ECW Press granted Pancouver permission to publish “Payday at the Bottle Depot” (below), which is excerpted in part from Very Vancouver: Uncovering the Soul of a West Coast City by Christopher Cheung. Copyright © by Christopher Cheung, 2026.
Liang was a casual binner. Or so she said. It’s hard to believe her when she’s meticulously mapped out the best spots for collecting.
“I have to work fast to collect these, you know,” she said, gesturing to her trolley. “There are always people drinking at the park, but there are always people like me waiting for them to finish.”
Aunties like her are a feisty bunch. It doesn’t matter if there’s a language barrier. A big smile will do.
A Chinese man passed us with two bags of his own. It was someone from Liang’s building. He was on his way to the depot, too, and just in time to catch the bus pulling up on Main Street.
But Liang never took the bus. Not after the attacks.
Chinatown might be home to Chinese seniors, but they haven’t been safe in their own neighbourhood. They have been bullied and pushed out of lineups at soup kitchens and food banks by others who don’t believe they’re poor, who paint them as freeloaders, who might think they are secretly crazy-rich-Asian millionaire migrants. Racists looking for someone to blame for the pandemic made things even worse. Liang’s neighbours have been bear sprayed, pushed to the ground, and cursed at with slurs. She saw evidence of hate around Chinatown: the graffiti on murals, walls, windows, and the pair of lion statues on Pender Street that welcomed people into the neighbourhood. “GOOF CHINA,” read an ugly scrawl on one lion. “COVID 19 CHINA,” read the other.
There was a bus attack that Liang heard about on the news. A man allegedly told two East Asian women wearing masks, “Go back to your country. That’s where it all started.” When someone tried to intervene, he allegedly kicked her and yanked her hair so hard that he tore out a clump. Seniors might have their reasons for moving to Chinatown, but it also meant that they had to live with being exposed to such dangers and hate.
These days, it was not good to draw attention. Binning made Liang extra visible, not to mention audible, carrying rattling recyclables. The thought of flagging down a bus and hauling her cargo on-board under the eyes of the other passengers frightened her. Anyone could blame her for causing a health hazard, worried Liang. She’d rather not do anything that might cause trouble.
“I just tell myself that a walk is good exercise,” she said, watching as her neighbour sped away on the bus.
Walking wasn’t all bad. There was often an extra container or two waiting for her. As we made our way down busy Main Street, something glittering on the road caught her eye.
It was a can of Canada Dry’s cranberry ginger ale, flattened paper-thin by passing cars. Liang waited for a gap in traffic before stepping off the sidewalk curb to pinch it, adding the wafer of a can to her garbage bag.
“The depot still accepts them like this,” she said with a laugh.
The walk from Chinatown to the recycling depot revealed a landscape of change. She passed the new coffee shops with Italian espresso machines that prompted her fellow seniors to say that Chinatown had turned into Coffeetown. She passed the old dive bars on Main Street, trying to hang on after the cocktail lounges and fine-dining restaurant moved in, places that earned rave reviews and Michelin stars, attracting visitors who criticized the area while praising the delicious offerings in the same breath. She passed the underbelly of the viaduct, the only part of the planned highway project that was built, the project that would’ve destroyed much of the neighbourhood. Chinatown had been saved in the 1970s by residents who stormed city hall in protest, but when a small army of seniors did the same in the 2010s and 2020s to protest new condo developments, the city went ahead and approved them anyway.
Chinese businesses were closing one after another. Produce used to be on every block, with fierce competition between grocers shouting the deals of the day to fight for customers. Now there’s only three such places. In their place are new boutiques with messages of welcome in Chinese on their windows, but Liang had no idea what they sold. Chinese Canadian families in Vancouver and beyond used to come down regularly to do their shopping. These days, she more often brushes shoulders with young people in baggy streetwear doing photoshoots in front of boarded-up storefronts of Chinese businesses for their authenticity. Sometimes, they’d turn their two-thousand-dollar cameras towards the seniors, snapping their portraits unawares to post on Instagram.
“Even if I had money,” said Liang, “I have nowhere to spend it.”
Chinatown wasn’t perfect, and the Chinatown that Liang knew was shrinking. But it was still the only comfortable place in the region where Chinese seniors who came to Canada in their late adulthood could live on their own. The landlords and societies in possession of old buildings rented units out for cheap, and there was the benefit of neighbours and services who spoke Cantonese and some Mandarin.
“I used to live on the east side,” Liang told me. She emigrated from China to Canada to live with her children and help raise her grandchildren. After they grew up, she and her husband moved out.
She found work in nearby restaurants washing dishes. I was surprised to learn their names, as I had eaten there many times, and was left wondering about the invisible workforce of seniors like Liang toiling behind the scenes.
Being self-sufficient was important to her and her husband, and Chinatown offered them a new life.
“Even without English, we can get by,” she said.
Liang started to notice that her neighbours in the building were collecting empty cans and bottles. They had a lot at the restaurant, so she brought them home as a gift to them. Her boss noticed this and asked if she was interested in learning how to become a binner.
“Why not?” replied Liang.
“I’ll find someone to teach you,” said her boss.
She set Liang up with a binner that she knew. But that instructor took her far away, out of Chinatown, out of Vancouver, and into the city of Burnaby.
When her boss heard about this, she was furious.
“Why would she take you so far?” she cried. “Let me find you someone else.”
The second instructor was better. She showed Liang where the closest recycling depot was, how to sort the containers, how much they were worth, and how to cash them out. Nobody at the depot spoke English, so it was important to have a Cantonese-language instructor.
“This seems to be a common story,” said Beverly Ho, the operations manager at Yarrow Intergenerational Society for Justice, a non-profit that works with low-income seniors in Chinatown: grandchildren grow up, grandparents move out. They either value their independence, or their families don’t want them in the home anymore.
Yarrow has come across a significant number of seniors who have incomes less than $15,000 a year. Some are undocumented or haven’t yet been Canadian citizens for ten years, disqualifying them from pensions. Seniors may not have family nearby, or have families who are low-income themselves and unable to provide financial support.
As a result, these seniors work. Ho has met some who do care work, taking care of children or minding other seniors who require assistance. Some work in the food industry, like wrapping dim sum, but the most common place of employment was in restaurant kitchens.
Christopher Cheung is the author of Very Vancouver: Uncovering the Soul of a West Coast City.
Binning is an attractive add-on because it’s flexible. You don’t need a resumé or a reference. But binners are different from other workers like custodians and garbage collectors who handle waste because those are formal professions regulated by WorkSafeBC. The provincial organization recommends anyone coming into contact with bacteria and bodily fluids to use personal protective equipment like gloves. Workers also receive mandatory training about safety. Binners do similar work, but they are unregulated, self-employed, and often poor. Even if they know to don masks and gloves, these things cost money.
Binners have also been making less money over the years. Stanley Woodvine, a multitalented binner, blogger, and all-around handyman who’s an unhoused resident of the nearby neighbourhood of Fairview, often tells me about the evolving economics of binning. He has been living off the streets for nearly two decades, and binning in that time with his bike and trailer. In November 2019, newspapers talked about binners rejoicing when containers under one litre were boosted from five cents to ten, even hoarding their hauls in anticipation of the switch so that they could earn double. But that was followed with bad news in the following year, when containers over one litre were reduced from twenty cents to ten. According to Encorp Pacific, the non-profit that runs the system in the province, this was good for customers: “This will simplify the overall system and make it even easier for you to recycle all your beverage containers — regardless of size.” Woodvine remembered a time before 1998 when plastic two-litre pop bottles went for thirty cents, among other changes. With inflation, he calculated that binners today are taking home half of what they would’ve earned a little over two decades ago.
“I don’t know if you know, but when we’re binning, we’re touching garbage,” he told me sarcastically in the middle of Covid.
Cities throughout history have always had people making a living scavenging and selling the stuff that their neighbours leave behind, from bonegrubbers and ragpickers to scrap metal collectors. Vancouver is no different. Binners might be a regular sight, and celebrated for recycling, but the irony is that they’re cleaning up a city that doesn’t clean up after itself, and they’re doing so because there aren’t social supports for them. Binners, particularly seniors like Liang, are brave, no doubt about that. But if they had the money, I wonder if they’d still be sorting through trash with their hands and frequenting places where they might be attacked for their race or assaulted for their containers. Vancouver has tried so hard to earn the label of the world’s “greenest city,” but there is an undeniable dystopia in the utopia if it’s subjecting people like Liang to the dangers of this labour that offers marginal rewards.
Nonetheless, Liang was glad that she took up her boss’s offer to learn how to bin. Life at her age can pass slowly. It wasn’t long after Liang began binning that her boss retired from the restaurant, and Liang decided to retire too. Her neighbours who used to bin were getting old and found themselves unable to make the trek to the depot. And when Liang’s husband died and she was left in Chinatown on her own, binning became an easy way to, quite literally, pick up some extra money at any time.
Excerpted in part from Very Vancouver: Uncovering the Soul of a West Coast City by Christopher Cheung. Copyright © by Christopher Cheung, 2026.
Published by ECW Press Ltd. www.ecwpress.com