When Yiping Yang moved from Taishan, China to San Francisco, he worked in a restaurant kitchen. It was hard work. Co-workers fought with each other. Passions ran high.
Decades later, the work is still hard, it smells way worse, but his crew of 14 middle-aged, mostly Chinese men do not tend to bicker as they make their way through San Francisco, cleaning the city’s 2,800 public trash cans, one by one.
The crew is hired by a Chinatown-founded nonprofit with a city contract to power wash every city-owned trash can in San Francisco. They’re paid between $25 to $27 an hour and work five days a week, driving around the city in Ford Super Duty trucks…