I'm the president. (This photo and comment does not equal endorsement of the current president.)

4) They thinks it's their right to go through your garbage.  Now, I'm a very charming person.  So, naturally, a few times, I've caught the can-collecting people in the act and I've run out of my house into the street yelling at them. 

Don't look at me like that, Spock.

You'd assume that when someone comes running out of a house yelling at them, they'd back off or walk briskly away, with their heads hanging in shame. 

Instead, they do the following:  When I yelled at one of them, the lady started arguing with me, albeit in Chinese, so I couldn't understand her, but I know what arguing sounds like, as I do a lot of it myself.  When my mother yelled at one of them, she laughed at her.  Laughed!  Pointed and laughed because my mom told her not to do something that is illegal.  It's enraging.

4) They trespass.  Usually, before my mother puts the cans out on Sunday night, they rest inside of our gate, in our driveway.  However, my mother has witnessed the Can-Collecting Ladies open our gate and come onto our driveway to go through our garbage.  This is trespassing on two levels.  Garbage.  Driveway.

So, my mother decided to move our cans waiting to go that big recycling bin in the sky to our backyard, which is blocked off by another, openable, fence.  Guess what?!  My mom saw them in our backyard, going through the garbage.  Of course, as is custom, my mom went into our backyard and yelled at the lady.  Guess what again?!  The lady laughed at her!  This woman is in our backyard going through our garbage and she has the nerve to laugh?  It is honestly beyond me.

5) Everyone assumes they're doing it because they have no other options.  I beg to differ.  The overwhelming majority of these Can-Collecting Ladies, literally like 99.9% (I saw two Latinas doing it once), are Chinese.  Most people that I have discussed the issue with tell me that they do it because they're poor and have no other income.  There is absolutely no proof of this.  Many of the Can-Collecting Ladies I have seen seem well-dressed.  If they were this poor, that they had to subsist on other's people's recycled cans to survive, then wouldn't there be Chinese slums around my neighborhood?  Sure, there is an overwhelmingly Chinese area about ten blocks away from me, but it's in no way a slum.  And if it was true that these people are doing it because they're so poor, wouldn't you see people of other nationalities going through your garbage?  It can't be that only Chinese are broke.

No, they are not doing it because they're poor.

In fact, no one seems to know why they are doing it.  I've scoured the internet looking for an article about this phenomenon, but only found blogs.  To my surprise, these bloggers aren't complaining about the phenomenon   Most of them collect the cans to see how much money one can make doing it.  (Spoiler Alert: about $5 a day.)

One blogger, a Chinese girl who runs a blog about Chinese culture says that she thinks that Chinese people do this because they can't resist free stuff.  (Her words, not mine.)  Here is the blog in question: http://chineseppl.blogspot.com/2011/11/chinese-can-collectors-why-do-they-do.html.  In other words, it's a cultural thing.  

I thoroughly agree with this girl.  After all, she's a far more credible witness to Chinese culture than the Italian-Americans of whom I usually discuss this issue.  Furthermore, I have witnessed one of these can-collecting ladies teaching a young girl, presumably her daughter, of about 4 or 5 years of age, to go through the garbage!  And I don't mean she was taking her along for the ride.  The woman would stop in front of a house, point to the bag of garbage (on the homeowner's property!), give the kid a little shove, say something in Chinese, and watch the kid go through the garbage, pull out a can, and give it to the woman, at which point the woman smiled, and, seemingly, congratulated the child.  She was proud of the child for digging through garbage!  Parents usually inspire their children to do better than themselves.  And if the parent is teaching the child how to survive, they certainly wouldn't be proud of those actions.  A man who knows that his adult son is stealing bread to feed his family is not proud of this; he just quietly knows that this is what his son must do to survive.  

6) And this is probably the most irritating part.  The NYPD and community police refuse to do anything about it.  If every burglar in the city had agreed to rob every convenience store once a week, at a certain time, wouldn't that make the cops' jobs so much easier?  Wouldn't they be waiting outside the convenience stores every week?

Then WHY don't they do something about these Can-Collecting People?

Ariana Grande wants to know.

Like I said, they go up and down the streets with their (probably stolen) shopping carts every Sunday night like clockwork, committing a crime.  I've actually seen police, chilling in their patrol cars, while a woman goes through garbage right in front of them.

Can They Be Stopped?

I've brought this up at community council meetings.  That's what community council meetings are for, right?  Once when I was talking to a community police officer about it, he basically admitted to me that the cops can't be bothered to do anything about the Can-Collecting Ladies.  He told me to put a lock on my gate, to which my mother's response was, "Why should I be inconvenienced?  They're the ones breaking the law."

Excellent point.

His sarcastic and unappreciated response to my mother was something along the lines of, "Well if you really cared about the situation, then that's what you would do."  But my mother has used locks before.  She put a lock on the gate that leads to the backyard when she began to leave garbage bags back there.  She still witnessed a Can-Collecting Lady go through our front gate (crime) and onto our driveway (crime) and try to force the back gate open, despite the lock (strike three!).  The bottom line is, the local cops would rather use their time giving homeowners tickets for being inches in front of a church (more on that in a future blog) than ticket people who are actually committing a crime.  (I've used that word a lot in this entry.)  

One more time. Ha ha.

Recently, my mother's local community board (and I refer to it as my mother's because she is the one who owns our house in Brooklyn) printed out signs in Chinese that translate to, "Don't take our cans," or something along those lines.  Apparently, they had received so many complaints, that they couldn't print the things out fast enough.  Granted, they worked for awhile-- maybe about three weeks-- but they're back now.  And apparently, there's nothing we can do about it.

It's hopeless.

Do the Can-Collecting Ladies bother you?  Or am I crazy?  Or is it both?  Leave your comments below!