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From Magic City Morning Star R.P. BenDedek Part Four in a series of articles about the experiences of an Australian Conversational English Teacher in Rural China. Self published author of 'The King's Calendar:The Secret of Qumran', (a study in Biblical history and chronology), R.P. BenDedek is a pseudonym. A TOUR OF MY HOUSE
The location and style of accommodation can vary from those in apartment buildings (as high up as 7 stories) to separate/detached quarters at ground level. Ground level in China by the way is referred to as the 'first floor'. My apartment is located in an extreme corner of the residential complex, as one half of a ground floor building, and is directly opposite the ladies section of the public convenience. The grey building to its left houses recently graduated teachers, although our nearest neighbour Mr. Liu is the school electrician. The very first thing I ever did when I was shown to my new home, was to ask what that building opposite it is. When no one answered me, I just walked over, went in, did a quick about face and walked out. It was a while before I realised it was the ladies toilet. My second shock was walking inside my apartment.
The first thing I noticed was the light fitting on the ceiling. It sort of reminded me of something out of the TV program Dallas. Ornate, ostentatious, and clinically white. Nowadays it's clinically covered with cobwebs which in addition to helping control the mosquito population, offsets the stark white of the room. Everything about the apartment appeared wonderfully overdone and it was quite apparent that the school had put a lot of effort into its appearance. Now at this point, I must point out something that was said to me in Beijing upon my arrival. 'Everything in China is a facade'. This statement has helped me get through many difficult situations, but the reason I mention it here, is that despite the way the house �looked�, it is a 'dreadful' house (by western standards) to manage.
Firstly, there is absolutely no support for the TV. It sits on a platform that rests on the back of the cabinet (it is not affixed to it), and upon two round movable supports. There is literally nothing to stop it from crashing down if it were bumped. The two 'opening outward' doors both work, but the roll up ones do not. When my brother tried to relocate his identical cabinet, it fell to pieces. I on the other hand had already discovered the disasters awaiting anyone who dares to move a piece of furniture. The first thing I wanted to do in the house was clean the dusty floors. Naturally I pulled the dressing table (with half size mirror) away from the wall, to discover that the whole mirror section (one metre square) was nailed into the back of the cupboard with two half inch nails. Naturally, the whole thing fell down, and I will have to wait seven years for things to improve in my life. Now speaking of things that break and collapse, I guess I had better explain what all that bedding is doing in the lounge room. My bed had the appearance of a beautifully modern western style bed with a regular mattress. It came with the usual paraphernalia, bed head, two sets of matching side draws and of course the dressing table. The base of the bed however consisted of four sides that 'slot' into each other using a metal hook. Running the length of the bed were two support planks for the mattress, with four planks running crosswise. The bed always wobbled when I got into it or moved suddenly, but one day as I climbed into it, it collapsed on the right side and the mattress consequently was left sitting at a 45 degree angle. I informed my liaison officer about it, and it was promptly fixed three weeks later. (Well in China that counts as 'prompt'. It took four weeks and 5 requests in the middle of winter to have my air conditioner fixed.) While I waited for the bed to be fixed, I took to sleeping on the mattress which I took to the lounge room. When the bed was fixed, I watched as the repairer reattached the metal thing into which the 'hook' goes (can you tell I'm not mechanical?). He put it on upside down. Even I could see that. I tried to tell him, but he couldn't grasp my meaning. When the bed was reassembled, the bed end was 'x' number of millimetres (quarter inch) off the ground. I pointed this out to him, so he smashed a little bit of wood with the hammer, and shoved it into the gap. Looking pleased with himself, he smiled and said 'bye-bye'. Two weeks later the bed collapsed again. I packed the whole thing up including the mattress (which always stunk), and put them in the corner of the bedroom, and made up a bed in the lounge room, using three 'quilts' for cushioning. My lifelong 'bad back' problem soon disappeared, and every attempt since then to get me a new bed has been met with stiff resistance. But don't think I have finished with this little vignette, I will come back to 'the bed' in another story. You can also see a big water bottle in these photos. Nobody drinks tap water in China. Every household has one of these contraptions. It costs 5 yuan to replace the bottle (about 60 cents US$). But that is only if you go and collect it. For one yuan extra you can drop the bottle off with the security police at the school's front gate, and in the afternoon when the water truck comes to the school, 'somebody' will bring the bottle to your house, and if you are home, will even come inside and put it on the 'thing-me-jig' for you.
The two photos above provide you with a view of the other side of the lounge room, and a view of the dining room. The kitchen is to the left of the dining table, and the room to the right is the spare bedroom, which is now my office. The closed door in the photograph on the right, is the door to the bathroom. In the right hand picture in the right side foreground one can see a row of shoes. There are in fact 25 pairs of slippers (don't ask) as well as all the other shoes. At the time of writing this story I have three Chinese boys living with me. You will also note some bags on the floor by the door. This is household rubbish (no food scraps � they get thrown out the window.) These bags pile up at the door until I spot a particular man or his wife. I dutifully hand the rubbish to them, for which they bow and say thank you! If I end up with too many bags, I just go down and drop them at their front door. They recycle everything, and in the process earn their living. I used to just put the bags outside my door (as instructed), but discovered that some folk were particular in what rubbish was rubbish, and what rubbish was not rubbish. I noticed over time that if this couple got the bag, they actually took it away. So they won the Royal Warrant � 'Dustman for the Waiguoren'. (You will hear more about this rubbish in another article). Between the shoes and the rubbish, there are two items. If you look closely, you may identify them as a spare water bottle, and a gas bottle. My brother (who lived next door) and I both ran out of gas one evening before dinner. Neither could just run into the other's house and finish his cooking, so he decided to 'buy' an extra gas bottle for just such emergencies. The gas man comes around the complex each evening at around 5pm. He rides a nice little bicycle with tray attached. It looks like a utility truck. He calls out in a 'sing song' voice, �Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!�. Well actually I don't know what he says because he says it in Chinese, but his 'sing song monotone' does conjure up visions of that comedy in which they went around collecting dead bodies during the plague. �Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!� Gas costs 55 yuan to refill and lasts until it runs out (as any Chinese person will tell you). The spare bedroom is three steps up from the lounge room. You might have noticed something silver inside the open doorway in the last picture. It is the thermal blanket with which they covered me when I was in hospital (on my last visit home). I liked it so much I brought it back with me, and now it covers the useless computer provided me by the school. My current lounge chairs belong to my brother. That big fragile, uncomfortable and ugly monstrosity in the corner of this room, is what the school provided. When we first arrived there was a different style of chair that was replaced within the week. They were old, well worn and comfortable. These replacements are uncomfortable to sit it, and students had a habit of sitting on the arm rests, which is definitely not advisable. The base supports are all uneven making for a disaster waiting to happen if you should be so foolish as to sit in them with a drink in hand. When my brother and I first arrived, he took the master bedroom and I got this room. When he moved into the apartment next door, I remained in the spare bedroom, because I like to have open windows and curtains (being somewhat claustrophobic). Since the windows in the master bedroom overlook the ladies toilets, it does not actually offer an appealing view.
Speaking of clothing, in the two photographs above, you can see where MY clothes are kept. The metal wire from which they hang, is most assuredly the most 'solid and trustworthy' piece of equipment in the house. It currently holds all the clothes for three persons, and is great for hanging up clothes to dry during wet weather (every other day). The light brown desk that you see, is the dressing table minus the mirror. The other desks actually belong to my brother, and I have the use of them since he left this school to go work in ChangZhou near NanJing. If he and his wife have not returned by the time I finally leave, then his mother-in-law will take them. She lives about 15 minutes drive from here. The doors to the guest room and the master bedroom face each other. The two rooms are separated by the bathroom, and all three are elevated above the rest of the house. In the bottom photo (Above / Left) you can see the dining room and the guest bedroom. The top photo is of the master bedroom clothes closet/wardrobe (whichever term you prefer).
Now I don't mean to imply that the knobs don't exist, because they do. They are in one of the drawers. But if you actually attach them to the wardrobe, then you can't open the two sliding doors to the hanging closets. The photo (right) gives a view of the rest of the master bedroom. The original bed was transferred to my brother's apartment when he left. The bed head (top left corner) comes from my bed and was overlooked when I dumped the rest of it. In front of it is the other lounge chair. The bed is currently occupied by Xie Qing Chao who by the time you read this, will be in university probably in Wuhan. His single bed (provided by the school for him) has a wooden 'mattress' over which is placed one single' quilt' to lay on. The bedhead by the way is a separate entity. Move the bed and the bed head falls.
Since power supply is never to be taken for granted however, there are occasions when there is no hot water. But then again, sometimes you don't need the water heated, because much more frequently, there is no water at all. One thing you learn very quickly, is never to put off having a shower. You will discover that the morning or evening that you were too tired or lazy to take a shower, was in fact your last opportunity for several days to do so. This of course is quite a different situation to the necessity of taking a shower before midnight, at which time water pressure is either so low or completely non existent, that taking a shower is pointless.
There are however several advantages to these modern Chinese bathrooms. Firstly you never have to worry about washing the floor, or the toilet for that matter. You merely grab the shower hose, point it around the room and 'Voila!', the bathroom is clean. The other advantage is that if you are feeling tired or perhaps consider that nature may be calling, you can just sit on the toilet and take your shower there. As for the toilet, it is a modern fully functioning flush toilet (when you have water to flush with). It has a dry pan however and that is where that red bucket (sitting directly under a cold water tap) comes in. Waste is flushed into a channel that runs outside the bathroom wall, down to the front of the house, and left under the brick wall to be collected in a big ditch that looks like a stagnant pond. Beyond that, I shall say no more of the waste management program except to say, that hot water, detergent and loads of bleach should regularly be flushed down the toilet. The bathroom comes with two other features. One is a self-detaching fluorescent light, which, when not sitting in its bracket, can be found hanging just off to the left of the hand basin, a position which for some reason seems to guarantee its functionality. The other is that it comes equipped with a means to check on the kids when you are in the shower. Have you ever been in the bathroom and wondered: �What are those boys up to out there?�. In my bathroom it is not necessary to open the door to find out. You just look through the cracks in the door. Of course this is a two way feature, and try as I might I still cannot figure out how that photo of my private parts that I found in the camera, was actually made, given the size of the gap in the door at that height. The lounge, dining room and kitchen are all lower than the bedrooms and bathroom.
The lounge room is directly opposite the bathroom, and to its right is the kitchen. To get there however you cross in front of the dining room. The kitchen comes will all the necessities, although the toaster I purchased myself.
So I generally just do a full load full wash. This will be in cold water, for except during the heat of summer, you can only get cold water in the kitchen. In the middle of the day in summer of course you can only get hot water. Which is quite convenient really because to wash the dishes, one needs to fetch hot water from the bathroom. While photographs seem to make everything except people appear in a good light, there are design flaws in the sink and bench which cause problems. Like everything else in China, the kitchen sink is not on the level, and there are huge gaps between the sink's three sides and the adjoining walls. Water therefore runs on the sink's edges and falls straight to the floor. When the washing machine is running, it too deposits water on the floor, from the pipe which runs under the cupboard. All kitchen waste water runs to the other side of the wall, and is received back into the earth.
In the meantime, the school provided dining room 'table' base (majiang/majong table when the table top is removed) sits beside the refrigerator and is used for extra needed grocery storage. Ending this story as I have with a photograph of my pantry (so to speak), allow me to give you a little insight into what grocery and other assorted items cost the ordinary Chinese person. Tourists of course like to use the $ conversion rate to determine the TRUE price of something, but that does not truly reflect the cost to the average man in the street. Just to put prices into perspective in China, a first year teacher will earn 600 yuan per month. An ordinary teacher will earn 2000 yuan, as will a government officer (manager/clerk).
Toaster $200 (cheapest) - Bread $4 - Stove $200. Pork or Beef $15 per kilogram. A scrawny chicken will cost $20 - Tomatoes (vary with season) $1.60 to $8 per kilo - Potatoes $2 kg - Capsicum between $6 and $10 kg - Fresh corn in season, three cobs for $1 but 425g tinned corn is $3.20 - Apples cost $3 kg Milk works out at about $7 a litre - A small block of cheese $25 - Twenty-one Eggs cost $7 - A bottle of Nescafe coffee (200gm) $50 - A cup of instant coffee $25 - Loose cookies $9 kg - Orange Juice 1.5 litre $5.70 Coke 1.5 lit. $4.80 - can of coke $3 - Toilet paper is $2.70 per roll - Lux soap $3.20 - Bleach 600gm $4.70 (cheapest) - A solid dinner knife is $5 - 450 ml bottle of beer is $2 There is an OK cheap bottle of red wine for $17 and a white for $21. Generally it will cost you upwards of $60 for an ordinary bottle of wine - Cigarettes vary between $4 and $30 per pack - The cheapest shirt will cost $30 and the cheapest trousers $70 The local bus costs $1 - Express bus for 3 hour ride to the capital costs $45 - Plane from Wuhan to any major city will cost $1000 (yet possible to get it for $500). When you live in China, you have to stop thinking about the conversion rates (except when it comes to buying clothes). R.P.Bendedek ADDITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Note: Some photographs were lost when the server was changed. Article was updated August 2007. © Copyright 2002-2007 by Magic City Morning Star |
