garbage

Currently listening to Carcass - Swansong

It is often said that we live in a throw-away culture in America. We're wealthy compared to most people in this world, and we don't think much about what we buy, use and then throw away. Much of the throwing away happens despite the fact that the item thrown away is still in good and/or usable condition.

When you have money to buy new things all the time, this aspect of our culture just doesn't seem all that important. However, when you have little or no money, you begin to treasure each item that comes into your possession, no matter how insignificant. I discovered this as a missionary. The smallest little things, like the plastic bags I got at the grocery store to carry my groceries, soon became valuable items that couldn't be thrown away until they had been used many times, or could no longer be used at all.

The Chinese certainly aren't as materialistic as we are (though this is changing), but they also don't live in homes as big as ours, which means they can't keep a lot of junk around. This often worked to our benefit, as we would walk around and find perfectly usable items and then take them home for our own use. The Cantonese word for this is "jup," and I wish there was an English equivalent, because it's a great word. It basically means "to pick something up off the street and keep it for your own use." We jupped a lot of good stuff, but I also remember a few disasters from jupping.


The apartment in Tuen Mun was old and cramped, as most of the apartments were. In one corner of the living room was an ugly, fake leather couch. It was gray and had black zebra stripes. Said couch had been jupped by a couple missionaries a few months before I moved in, and it was nice to have, since it provided an additional place to sit where there had been none. It was late summer when I arrived in Tuen Mun, my first area, and not being used to the heat and humidity, I had a hard time adjusting. The first Monday I was there, I woke up really early in the morning. Not because I wanted to, but because I felt something crawling on my face. It was a giant cockroach, between 3-4" inches long. Oh, and the cockroaches in Hong Kong can fly, too. After finding that on my face, I couldn't go back to sleep. The Tuen Mun apartment had a major cockroach problem, and we were always finding them and crushing them with shoes, pots and pans, books and whatever other weapons we could find. One night, I went to bed early because I wasn't feeling very well--heat exhaustion, I think. Anyway, I was both tired and somewhat delirious, but I was having a hard time staying asleep for very long. As I was tossing and turning later in the night, I heard a lot of commotion coming from the living room/kitchen area. Too tired and sick to get out of bed, I tried my best to ignore it and go back to sleep. I was the first person to wake up the following morning, and when I walked into the kitchen, I found dead cockroaches everywhere--on the floor, on the counter, in pots with water in them, etc. Apparently a couple of the other guys in the apartment had purchased a fogger the night before, and setting it off had brought all the cockroaches in the apartment out, so they did their best to kill every last one.

My stay in Tuen Mun, though brief, was not a pleasant one, and cockroaches were a large part of the reason why. None of my other apartments were ever as bad as the Tuen Mun apartment. A couple months after I moved out, another missionary called and told me that they had ripped the back off the zebra couch and had found hundreds of cockroaches living in it. They took the couch and threw it out the window of the apartment (I laugh when I think about it, since that apartment was at least eight floors up), and after that the cockroach problem largely disappeared. Definitely my worst experience with a jupped item.

My favorite jupped item was my guitar. I found it in a pile of garbage in the hallway of an apartment building in Causeway Bay. It was an old acoustic guitar and the back had split, so I took it home and taped it up. I bought new strings for it, and once it was all put together, it sounded fairly decent for what it was. I managed to keep it with me almost the entire two years I was in Hong Kong. I never had a ton of time to play it, but it was nice to have just the same, as it kept me from forgetting everything I knew while I was in HK. It was also good for irritating other people, like Dawkins, the accomplished viola musician that I served with a couple times. Like many classically trained musicians, Dawkins was a music snob, and being a BYU Presidential Scholar, he also had a pretty high opinion of himself and a major type A personality. My chugging out Slayer and Metallica riffs always drove him crazy. That doesn't mean, however, that I would stop. Thinking about how irritated he would get by the fact he couldn't control me still puts a smile on my face. As a side note, my linguistic abilities also drove him crazy. We were in the MTC together, and I think learning Cantonese with me in the class was the first time he had ever experienced not being the best at something. What made it even worse for him was the fact that I had a tendency to fall asleep in class--every class, regardless of the time of day. So, while the genius sat attentively, paid attention to every word and studied like crazy, I put forth no effort and still spoke way better than he did. He yelled at me in frustration for this more than once. It was nice to see him squirm. I should write more about him sometime, as he was also the cause of the weirdest, most awkward church meeting I have ever attended. More on that some other time.

Anyway, as I mentioned, I took my guitar with me to each new area. In what I thought was my last area, Mui Wo, I decided it was time to sacrifice the guitar to the gods who had so graciously bestowed this junk guitar on me. Two other guys and I took it to the roof of our three-story apartment building, and I threw it off the top. I should have checked to see if there was anyone outside before I did that, because the lady from Zaire that lived across the path screamed and went running for the door when she heard the "explosion." We quickly ducked and rolled around on the floor in laughter. I have a picture of the shattered guitar on the ground somewhere in storage. If I ever find it, I'll have to scan it and post it.

The Chinese don't bake, so I never lived in an apartment that came with an over. One weekend, a counselor in the English district presidency, who lived in Discovery Bay, asked us to help him move to his new home. He was the senior legal counsel for Intel Asia, and as such, incredibly wealthy. He was moving from a large house (yes, a house--extremely rare in HK) to an even larger house (he told me the rent was US$8000/month--crazy, but also not the worst rent I heard about while I was there). Discovery Bay is an interesting place. All the land in the entire city/development is owned by one man, so everyone that lives there does so on a lease--no purchasing of property is allowed. This man also dislikes religion and cars, so churches were forbidden (we had to borrow rooms at the local international school for church services), and cars were outlawed (at the time you couldn't drive to Discovery Bay, as no roads in or out had been built). Discovery Bay was its own little world. You could only get to it by boat, and once you were there, you could only get around by golf cart or bicycle. Anyway, as we were helping this family move, the father mentioned that they weren't taking the oven they had with them since their new place already had one. The oven was connected to a gas bottle (there are no natural gas lines in HK), so I asked him if we could take it. He said we could, so at the end of the day I borrowed a cart from him and put the oven on the cart. My companion and I wheeled the cart about a mile to the ferry pier, and then clumsily tied the oven to the front of the ferry so that we could get it home to Mui Wo. The sight of an oven on the front of this small boat must have looked ridiculous, but hey, I wasn't going to let this opportunity get away from me. It was another mile at least from the ferry pier to our apartment, so getting the oven home was a major hassle, but in the end, it was all worth it.

It was October or November when we got the oven, and it turned out to be a lot of fun for me personally. As I mentioned, the Chinese don't bake, and really, I didn't either. Still, having the oven encouraged me to try baking cookies and lattice-top apple pies, and I made both for branch parties and members that I liked. Not knowing how to bake, the Chinese were truly impressed with these baked goods, despite the fact that they were really simple and hadn't taken me a ton of time to make. I forget what those cookies with the Hershey Kiss on top are called, but those were the cookies I made the most with the jupped oven. I once took a plate of them to a gathering at Sis. Tam's home in Tuen Mun (I don't remember exactly why we traveled so far for this), and I can vividly remember her niece, Cindy (whom I later baptized), going crazy over them as soon as I took the foil off them. She ate several of them before dinner, and had sloppy chocolate stains on the side of her mouth when she was done--pretty funny for a girl who was in her late teens. She always had a weird thing for chocolate. There are chocoholics and there are chocoholics, and then there was Cindy.

I don't think I've jupped an item since I left HK. I hate used stuff, for the most part, and typically will only buy used movies, music and books--nothing else. The thought of buying used electronics or even a used car makes me sick. There's something about not being the first owner of an item that really bothers me. I kind of have the same feeling about my current car after this recent accident. All the cars I've personally owned were purchased new, but as soon as I've been in a car accident (as has happened with all of them), they've no longer felt right to me. They're used; they're damaged goods; they're no longer pristine. That really bothers me. I certainly felt that way when I got my car back from the auto body shop yesterday.

Maybe if I lived on $200/month again, I wouldn't care any more. I hope I don't ever have to go back to that.