FORTNIGHT JOURNAL :: Documenting the Promise of the Millennial Generation

HOARDERS

IMPULSE DRIVES ECONOMIES AND CREATES STRANGE HABITS. FROM BUYING TO DUMPSTER-DIVING, ANH-THU TACKLES OUR DESIRE TO COLLECT.

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I am home in the Dallas suburbs on winter break from law school, idling on the computer and trying to figure out what to do besides devolving into a sedentary blob. My mother pops her head through my bedroom door.

“Ok, we’re going to the grocery store!”

Ah, an activity with the possibility of snacks. I hop into her 1990s-era Cadillac Sedan de Ville.

“It runs great! I will drive this until I die.”

I'm not sure if GM cars have been constructed with the same longevity as my great-uncle's Peugeot, bought literally as the French vacated Vietnam.

She’s told me this numerous times before, but I’m not sure if GM cars from the past two decades have been constructed with the same longevity as my great-uncle’s Peugeot—bought literally as the French vacated Vietnam—which still rumbles along the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, terrifying small children who believe it a ghost car that the ancestors are taking out for a day trip.

As we make our way to the local Vietnamese grocery store, my mother takes an unnecessarily circuitous route through several neighborhoods,

winding through a multiplicity of tract homes and slowing the car down to a crawl. Slowing to a rolling stop near a freshly mowed lawn, my mother points to several trash bags perched on the corner.

“Get them and throw them in the trunk. Don’t be slow, nobody will see us.”

As I had suspected, the grocery excursion was a ruse to have me as unwilling accomplice to a harvest of grass clippings. My mother wants to fertilize her garden without having to pay Home Depot for the pleasure. Since I don’t really have any choice in the matter, I dart out of the car, grab the bags and toss them into the trunk as quickly as I can, racing back to the front. Moving on, my mortification ebbs—until when we stop by another newly-cut lawn.

“Get those.”
“No!”
“Get them, or there will be no food from the garden!”
“Fine!”

My mother’s cheapness wins out over any concern for my dignity. Well-played.

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Descended from a long line of severe-minded Mekong delta gentry, coming of age at the epicenter of a raging war in a backwoods province in southern Vietnam and eventually arriving in the U.S. an almost penniless refugee—my mother has survived and thrived mainly by being very, very, very frugal. Unfamiliar with current trends of anti-consumerism, DIY culture, “freeganism” or off-the-grid living, she takes frugality to new heights rarely seen in the first world. And, having grown up in a place and time where even the wealthy had less than a dozen outfits, she can’t imagine why I would need more than three pairs of shoes.

Arriving in the U.S. an almost penniless refugee, my mother has survived and thrived by being very, very, very frugal.

When not tending to her formidable vegetable garden, my mother eyes used packing materials at hardware stores and warehouses, picks up discarded plywood from construction site dumps and religiously peruses weekly supermarket circulars (“eggs for 61 cents a dozen, what a deal!”) She enjoys long walks around the neighborhood, inevitably returning with random bits of china (“for your family, when you have one!”), large cabinet-like things and pieces of luggage.

Not surprisingly, from an early age onward I developed similar penchants for thriftiness. While some kids collected POGs or baseball cards, I eagerly looked forward to the Sunday newspaper, with its fat coupon books and inserts—carefully clipping and saving coupons for Lunchables, and ceramic Star Wars plates from the Franklin Mint. As an adult, I indulged in dumpster-diving, Ebaying and bankruptcy liquidation auctions. At law school, it was of little surprise that my favorite legal principle was the “finder’s-keepers” rule. Today, I remain as single-minded about finding inexpensive groceries as Indiana Jones was about recovering the Ark of the Covenant; willing to crawl through a pit of asps to obtain parmegiano reggiano for $6.99 a pound.

II

A friend and I recently started a social enterprise that distributes fair trade consumer goods from microfinance entrepreneurs in the developing world. How ironic, I think; it’s now my job to push product on to people. That is the paradox of a consumer society: It is wasteful, but crucial to economic development in less-industrialized countries, where significant aspects of GNP consist of manufacturing goods for domestic and global consumer appetites. We operate in the U.S. because we know Americans love to buy shit. It’s what keeps the global economic engines going,

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both in the developed and developing world. Consumption presupposes production, which presupposes job creation and maintenance, and so on.

III

Bored again, I’m sitting in my mom’s living room, scouring Ebay and watching Hoarders. Hoarders is a TV show where a personal organizer and cleaning crew stage something akin to a home invasion robbery. Once inside the inner sanctum of a hoarder—surrounded by mountains of stuff, stacked wall-to-wall and a meter deep—the hosts berate hapless participants, who cry as their cherished Slurpee straws and c. 1980s Lands End catalogues get thrown out by grim-looking cleaning teams.

“Why do they have so much stuff? They must be crazy,” my mother pronounces.

Hoarding seems to be a distinctly American habit; something that I associate with formerly rich, crazy old recluses, like the Beales of Grey Gardens, or the Collyer brothers. It’s fascinating, in an alien way, but at the same time awakens a deep-seated fear of mine; that I, too, will one day be found buried under 12-foot stacks of 60-year-old issues of Condé Nast publications and scavenged Nancy Drew mysteries.

Why? Because unlike my mother, whose scavenging techniques and thrift are instructed to a strong extent by notions of practicality and immediate use-value, I have to use all my willpower not to pick up or buy crap purely for the sake of a deal. Necessity dictates her collection strategies—if she can’t think of an immediate use for something she sees, she leaves it. An old, but perfectly workable stereo system is of no interest to her (unless she has someone in mind who is in the market for one), but she’ll always bring home plywood to construct ever more trestles for her garden. I, on the other hand, cannot resist carting home boxes of giant Legos or 1950s tiki-lounge records—even though I don’t own a record player, and it’s been a good 3 years since I’ve last played with Legos.

Lest I find myself twenty years from now with guys in biohazard suits throwing out my collection of novelty GI Joe bandoliers...

In the episode of Hoarders that we are watching, a woman picks through a dumpster to reclaim a plastic take-out drink cup. I love going to the thrift store, she later exclaims, showing off some hideous tchochke that she recently brought home from a Salvation Army. Ok, that’s it. I turn off my computer—lest I find myself twenty years from

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now with guys in biohazard suits throwing out my collection of novelty GI Joe bandoliers.

IV

It’s Saturday night back in New York, and I have apparently found myself being lectured on the virtues of dumpster diving by a bright-eyed activist chef. At a Brooklyn cultural space, she introduces guests to a cornucopia of apples, breads, spreads and vegetables—all of which most recently resided in a Trader Joe’s dumpster.

I reminisce about my excursions into “freegan” cuisine and practice: Nights trawling Craigslist and Freecycle listservs for gratis bookshelves and curtains, or carrying curbside furniture home with the help (and egging on) of friends and conspirators. But, I tell him, I was merely a dabbler. Being a true-blue freegan requires too great a combination of zeal, free time and highly-developed organizational skills. All of these elements are critical to mapping out ideal days and locations for dumpster diving; to be on hand for curbside furniture during end-of-month move outs; and to write up Excel spreadsheets of free appetizer and drinks offers.

Freegans are the one successful example of trickle-down economics beneficiaries I know. They rely on the cast-off wealth, and spendthrift

habits of others to create a comfortable life for themselves. They’ve adopted thrift as an ideology, critiquing the waste of a society that demands, obtains, and disposes of cheap and plentiful goods in an endless feedback loop. Friends of mine particularly devoted and skilled at scavenging have acquired possessions to rival those of any spendy investment banker, in both quantity and quality.

V

The paradox of a consumer society is that it is simultaneously wasteful, but crucial to economic development. Consumption presupposes production, which presupposes job creation and maintenance. Innovation presupposes consumer desire for novelty; not necessity. In the global economy, individual savings and thrift is OK as a virtue. But in reality, when everyone is saving, no one is shopping. And when no one is shopping, the economists and politicians who scrutinize numbers indicating economic growth start having heart palpitations.

It’s a conundrum that dogs both producers and consumers in a society where it’s all too clear that, while consumer habits have destructive environmental and human consequences, they simultaneously enable the survival of whole societies.

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Freeganism and hoarding compose opposite ends of a first-world thrift spectrum. Both are extreme responses to life in a culture and economy dependent on, and oriented towards, consistent consumption. Freegans live off the fat of the land, exploiting excess for their own ends. Hoarders save out of compulsion, seemingly afraid that the salad days may come to a screeching halt without warning, finding their own self-worth to be tied up with the objects they so carefully save, and thinking that every little thing, no matter how seemingly useless, has some sort of future value.

Both practices are symptomatic of a societal preoccupation where having more means being more, where use-value is connected more to novelty than long-term function, and where waste is a prerequisite to continued growth. Most self-described cheapskates, including myself, can be self-congratulatory in celebrating the rigor of our thrift, thinking that we are cheating the system, or wholly rejecting the fueling of a consumer-oriented society through our scavenging. However, these habits betray a mindset still firmly set on the act, if not necessarily the ethic, of consumerism. Weekly dumpster-diving trips and idle Ebaying for sport are not so different from window-shopping on Madison Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. We’ve been raised to want things—to collect and feel the rush of finding

them. Collection inevitably echoes consumerist practice. For the time being, we might just have to recognize that consumerist habits are the bread and butter of industrialized societies. As romantic as scavenging sounds, it’s hard to conceive of a society based on that principle, outside of Mad Max. We’re starting to regain old knowledge of traditional, lower-impact consumptive practices, and emphasizing an ethic of sustainability and conservation. Fair trade has become a popular trope.

But these advances are just stop-gap measures, because consumer demand will only grow as more societies become industrialized. We require a full paradigm shift in which consumer culture is not the only thing propping up the global economy. I don’t know the answers to this problem, but right now, I look to my mother as an indicator of how to perhaps navigate the vagaries of consumer culture by balancing thrift with the occasional indulgence. Fully adapted to the American way of life, she would never dream of going back to living the way she did at the age of 12, instead spending the money she makes on the kitchen utensils, renovating our house and having a flat-screen TV.

“Almost everything else, I grow or I find,” she boasts to me, lying satisfied on her couch as we watch a variety show.

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Anh-Thu is an Vietnamese-American lawyer who worked at the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia. Anh-Thu studied at Georgetown in Washington, D.C. and received her J.D. from the University of Texas. Her entries in Fortnight are essays about her experience in human rights law, growing up in a family of immigrants, and living a frugal life during an economic recession. Since publishing with Fortnight, Anh-Thu started and received incubation support for her own non-profit, Ahkun, a marketing platform for micro-loan textile goods made by formerly-trafficked women artisans in Southeast Asia.

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FORTNIGHT IS

A MULTIMEDIA DOCUMENTARY PROJECT ON THE MILLENNIAL GENERATION: THE LAST GENERATION TO REMEMBER A TIME WITHOUT THE INTERNET.