"Stooping" in China

I never heard of it in America or Europe (seems to be a quite recent phenomenon — by that name — but see below for the deeper history of the activity).  Apparently it has taken off in China during the last year:

Stooping Takes China by Storm as Zoomers Scour the Streets for Junk

Cash-strapped young Chinese have developed a sudden passion for furnishing their homes with discarded items found on the street. Their parents are horrified.

By Fan Yiying, Sixth Tone (Jul 18, 2023)

Stooping has its roots in New York, where there is a long tradition of people leaving unwanted furniture on the stoops of their apartment buildings. The name “stooping” was coined in 2019 by a couple from Brooklyn, who set up an Instagram account sharing photos and locations of discarded items in the city. The feed — Stooping NYC — has amassed nearly half a million followers.

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"In the name of stooping, picking up trash is suddenly cool among young Chinese"

Zhao Yuanyuan, The China Project (10/6/22)

The roots of stooping are in New York:

Stooping in NYC: Meet the couple behind the popular social media account linked to the trend

By Bianca Peters, Good Day New York, FOX 5 NY (October 24, 2022)

Good Day New York finds the anonymous people behind a popular stooping NYC Instagram account that lets people in on items left for the taking on city streets.

NEW YORK – You know the saying, "One person’s trash is another person’s treasure."

Well, one Brooklynite lives by that saying, calling herself a professional at turning trash into home treasures. Abhilasha Sinha, is part-time musician and full-time treasure hunter. She has stooped 25 items in her apartment ranging from big furniture pieces to smaller décor items.

Stooping is a term that has become popular on social media. It’s when one person throws out an item and leaves on the street or their stoop for someone else to pick up before it goes to the trash.

The problem is how do you say this in Chinese?  According to Sixth Tone and The China Project, everybody is talking about it, and a lot of people are doing it, but I have not been able to find an equivalent word to "stooping" in Chinese.  To tell the truth, I think that Sixth Tone and The China Project have hyped the dimensions of "stooping" out of all proportion in China.  I suspect that it is restricted to a small circle of persons who do it as a fashion to emulate what goes on in New York, though a lot of people may be talking about it on social media as a matter of curiosity.  Since they don't have a fixed term that is strictly equivalent to "stooping", they have — so I'm told — been resorting to nonce expressions like shíhuāng 拾荒 ("scavenge") and jiǎn pòlàn 撿破爛 /  jiǎn lājī, lèsè 撿垃圾 ("pick up trash").

I've even heard some folks suggest that "stooping" might be rendered in Chinese as wānyāo 彎腰 ("bend at the waist; stoop") or fǔ 俯 ("bow / look down; stoop"), but these are clearly fallacious folk etymologies proposed by those who are unaware of the true origins of "stooping".

One school of thought, as noted by Diana Shuheng Zhang, has ingeniously adopted a jargon term from traditional antiquarianism, viz. jiǎnlòu 捡漏 (lit., "picking up leaks"), indicating that one encounters something unsought but nonetheless valuable.  Particularly in northern topolects, the verb "picking up" implies rarity.

Bottom line:  those people in China who are apt to engage in "stooping" simply use the English word when they talk about it

My brother-in-law has been doing this for decades, and he is very good at it.  He has found some amazing pieces (fine wooden chests, knick-knacks of all sorts, etc.) that are worth hundreds of dollars.  Since he lives in Seattle, the pickings are especially rich (Microsoft, Amazon, etc.).

Here in Swarthmore, I myself found an antique chamber pot with a wooden chair into which it fit — on the street just two doors away from my house.  It now sits proudly in my attic.  I also have two magnificent floor lamps, a pair of elegant end tables, and all manner of clothing (much of it unused) that I picked up at various places in the little town of Swarthmore.  Yes, I did have to stoop to pick these things up off the ground, but the harvest was well worth the effort.  As a matter of fact, this gleaning of the streets for treasured trash is one of the reasons I bought a pickup truck as soon as the pandemic was declared over.  Now there's almost no limit to what I can haul off the streets.

Only one problem:  my house is overflowing, so I occasionally have to put some things on the street myself.  That's recycling for you.

 

Selected readings

• "Sino-English neologisms" (4/14/19)
• 'Have a good day!' in Mandarin" (9/5/12)
• "The Westernization of Chinese" (9/6/12)

[Thanks to John Rohsenow, Zihan Guo, and Qianheng Jiang]