For his first job in America, my eldest brother worked in a supermarket. Among his many chores he found one particularly distasteful: throwing expired food into the garbage bin, then pouring bleach on top to discourage scavengers.

My brother tossed away perfectly preserved bags of cookies, frozen dinner trays, and cans of tuna. But it pained him to see so much go to waste. So, without fail, he would call my cousins and me over to salvage what we could before he poured the bleach.

After a while, the supermarket manager caught on to our scheme, and the bin got a padlock, and my brother was out of a job.

I was barely a teenager when I came here to San Francisco, I remember hauling some of the expired food home to my family with glee. What Americans threw away was a treasure back home in Vietnam, where children scavenged through piles of garbage for anything salvageable and adults canvassed the neighborhoods buying old papers and magazines to recycle.

I also remember seeing the city’s downtown at night for the first time. I was in awe of all the bright lights inside majestic yet empty high rises – so beautiful and so wasteful. Electricity back in home was expensive, and a large population of children still studied at night by oil lamps.

What the Vietnamese refugee child marveled at, however, now causes the American adult to fret. My family and I have moved to the middle class life. Like everyone else, we buy the latest laptop, the newest car, and the most fashionable furniture. If we were once shocked by America’s opulence, we have long since learned to take it for granted that, well, there’s plenty more where that came from.

We have become consumers. We consume.

But we also begin to fret. My 13-year old American born niece is mourning the drowning of polar bears as the glaciers melt. She admonished her parents when they failed to recycle.

And I, too, wonder if our way of life has a direct consequence on the weather. Is the good life, a la American style, driving the ecosystems toward the brink?

Last night, walking home, I saw two old Chinese women scavenging for aluminum cans and plastic bottles in a garbage bin behind a restaurant. A worker came out and yelled at them to stop. As I watched them scurried into the shadows, I thought of my own humble past.

But more: I feared that, with the way things go, as consumerism eclipsing frugality, and global warming threatening to undermine our civilization, those two scavengers may well represent our own retro-future.

Copyrights @ Andrew Lam