Le Petit Taichung Chiffonnier (The Taichung Rag Picker)

Le Petit Taichung Chiffonnier

(The Taichung Rag Picker)

“What do those yellow lines on the street mean?”

“I think it means – I’m not sure – don’t stop your vehicle here?” My thirty-year-old law school graduate daughter pays attention to everything, especially if it’s unusual.

In New York City, those large orange perpendicular lines, looking like a chain-link fence painted on the intersection, is to warn vehicles not to stop there in traffic when the light turns red up ahead at the corner. If you are caught stopped there, a cop could come and give you a ticket. Better yet, to save manpower, a camera could snap a photo of your license plate number and another machine could mail you a ticket. On “gridlock alert” days, the fine is doubled, and tripled if it’s in a “work zone.” You are told on the news to leave you vehicle home to avoid getting locked on the grid without a key to the highway.

In Taichung, this is not what the yellow grid painted on some streets means. Cops here don’t trifle with foolish things like giving drivers parking tickets of any kind, unless the infraction is across the street from a KMT or DPP member’s property, sometimes both.

     “I think it means ‘Caution’ because there is a hidden side street approaching,” I explained. “It doesn’t even have to be at a crossroads. I’ve also seen streets that vehicles may be exiting garage driveways onto painted with this pattern.” I could see my daughter nodding her head and grinning in legal comprehension.

“However, I’m not sure what the penalty is, if any, if there is a collision on that grid, nor do I know who is responsible in an accident, the driver on the straight way or the one entering from the side.” I knew that would be her next question.

“Who is that man down there?” my daughter asked. Through the miracle of modern technology in the computer age she could see the street outside my fourth floor patio, thanks to Skype, the image sent twelve thousand miles away to her computer monitor in Pittsburgh. My daughter could see the scene and a man just off to the side of the yellow grid, as if all lines pointed to him.

“You mean the man near the corner of my lane?”

“Yeah, the man with the cardboard box on his head putting something onto the back of a flatbed truck. Now he’s sitting on something and doing something.” There was only one man on the street below. I knew who she meant.

“Well, he’s a kind of recycler,” I explained. “He’s recycling garbage, I think.” His putting the world in order makes him different than say the auto mechanic who shares his corner. That mechanic throws tires helter skelter and attracts mosquitoes.

That little rag-picker parks his truck there every morning and stays through the hot Taichung afternoon. Then, he ties up large plastic bags that he’s filled secures them to the bed of his pick-up, and drives away, to somewhere,” I couldn’t tell her where.

 The day I gave my daughter a video call tour of our new home, the busy man was wearing a cardboard box on his head, indeed, but he usually wears a ragged and torn bamboo leaf hat.

He is a grizzled old man, about five-foot four-inches tall, slightly hunched and stooped with skin like sun-dried raisins but not quite as dark. I think his body itself shriveled up from all the attention it got from the tropical Taiwan sun. Every muscle in his arms, legs and feet are connected to gruesomely skinny sinews of flesh that must stink like a flesh-eating plant, if you could smell it, and distinguish it separately from his pungent work garden of trash. Not smile nor grin nor glace around does he make in his busy vocation all day long.

Every muscle in his arms is connected to gruesome slender fingers like a burn victim who hadn’t had a skin graft yet. His body looks like a dried-up salamander, his head like the skull over the cross bones of a poison warning with deep eye sockets and protruding teeth; amazingly he has teeth! His head has a short cut of occasional white splinters.

 He was surrounded with second-hand piles of organized paper and plastic goods; carefully folded colorful food wrappers, stacks of 500cc paper cups of emptied bubble-tea drinks. If perhaps there is a drop of liquid left in the cup, he downs it head-up skyward before he adds the another cup to his stack. I’ve even seem him eat food of the ‘bian-dang’ sectioned plates, though I’m not sure if it’s from leftovers or ones he’s brought for himself for lunch. 

Under his blue Toyota flatbed pick-up truck, there lay an old large black dog, part Labrador. If you look closely, you can see the dog’s tail wag occasionally from between the tires. It’s his dog, and an obedient dog it is, avoiding traffic on the narrow two-way street and the burning sun above the sheltering vehicle. He needs the shade and perhaps a bone the rag picker might find in a bag somewhere. Perhaps someone was giving the man and his dog food to eat.

My daughter could get the picture from the Skype video. You can bet your bottom dollar that this old street hoarder had never put his finger on a keyboard, whether or not it was working or attached to a computer, just like Buddha. But he was the Buddha I tell you. I saw a golden glow surrounding his filthy figure. No one dares tell Buddha to get the hell away from in front of their house or remove his garbage from the street, even if he is a hazard. Sometimes you do penance. After all, he wasn’t that much more disheveled than Taichung itself, not counting the rich Westside. Perhaps it mattered that he took up shop on a side street outside a storefront Buddhist temple alongside the corrugated fence of an overgrown vacant lot used by the stone mason down the block. Furthermore, he was parked legally I’m told; no red or yellow line on the grimy street below his holy sandal feet. No one would dare tell him to move, not even the police; their ancestors might be evicted from heaven if they did so.

    

     “Looks like your truck is full,” my wife heard as we looked down and saw a slender man of seventy years step off a bicycle near the rag picker who looked up at him. The man stood at the tail gate of the pick- up, and took hold of a blue nylon rope that was wound and tied around a white burlap plastic sack full of recyclables.  He gripped it now, and as tight as he could, pulled it closer around the sack stacked in the back. He then grabbed the loose end of the rope with his other hand and slipped it through a shiny silver ring, one of six along each side of the little flatbed truck. The rag-picker stopped folding the empty paper food boxes and stood up slowly from the large cooking oil can that served as his work stool. He started chatting with the seventy-year-old youngster helping him pack up. We couldn’t hear what they said as a scooter passed on the street but it looked like they knew each other.

     “Have to be there by nightfall,” my wife heard him say in a rich Taiwanese dialect once the scooter had passed. “Be there soon or they won’t let me in! I’ll have to go back again tomorrow morning, damn it.”

     “Well then, you let me finish tying your load up and get on your way. You don’t want to drop any along the roads.”

“No, no, I won’t want to do that,” he said loudly. “Not after all this work.”

“Yeah, it’ll be all over the road,” the visitor said as he finished trying the load down. He then walked around the truck to see if all else was safely tied.

I smiled at my wife as she translated what they said. The road around them was so littered with remaining plastic bottles, paper cups, newspaper, cardboard, and aluminum cans, all strewn about. The visitor was worried he’d dirty the street if this load fell off the truck? Hah! Not the rag-picker. Nor was he worried that falling trash would be a hazard for vehicles. Buddha doesn’t worry; He lets others work out their karma.

“Yeah, it looks like you’re set,” said the lean visitor as he walked toward his one-speed, heavy, old-style bicycle. He gave the rope one more tug to show it was safe, nodded his head at his eighty-year-old senior, mounted his bike and rode away.

The rag-picker went back to work, tidying up some loose ends and excess junk that would have to wait until tomorrow to be sorted. The rest remained on the road, mixed juices of many foods from the containers dripping down the slope of the street across the lane toward the stack of used tires near the auto mechanic shop on the first floor of our condo. Soda mixed with soup and dried on the red hot asphalt leaving a sickly sweet smell and sticky mess that cockroaches and flies love. They’d be licking it in no time.

He piled the rest against the corrugated steel fence just near the gate outlined by two orange plastic caution cones a friend of Buddha had placed there. He had his work load ready for tomorrow. For now it was quitting time at his makeshift street-side recycling plant.

The old rag-picker walked around his flatbed Toyota. He removed a tattered brown barbecue apron he had probably found among someone’s trash. It was large and could have been wrapped around his waist twice as it hung like a lamp shade around his scrawny knees. Underneath, a pair of soiled brown shorts hung, darker in color around the crotch from sweat and urine. He pulled it over his head, not bothering to untie it, and walked into the street where his truck was parked, facing the wrong way, to an open passenger door. There is no wrong way for Buddha. It had been left open all day obscuring the road to anyone making a turn off the lane to the street. To hell with the yellow cross-street grid! Buddha knows no grid, or anger. He brings to a halt every two cars that passed each other on the narrow roadway, but that’s his function; to stop people in their tracks. Karma alone would help them pass through Buddha’s earthly threshold. No concave street traffic mirror could repel a demon from hell or hinder an angel. Simply, it was time for him to leave and the door had to be closed. That’s all.

The old black Labrador mix awoke and came out from under the truck when it heard the door slam. It was the signal that it was time to get up and go. It smartly stayed along the side of the road and slowly climbed up through the driver’s side door and into the seat. Then the old rag-picker followed, almost like a dance routine, took care to climb into the truck. He sat in the driver’s seat.

My wife and I watched from the ledge of our fourth floor patio. We saw, but didn’t hear the truck engine start up; we saw the brake lights glow red. It was hard to believe that this man would have a key in his ratty shorts pocket, but he did! He even had a wallet somewhere inside with a driver’s license, I guess. No holes in this man’s pocket for sure!

The right turn directional started flashing. It never occurred to me that he would do it. This eighty-year-old rag-picker from Taichung was not picking rags nor was he hoarding trash and garbage. The truck carefully crossed over to the right side of the two-way street and moved up behind traffic at the red light ahead on his way to the recycle redemption center where he would be paid for a hard day’s work. How much money would he get for his work-time? That’s not the point, is it?