Dressed in a long raincoat and rubber boots to stave off the day's nasty weather, Kao takes a break to talk at the recycling center where he sells his papers twice a day. He must shout above the constant roar of the huge trash-compacting trucks and the rush of the nearby city traffic.
As his strong accent betrays, Kao is originally from mainland China's Jiangxi province. He came to Taiwan in 1949 as a sailor in the Nationalist navy. He quit the military after about a decade and began doing construction work. At the age of sixty-three, he was fired and began collecting used paper. Divorced several years ago, he now lives alone in a rundown apartment. His four daughters and one son are all married and live elsewhere.
Every day I begin work at about six in the morning, and I don't go home until seven at night. It's a pretty long workday. All day long, I pick up used paper like newspapers and cardboard boxes from apartment building dumpsters and I sweep the grounds of the Far Eastern Electronics Corp. near my house in exchange for their used paper. Unlike other scavengers, I only collect paper because I think it's easier to get and I don't need to spend time sorting out recyclable things in the trash heaps. In order to live, I must work every day. Even on Sundays, I can't take time off.
My work is automatic—it doesn't require any thought, just physical strength. Since it's not considered a legal profession by the government, recycling collectors like me are slowly disappearing from the streets. Although my job isn't legal, I think that as long as I get the paper in a reasonable way—I mean, not by stealing it—I really don't have to worry about being stopped by the police.
For me, the time seems to have passed quickly. I've been doing this for seven years, although I keep hoping to find a different job. I really dislike my job. Every time someone yells "Scavenger!" at me while I ride along the street, I feel humiliated. I'm ashamed of myself for doing this. But I have no choice—no employer wants to hire a 70-year-old man like me. If I could get a different job, I wouldn't stay with this one for another second.
Another reason to leave this job is that there's no money in it. Used paper gets only 1.8 dollars [less than 7 U.S. cents] per kilogram. On average, I make only six or seven hundred dollars [US$23-US$27] a day. That's hard to live on in expensive Taipei. All I can afford is to feed myself, an old divorced man. Plus, because my work is not considered legal, I don't get health care benefits.
Since my wife left me several years ago, I live alone in an old apartment where the paint is peeling off the walls. My son, who's a taxi driver with two kids, rents it for me. His life is not easy either, so sometimes I have to pay part of the rent myself.
Year by year, it's getting tougher and tougher for me to pedal my heavy cart loaded with paper to the distributor. It weighs about a hundred kilograms when it's full. With the constant heavy lifting, I have aches here and aches there. So, to your question, "How long will you stay on the job?" I can only answer that I have no idea. Maybe only the gods can say.
Safety is another concern of mine. Usually, I come to the recycling center at least twice a day to sell my paper. I hate the racket of the garbage-compacting trucks and the polluted air over here. Plus, when the trucks are grinding up trash, you never know what might shoot out the back—glass, liquid, bits of plastic. There are no safety features on the trucks, so I always stay away from them as much as possible.
I don't talk much during work. Sometimes I chew the fat about things with other collectors—current events, who murdered who, sensational news stories. I like to take five minutes for a cigarette break. After work, watching TV and playing chess are my main recreations. Actually, I'm not satisfied with my life. If I had more money, I'd spend more time traveling, shopping, going out and doing things.
Every night when I get through with my work, I'm pretty well exhausted. Sometimes my body aches so bad that when I get home and try to hit the hay, I actually just roll around in the dark. At times like that, smoking gives me a great sense of relief, which I interpret as pleasure.
I used to be a heavy smoker, more than a pack a day. But after a doctor told me that I had some health problems, I realized I had paid a high price for smoking. So I decided to quit. But you know, it's not easy to quit completely. In fact, I failed. At least now I rarely smoke more than one cigarette a day.
You asked me, "What are my main goals?" This is a question I ask myself every day. People never stop wondering about the future and pursuing their goals, but they never know what's going to become of their lives. I was always told that you have to do something honorable and not cowardly in your life. However mean your life is, face it and live it. It's sad but, as a scavenger, my main goal seems to be just keeping hunger away.
Still, I haven't given up on my life. I'm waiting and hoping to get a veteran's I.D. card, which will prove that I served in the Nationalist navy during the 1940s. But some documents are missing, and it's made my application difficult. I first have to ask my former unit commander in the navy to help find the missing document, which was left in a government office in Kaohsiung when I applied for my citizen I.D. card in 1953.
Maybe you don't know that most scavengers are veterans and the rest are homeless, retarded, or handicapped. [He gestures toward a fellow collector walking nearby.] He's retarded. Most of us, like me, live a pretty rough life. If I can get the veteran's I.D., I will get retirement money to live on for several years. Then probably I would quit scavenging. I'm not the only one hoping for this—other scavengers are hoping for it too. I'm waiting for that happy day.
—interview by Jessie Cheng