The greatest hazard I encountered while reporting this book was temptation. At a Bookoff in Yokohama, Japan, I nearly scooped up armfuls of used Thomas the Tank Engine train cars for my son; at Empty the Nest in Minnesota, I was on the verge of purchasing a Monday Night Football board game that I’d played as a child; in Tamale, Ghana, I spotted a vintage J. Geils Band T-shirt in a street stall selling secondhand clothes; at the Amcorp Mall in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, I inquired about an art deco dresser; at a Koenji vintage shop (whose name I failed to write down), I was tantalized by a vintage Coleman tent in excellent condition; at Alliance Laundry Systems, I briefly considered text messaging my wife that it was time to buy a new washer.
Mostly, I resisted. Mostly. At the Goodwill Outlet Center on Irvington Road in Tucson, I purchased an Angry Birds board game and a pair of corduroys, both for my son. At a Goodwill on University Avenue in St. Paul, I purchased a Chutes and Ladders game, also for my son. Then there was that vintage Northwest Orient Airlines shoulder bag that I bought at Stillwater’s Midtown Antique Mall (described in chapter 4) and subsequently gifted to my cousin Bruce. And I can’t forget the handful of porcelain refrigerator magnets in the shape of vegetables that I purchased at Singapore’s Sungei Road Flea Market. Meanwhile, my wife—who accompanied me for some of the reporting for this book—also bought stuff. In her accounting: a “few” books for herself, a handful of toys for our son, an REI-branded shirt, and a Lululemon top for $3.99 (incredible bargain!)—almost all of which were found at the Goodwill up the street from the house we rented in Tucson.
We don’t regret any of the purchases. It’s good stuff. And except for two notable items, I don’t regret what I didn’t buy.
It’s mid-afternoon on Saturday, and the donation door at the Goodwill on South Houghton and East Golf Links is nearly blocked by the flood of stuff. I stand inside, relieved by the air-conditioning, and watch as cool Michelle Janse walks through the barricade of stuff with pivots worthy of an NBA All-Star. She’s carrying a stack of books on top of a stack of magazines. “We’re getting a lot of books the last two months,” she tells me. “Digital age, you know, phones.” She drops them into a washing-machine box labeled RAW BOOKS.
Raw books? I look into the box anticipating a frenzied stack of hot romance. Instead I see a two-foot-deep frozen whirlpool of coloring books, cookbooks, recipe binders, several romances (The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon catches my eye, and feels apt), and dozens of stray fashion magazines. It’s depressing but nothing I haven’t seen before. At Bookoff’s Yokohama warehouse, dozens of boxes like this are bound for recycling plants daily.
Muscular Mike Mellors and another employee start to push furniture into the warehouse. They don’t have to say anything: I know I’m in the way. So I retreat toward the furniture that’s priced and ready to be moved onto the sales floor and stop at a long table covered in gray plastic storage totes. Each is labeled with a price: $0.99, $1.99, $2.99. Next to the table are carts filled with “wares,” the Goodwill term for used stuff that isn’t electronics, clothing, media, or furniture. Employees are ordinarily stationed here to sort and price the wares from the carts to the totes (it’s all-hands-on-deck at the donation door as Saturday rush hour hits). The totes will then be taken to the sales floor, and the merchandise placed on shelves.
I lean over the $2.99 tote. It holds a set of matching blue plates held together with a rubber band, a neatly folded Texas state flag, and a set of six steak knives in their original packaging. Next to the $2.99 tote is a much fuller $0.99 tote. Among other things, it holds a dish rack, a wooden meter stick, a Tupperware bin, a glass vase, and—in the corner farthest from me—two small porcelain cats roughly the size of a hand. One is black and one is white.
I hesitate and feel my throat catch. “Sasha and Julian,” I think, recalling the names of my mom’s beloved cats who passed a few years before her. These two porcelain cats—precisely these two porcelain cats—used to sit on a side table in her living room in Minnetonka, inanimate reflections of the real cats lounging on the floor.
I reach into the tote, pick them up, and turn them in my hands. I don’t know what happened to my mom’s porcelain cats. It’s possible that during one of her moves they were lost or perhaps landed in a relative’s basement. It’s likely they eventually ended up at a Goodwill or a Salvation Army. It doesn’t really matter, though. I know that these porcelain cats found 1,600 miles from where she enjoyed hers aren’t hers. Porcelain cats that land in the $0.99 bin at Goodwill don’t move very far, even in an era of globalized secondhand.
I take them out of the bin and set them on the table. I’m sure Cathy, the store manager, will let me buy them before they go on the shelves.
And then I put them back.
Better that someone else, someone like my mom, has a chance to enjoy them. And if nobody buys them, if those porcelain cats end up in a desert landfill, I take solace in knowing that somebody, somewhere, had a chance to enjoy them before they ended up in a tote at Goodwill. When I started this book, I wanted to find out what happened to my mother’s stuff after I donated it. More or less, I think I have. I just wish I’d snapped a picture of those porcelain cats with my phone before they slinked away to their own version of obsolescence. In retrospect, however, I knew the answer long before Tucson, Tokyo, or anywhere else I traveled while reporting. At heart, every consumer sort of knows. Sooner or later, we all know: it’s just stuff, and stuff isn’t forever.
For an author with a partner or spouse, a book becomes a family project. My wife, Christine, was the first person to hear about my trips to cleanouts, to clothing markets, to the donation door, to the Yokohama warehouse where Bookoff performs triage on tons of used books per day. The experience impacted both of us. I was never much of a shopper in the first place, and I became less of one.
Christine listened to my stories and often took them more personally. One evening early in this project, I noticed she was examining the books in the personal library that she’s been carefully collecting since childhood. She does this often, flipping through favorite passages. But on this occasion there was a slightly frantic nature to her page turning. She wasn’t reading; she was looking for and finding damage. We live in a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, and the tropical heat and humidity take a toll on books: mold, foxing, pages sticking together, pages turning yellow and brown. So in the days and weeks and months that followed, Christine did something unexpected. She decided to give away her books. Rather than have them rot on the shelves, only to be opened once in a while, she wanted someone else to have the chance to enjoy them.
First she tried donating them to charity shops. But the charities were already inundated with books and didn’t want them. So she sought out local book exchanges and book lovers, and the books started moving off her shelves. As they did, Christine realized something lucrative: people wanted her books badly enough to buy them. So she sold them. And when she sold them, she found, they disappeared more quickly than when she tried to give them away.
Soon buyers started inquiring about titles Christine didn’t have, so she started acquiring secondhand books and selling those, too. In other words, she happened upon her own secondhand business. These days, she hunts flea markets, remainder shops, online sites, and any other place that carries titles appealing to Malaysia’s thriving community of readers.
Money is one reward. The other is a more bookish life filled with even more bookish friends. As it happens, Malaysia has a wildly committed community of readers (the KL Book Appreciation Club has—as of this writing—8,422 members), many of whom constitute Christine’s social circle. At all hours, she’s immersed in book-related messages on her phone.
One evening, as I was nearing the end of this manuscript, a college student messaged Christine to ask about Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism, by Fumio Sasaki. It’s an international bestseller by a self-described “regular guy” who decided that his life was too full of stuff. Sasaki’s fix was to become a minimalist. He pared his life to its material essentials: a bed, a table, a few changes of clothes, his laptop, and a few other items. For those occasions in which he finds himself needing to acquire an actual item, he requires that the object meet these minimalist criteria:
(l) the item has a minimalist type of shape, and is easy to clean; (2) its color isn’t too loud; (3) I’ll be able to use it for a long time; (4) it has a simple structure; (5) it’s lightweight and compact; and (6) it has multiple uses.
As pictured in his book, Sasaki’s home looks like a tech-loving monk’s cell (for the record: I have visited monk’s cells, both in Japan and the United States). My guess is that most of the millions of people who buy his book admire him more than emulate him.
“I need to declutter,” wrote Christine’s college-age book-loving friend. “But I don’t know how.”a
Christine likes to sell books. She’s good at it. But not that evening. “I don’t find all these books particularly helpful,” she messaged back. “The method I use for myself is, imagine myself dead and all my stuff chucked.” The student responded with a heart, and Christine continued: “Sad right? So better let go now, especially if I can see the recipient and know the stuff will be loved or used.”
I call Christine’s method Preemptive Morbid Decluttering (PMDC), and I think there’s probably a short, morbid-advice bestseller to be written about it. The idea isn’t entirely original to Christine, of course. I’ve met numerous cleanout professionals in the United States and Japan who have their own variations on it (some are mentioned in these pages). Years spent cleaning up the messes of others instill in them a powerful desire to avoid placing that same material curse on their relatives (and the cleanout professionals those relatives might hire). If readers come to this book in search of advice—as in real-world, what-can-I-actually-do advice—Preemptive Morbid Decluttering is the best I’ve got.
By the way, Christine’s copy of Goodbye, Things remains in her possession, stored in a plastic bin, where it’s protected from the humidity and insects. “Because we’re hoarders,” she told me when I asked about it. “But mainly I hung on to it for you.”
Christine’s online friend bought a new copy.
a To be clear: I am not in the habit of reading my wife’s text messages. The only reason that I know about this exchange is because Christine mentioned it as it was happening. Later, I asked to see it—and then asked permission to use it.