Whenever we drive past a sidewalk pile labeled “FREE” in St. Paul, my daughters chant, “Mom, keep driving. Don’t look. Just go.” They’re half‑laughing, half‑pleading — teenagers seasoned by my curbside impulses, bracing for the possibility that I might slam on the brakes and leap out to inspect a discarded dresser or chair.
They think it’s a quirk — another one of my Mom things. But the instinct rises in me each time: the quick scan, the small thrill, the sense that something worth saving might be hiding in plain sight.
Once, the golf course behind our house cut down several old trees. The workers left the trunks in large discs scattered across the grass. I couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about how to get them. The next morning, I followed the young groundskeepers and offered to pay them to help me move six of the discs into our yard. They became side tables, flower stands, and stools. When the bark loosened and fell away, my husband stained the wood to preserve it, and we used the bark as mulch.
I didn’t have a name for this impulse until a trip to Paris, when I found myself before Jean-Francois Millet’s The Gleaners – three peasant women bent over the fields, gathering the leftover wheat after the harvest. Until then, I hadn’t known the word gleaner, but I recognized the posture — the bent backs, the searching hands, the steady persistence. I felt touched. It reminded me of my childhood in a village called Nan Song in northern China — scavenging, searching, saving. For the first time, I felt the way I grew up was connected to a larger human story. I understood that my life had a lineage, even if I didn’t know what that lineage meant for me. I was a gleaner’s daughter.
The painting stirred a memory of a story my father, Ba Ba, once told me about the famine in Chang Zhi in the 1950s, during the Great Leap Forward. He sighed before he began, as if bracing himself. “Everyone was so hungry,” he said. Hunger made people’s bodies swell with fluid so severely that if you pressed a finger into someone’s leg, the indentation stayed, refusing to rise again. People wandered into frost‑bitten fields, my father said, digging through frozen soil for roots left behind in vegetable patches. Anything edible. Anything that might keep them alive one more day. That was gleaning too — not art, not pastoral, but desperate.
After hearing that story, I never looked at vegetables the same way. I peeled outer leaves carefully, saving every part. When I sliced broccoli, I no longer threw away the stalks. Waste felt like a betrayal of the past.
I carried the memory of Ba Ba’s story with me when I immigrated to the United States in 1987. I was twenty-one. China was still largely impoverished then — villagers farmed with simple tools, donkey‑drawn carts, and the strength of their own bodies. In America, farmland stretched endlessly, dotted with machines that harvested more in an hour than a village could in a week.
My first job in the U.S. was in the student cafeteria at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls. There, I learned to make pancakes. I learned that jam, butter, and ketchup came in tiny plastic packets meant to be taken freely. Napkins were soft, neatly stacked, and thrown away without a second thought. It felt like watching treasure tossed into the trash.
Before I immigrated, bathroom paper had been a luxury during my teenage years in China. We caught menstrual blood with old cloth, washed and reused. The soft toilet paper and pads in America felt like a silent revolution — a reminder of how far life could improve for women.
One day, standing behind the cafeteria counter, I had a sudden thought: in America, no one should ever starve. If desperation came, one could simply climb into a dumpster. There was enough discarded food to feed an entire village — my village. What one place throws away becomes another place’s treasure. Time and geography decide what counts as abundance.
But abundance was not where I came from. To understand my awe in America, you must first understand Nan Song.
In Nan Song, even with the Five Phoenix Temple — a Yuan dynasty structure, its carved beams and winged eaves a reminder of a more glorious past — towering above us, farming remained primitive. Hoes, axes, spades, oxen, donkeys. Small plots of land that barely yielded enough to last the year. Whatever the earth did not produce was nearly impossible to obtain.
We lived through the four seasons like animals. In early spring, when the cellars were nearly empty and only withered carrots and yams remained, children like me went out with baskets as soon as the land began to turn green. We scavenged for anything edible — lamb’s quarters, shepherd’s purse, Indian aster, dandelions, horseradish, cudweed, the first stubborn leaves pushing through the thawing soil. Villagers ground elm bark into flour to make noodles, a desperate invention that has somehow become a local delicacy. In autumn, children chewed corn stalks like sugarcane, saving apricot pits to use as dice. Survival depended on attention: knowing what the earth offered, and when. I was too young to realize I was suffering — I didn’t know what not suffering was. That was simply how we lived.
There is a Chinese phrase: 柴米油盐酱醋茶 — firewood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and tea. The seven essentials of daily life. The architecture of survival.
In the village, there were two brothers who lived next to us and were known by their nicknames, Iron Egg and Black Egg. Their family had coal but not condiments. So when their soy sauce or vinegar ran low, Iron Egg would shoulder two baskets of coal on a yoke and disappear before dawn. By the time the oil lamps flickered to life in the evening, he would return — sometimes with a bottle of soy sauce, other times only half a bottle of vinegar.
Cooking oil was even more precious. I remember it being in a small glass bottle that was never filled. Iron Egg and Black Egg’s mom would wrap a piece of cloth around a chopstick, dip it into the oil, and swirl it around in the iron wok before adding vegetables or salt. For years, I never saw oil poured. Only brushed, coaxed, and rationed.
Sugar was a fantasy.
Later, after the economic reforms in China in the late 1980s — when private markets reopened and goods slowly returned to shelves — cooking oil was no longer scarce. After centuries of hunger, people embraced it with a kind of collective relief, frying anything and everything to make it taste better. Nutritional value was irrelevant. After deprivation, indulgence felt like healing.
When I was six, my family moved from Nan Song to the nearby town of Chang Zhi. In the village, I had rummaged freely on the land, discovering treasures in the dirt: bits of pottery, glass, and rusted metal. But in the city, scarcity took a different form. The land was paved over, so I turned my curiosity toward trash.
One summer, our town received a rare treat: watermelons transported from faraway places. During the afternoon nap, when the whole town fell silent, I slipped out to the neighborhood trash heap. There, atop the refuse, lay watermelon rinds, their green skins still enchanting. I touched them gently, imagining the sweetness they once held.
My father’s voice cut through the stillness: “What are you doing, darling?”
I straightened, smiling instinctively — until I saw the pain in his eyes. He rushed over and grabbed my hands.
“This is trash. Don’t touch it,” he said. “If you want watermelon, I’ll buy you one. I would sell our cooking pot and pan as scrap if it meant my daughter could have what she wants.” His voice trembled with love and shame, and I felt both settle into me.
If Chang Zhi taught me to search, Beijing taught me to marvel. During summer vacations in my early teens, I stayed with my maternal grandparents at Beijing Normal University. There, the quality of garbage soared.
The six three‑story residential buildings had trash chutes that funneled refuse from each floor to the ground outside. I waited eagerly for the next cascade of treasures. These apartments housed some of China’s most educated people — professors, scholars, returned students from the Soviet Union, descendants of the last imperial dynasty. Their conversations floated with Russian phrases. Their garbage was exotic.
I found cellophane candy wrappers in colors I had never seen. Strips of film that I fashioned into picture frames. Cigarette boxes so elegant they became legends when I brought them back to Chang Zhi. Those summers felt like stepping into another world — one where even trash shimmered with possibility.
These were my playgrounds: the land in Nan Song, the garbage heaps in Chang Zhi, the recycling station and trash chutes in Beijing. I only knew the thrill of discovering something edible, useful, or beautiful in places others ignored. These quiet delights taught me that joy can bloom in even the humblest corners of the world.
In recent years, my gleaning has taken a different form. I began to notice how beautiful my own garbage was — the colors, the textures, the sheer abundance of it, free. Black trash bags with bright blue drawstrings could be made into haute couture dresses; the blue string was already a halter. I cut the bottom open, cinched the waist with duct tape, and added another bag so the skirt could billow behind me like a train. From there, my imagination and creativity blossomed. There is nothing a needle cannot fix. Now I lead Fix-It workshops, where I teach children how to stitch mugwort plant sachets from scraps — the same kind of remnants I grew up seeing women transform on rainy days.
As a Chinese American, I have often been seen as a person who is off-center. I have gone from being angry at being marginalized, to accepting the world’s imperfections, to finally appreciating who I am. Gleaning has helped me hold my ground — helped me keep searching for my own life’s shape, even when the world tried to define it for me.
Some inherit wealth or land. I inherited the reflex to reach for what remains — to build a life from the overlooked and still call it enough.
