VANCOUVER—An elderly lady coming to late-night parties full of “hipsters and rockers” to pick up cans and bottles might sound unusual, but not if the party was in Rory Tucker’s backyard.

Not long after he moved into the East Vancouver property he’s rented for the past eight years, Tucker would often find the small woman with a big smile wandering the patio and yard in her brightly patterned outfits. Sometimes she would go about her business of collecting cans in the midst of a “crazy party.”

For a long time, the five housemates who lived in the rental couldn’t communicate with the woman because she didn’t speak English and they couldn’t speak her native tongue. They didn’t even know her name or where she lived, but she dropped by their yard as she pleased, sometimes multiple times a day.

After a few years of visits, the housemates learned that the woman’s name was Li Yinshun and she lived behind the rented house in a two-bedroom apartment with her family. Through a translator, they discovered that Li immigrated from Guangdong, a southern province of China, and only speaks Cantonese and the dialect Taishanese.

Though they didn’t speak the same language, Tucker and Li had other things in common.

Inspired by the large backyard of the rental property, he started gardening. Two years into his hobby in the spring of 2015, Li unexpectedly showed up with a bag of vegetable seeds while Tucker and his housemates were lounging on the patio, nursing hangovers.

“The second the sun came out when the housemates sat on the deck, she started nudging Rory,” said Martyna Czaplak, a former housemate of Tucker’s who is developing a documentary about the pair’s friendship titled A-yi, which means auntie in Cantonese.

“She was telling him it’s time. It’s time to take care of the garden, so she came with a bunch of seeds. She was just shaking a bag of seeds, and Rory was finally like, ‘OK.’ So he started gardening, and she would take the shovel out of his hands and say, ‘No, this is not right,’ ” recalled Czaplak.

Tucker made sure Li had space in the garden for her vegetables: mostly “big and hairy” cucumbers he’d never seen before and different types of bok choy. He preferred tomatoes and squash.

“She would put plastic Safeway bags on them (cucumbers) to make them heat up and grow enormous,” Tucker said. After that first day of gardening she visited in the yard “non-stop.”

Li also used the clothesline to sun-dry her laundry and cleared out a large space under the deck she uses to store her cans and her cart. It was storage space that she didn’t have in the apartment building, and when she kept her cart in the building’s parking lot, she was fined $200, according to her translator, Dong Yue Su.

One day, when Li visited, she signalled for Tucker to go down to the gate of the storage area she had cleaned out. She took out a padlock and two keys, each tied to a red ribbon.

“She gave one to me and she had one, so we had a key for this little thing and it just felt like such a little friendship bracelet. It was a great day,” he recalled.

Li said through a translator that she remembers the housemates as “very nice.”

“But I can’t understand what they are doing,” she added.

April Liu, who also acts as a translator for Li, said she observed a “high-level” of trust between Li and the “hipsters and rockers.” Because they had spent so much time together over the years, they resembled a family.

Li’s desire to garden in the yard also highlights how immigration can be especially “alienating” to seniors who often don’t speak the language and aren’t familiar with the culture, said Liu who is also an art historian at the University of British Columbia.

“Moving from a village where you’re living surrounded by farms and … animals to urban Vancouver, where you’re in a tiny little apartment in an apartment building is a huge cultural, spiritual and psychological displacement.”

During their Chinese New Year celebrations in January, the housemates invited Li and her two translators to sit down together for the first time. They had a tea ceremony, blessed the house and “talked about eight years of questions,” Czaplak said.

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“She thought we were all siblings for example, because she didn’t understand how people lived together in a house and she said, ‘Where are your parents? You have a very large family, how do they feed you?’ And we had to explain to her we’re roommates. It was really bizarre to her.”

During that meeting, Li also insisted that she wasn’t collecting cans to make money, but rather because she needed something productive to do. The meeting was captured on film by Czaplak who has plans to translate the documentary in English and Cantonese.

She said the film feels especially timely in a climate where news of wealthy Asian investors in Vancouver have “overshadowed” other immigrants who have arrived seeking a different life.

“I just want to portray how two different cultures that really know nothing about each other managed to co-exist in such a small space, meeting each other with so much curiosity and respect. Although you have no ability to communicate, (you’re) still able to build this beautiful relationship,” Czaplak said.

Jenny Peng is a Vancouver-based reporter covering business. Follow her on Twitter: @JennyPengNow

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