Location: Commonwealth Avenue, Boston University Campus Date: circa 2012
Dear Chinese-auntie-collecting-bottles-on-Comm-Ave,
I don’t remember your name and I don’t remember how we started chatting, but I probably called you “Ayi,” which is Chinese for auntie used to address older women, and I assume mutual smiles triggered our conversation. Maybe you had asked if I were Chinese? 
Anyhow, I was walking down Commonwealth Avenue bustling with college kids, and you were lugging around a trash bag — were you pushing a shopping cart? — filled with empty cans and bottles. You wore sleeve-covers Chinese people wear when cooking or doing manual labor to keep your real sleeves clean.
We started chatting in Chinese, and I must’ve asked why you were picking trash, which now doesn’t seem so polite. But after all these years, I still remember your answer so clearly:
You said your daughter was at school, so you came out to collect cans and bottles as a pastime and as a bonus, for a little extra cash.
I’ll be honest. That was not at all what I expected to hear. It didn’t even occur to me someone 
could pick bottles for fun! Although, now that I think of it…I’d done that as a kid, y’know? I didn’t dig through other peoples’ trash, but I used to bring all my family’s cans and bottles to Star Market so I could squeeze them through the black hole of the big green recycling machine. Each nickel the machine spit out made me proud. I’d then keep this change until there was enough to bring back to Star Market, so I could dump them into the CoinStar machine that sorted and counted the coins, and spit out dollar bills.
When I first saw you, I remember feeling sad because you were a Chinese woman my parents’ age picking bottles from public trashcans. Actually, my mind had fabricated a complete story of your life before we even spoke. I imagined you came to America with nothing but hopes of a better life for your children, slaved for someone else doing manual labor, and could still only scrape by by collecting trash on your days off. Perhaps there is some truth to my version of your story because it is the experience of so many immigrant families chasing the American Dream.
But it makes me wonder how many other fictional stories I have narrated before? Probably stories so farfetched they’d be categorized as fantasy fiction. But I’m no J.K. Rowling.
Anyway, I’m writing years later because I want to tell you that those few minutes we chatted influenced me deeply and affected the way I look at people. While I still have that cruel habit of narrating peoples’ lives in my head without even talking to them — sometimes a sob story, sometimes a romantic comedy, and others a tragic tale of loss and addiction — I keep that tiny internal voice to remind me that everyone has their own story. They don’t need me, or anyone else, to tell it.
Perhaps we’ll cross paths again someday, or maybe we already have but have forgotten each other’s faces. Either way, I hope you and your family are doing well, and that your daughter doesn’t have to collect bottles unless she chooses to. Finally, thank you.
Sincerely,
Emily
*not my original photos. I forgot to credit those photos and now can’t find them on google….will keep trying!
Letters to Strangers