Paint. Fumigate. Decorate.
Or 10 Groovy Songs To Make Love To In Your Late-1970s Communist Bachelor Pad
NOTE: This post was actually started last week — hence the reference to nice weather, which was as short-lived as anyone familiar with Shanghai would suspect — and finished this week. Why the delay in completion? Well, read on. Moving is a pain in the ass.
It’s been a beautiful week here in Shanghai. Blue skies. Low humidity. At times, the air has actually seemed fresh.
Or, I should say, it has looked fresh. Because, during Shanghai’s nicest week of the year, I’ve been stuck indoors. I’ve been painting, cleaning and sitting in front of a computer.
I’m trying to get an apartment ready to live in. I’m trying to finalize plans for my upcoming trip across China. And I’m trying to get the new version of this website ready to launch before I leave.
Oh, and I’m trying to kill a small army of cockroaches, too.
For the past two years, I have been living in a hotel room on the campus of Shanghai University. Yes, living in a single room can drive you crazy. Paper-thin walls and sharing kitchen and laundry facilities don’t help much, either. But I have grown rather fond of daily maid service (when they don’t wake me up, that is). And whenever something goes wrong with the room, all I have to do is call the front desk. And, usually, someone actually fixes the problem.
But I have retired from my short-lived tenure as “foreign expert.” Two years was enough. And, as a parting gift, Shanghai University has generously bestowed upon me … a stamp set commemorating the school’s 10-year anniversary, an item that was likely a leftover from the celebration held last month. To be honest, though, thinking back on the amount of work I put into the job, a commemorative set of stamps is about all that I deserve.
So, my days of a free hotel room are winding down. I’m in the process of moving into a two-bedroom place downtown. And with every new chore that crops up, I’m already looking back fondly at those halcyon days of daily maid service and maintenance calls down to the front desk.
I’ve never owned a home — and, thanks to my “salary” from freelance writing, I likely never will — but I’m beginning to wonder how it’s possible to do so while holding down a full-time job. A five-room apartment has been time-consuming enough for me.
First, let me talk a little bit about the apartment itself. It’s on Madang Lu. About a five-minute walk from Xintiandi. Walking distance from both my gym and the metro. It is exactly the part of town that I wanted to be in. And, at RMB 3,350 a month (that’s just over $400), it’s kind of a bargain considering the location.
But sorry, I can’t offer you any tips or secrets for snagging a steal in Shanghai’s more-inflated-by-the-day real estate market. For me, it was all about the guanxi, baby.
You see, when I was back in Atlanta last month, I met up with a guy named Henry. He is Shanghainese and a longtime reader of the Shanghai Diaries. I mentioned I was looking for an apartment. He mentioned his dad had one. Ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom, I had my new apartment.
Well, maybe it didn’t all happen that quickly. For the final decision, I had to wait for my girlfriend to return from the States (she makes all the important decisions). Henry’s Dad, Alex, actually held the apartment for us for about three weeks, which is pretty much unheard of in this part of Shanghai. But Alex takes care of his son’s friends. And, a freelance photographer, Alex is convinced that he and I will eventually have some sort of professional “cooperation.”
By Shanghai standards, my new building is an old one. Alex first decorated the apartment in the 1980s … and by the looks of it, he last decorated the apartment in 1980s, too. It’s like a bachelor pad from the late 1970s. There’s a bar in the living room, with drinking glasses hanging from up above. Two big speakers protrude from the walls, their wires leading to the Pioneer rack system that comes standard with the apartment. On the ceiling near the bar, square glass panels — each painted with a single bunch of green grapes — rest below two long fluorescent light bulbs. On the other side of the living room, there are more fluorescent lights and more glass panels. These feature a groovy abstract design with muted (or perhaps just faded?) greens and yellows that would make good cover art for an album entitled “10 Groovy Songs To Make Love To In Your Late-1970s Communist Bachelor Pad.”
But beneath those album covers rests the coup de grace: a huge, full color, engraved window that separates the living room from what is now the office. This masterpiece — which is two inches wider than my girlfriend is tall — features a blue sky, a green ocean, a yellow sun, nine palm trees and a bikini-clad woman reclining on a hammock. I lost sleep for several nights trying to decide how to block this behemoth from view. But it has since grown on me and I have decided to leave it alone. It’s a conversation piece, and for a while there it helped take attention away from the bathtub.
The bathtub — a sore spot we have since taken care of — was my girlfriend’s biggest concern about the place, which, considering what I’ve told you so far, says a lot about the sorry state of the tub. Its smooth surface long gone, the bathtub became a porous piece of porcelain, absorbing whatever stain came its way. And so it had rust stains and other stains, no doubt made worse because the washing machine drains into the tub. (Later, we made it look even worse by trying to wash black paint out of some paint brushes. More on that in a bit.)
But we loved the location. We liked the idea of having a landlord that spoke some English. And Alex seemed more than willing to accommodate most of our Western requests. So with a promise that he would give the once-white walls a much-needed paint job and that he would have the place professionally cleaned — but “only to Chinese standards,” he warned — we signed the contract. Alex also bought a new TV and put in an air-conditioning unit in the living room, items we didn’t even ask for.
We informed Alex that we wanted to paint the wood trim and wainscoting in the living room ourselves. You see, the bar was black and everything else was kind of like Crayola’s “flesh” color. For uniformity’s sake (and sanity’s sake) we thought everything should be black. Alex hesitated, saying he thought black would be too “heavy.” (Originally, he thought we wanted everything black, including the white walls. That would have been heavy, I agree.) We also told him we would like to change the glass panels in the ceiling to plain white ones. Alex hesitated even more, saying that as a professional photographer he thought the grapes looked great. He also said it would be next to impossible to replace all the glass panels, saying he wasn’t sure where we would be able to have the new panels made.
But eventually Alex let us have our way. And early last week, after our new apartment was cleaned to Chinese standards (which, evidently, are fairly low), my girlfriend and I started painting … and we didn’t stop until 13 hours had passed. It was 7 o’clock the next morning. More than 10 days later, I still have black paint on my toes. When Alex saw the finished product, he had a sudden change of heart. What he repeatedly called our “design” had won him over. He said he liked the contrast of black and white. He said our quality workmanship — unlike the professionals who painted the walls white, we used drop cloths — told him a lot about who we were as human beings. And he somehow remembered where we could get our new white glass panels made — right across the street.
It was shortly after we completed the paint job that we saw our first cockroach crawling around in the kitchen. And then we saw our second, and our third. I sprayed with some Raid, and out came the extended family. The next morning, I counted 19 dead or dying roaches on our kitchen floor. More than a week, and another spray, later, the big ones seem to be gone, but we still sweep up dead baby cockroaches on a semi-daily basis.
(Here’s a strange, semi-related critter story for you: Last week, while in the back seat of a taxi, I heard some scratching at my door. I couldn’t think of a possible explanation. And it was dark out, so I couldn’t see anything. But then we drove under a light, and I saw something scurry. It was a crab! It was a small one, but any crab in a cab will scare the crap out of you — say that 10 times fast. Now, crab is not one of the words that has made it into my very limited Chinese vocabulary, so when the creature crawled under the driver’s seat, I had a hell of a time trying to tell him what all the commotion was about. I called my friend Johnson, who has provided instant translations for me in the past. “How do you say crab? There’s a crab in my cab and I need to tell the driver. It just crawled under his seat!”
At the time, I didn’t realize how ridiculous this would sound to Johnson, who I’m not sure ever totally understood the situation. And perhaps this wasn’t the emergency I was making it out to be. But if I was driving, I would want to know if there was a crab under my seat. Anyway, Johnson told me how to say crab — it’s xie with the fourth tone, by the way — and I tried to relay the message to the driver, who, of course, looked at me like I was crazy. I think he understood something was under his seat — he stopped his car — but I’m not sure if he understood what crawled under his seat — he reached his hand underneath. The crab, as crabs do, pinched the driver. He grimaced and chucked the crab out onto the street. But then he laughed. Not sure if that one ever happened to him before.)
The past eight or nine days have been spent cleaning and decorating and cleaning some more. It is impossible to keep a place clean in this city. Dust accumulates daily. And I’m beginning to wonder how much of it has settled at the bottom of my lungs. Shanghai is one filthy place. But at least my bathtub isn’t. We got it refinished, a process that would cost at least $400 back in the states. Price tag in Shanghai? $30.
I’ve also been doing my fair share of swearing at IKEA furniture (I have finally found something bad to say about the Swedish … they suck at drawing instructions … but I will always love their fish). We have replaced most of the furniture that came with the apartment. Luckily the apartment that shares a gated entryway with ours is vacant, and we can use it as a storage facility for all the stuff in the apartment that we don’t want. “Will you ever decorate the other apartment and rent it out?” I asked Alex of the storage room. “I don’t own it,” he replied. “Who does?” “No one knows.” And then he put his finger to his lips as if to say, “Shhhhhh.” (There’s another secret, one that I don’t totally understand. If anyone in the building asks me if I’m renting the apartment, Alex has instructed me to say, “No.” I am supposed to say I am just a friend of Henry’s. No one has asked yet.)
Alex is a former military man and was part of the first graduating class of Chinese journalism students after the Cultural Revolution. To say he is connected is like saying this blog entry is starting to get a bit long — it’s a vast understatement. Anything that we have needed done to the apartment has been done by one of Alex’s “good friends.” So the three ADSL guys, the cable guy, the electrician, were not paid with money. Instead, they got a cigarette from Alex’s front pocket. Expensive cigarettes. Eight dollars a pack. Which is quite remarkable, considering you can get pack of Flying Horse cigarettes here for about a quarter.
I first met Alex at his new apartment, a much more modern place overlooking Suzhou Creek near the Shanghai Railway Station. He wanted to show me his big binders full of published photos, he wanted to show me photos of Henry deep-sea fishing in Florida, he wanted to show me the print outs of every email I had ever sent him. He keeps them to study them. He does the same with his instant messaging sessions with Henry — they chat in English. He asked if we plan to have parties with other foreigners at the apartment. If so, he’d appreciate an invitation. “I just want to listen,” he said.
Alex has been the most attentive landlord I have ever had, which I guess is a good thing. He has met our every need, and then some. He has been more than willing to make the 30-minute bicycle ride to help us out with details we probably could have figured out on our own. He calls on a regular basis. “I think we can become good friends,” he has said more than once. I have to imagine that not all Shanghai landlords are like this. I have to imagine that much of this has to do with Henry and the fact that Alex and I both have “journalist” written on our business cards.
Or maybe this is just the way Alex is. Johnson talked to him once on the phone. His first words after finishing the conversation: “Well, he seems like a really nice guy.”
06.10.2004, 5:34 PM · Observations
10 Comments
Oh My GOD !! 8-O Dan, U are not suppose to reveal everything. Now the communist government will go after my father for real estate tax now !!
Nice pictures of the apartment! Hope the roaches are gone.
Wow, if you ever come back to the states you should flip apartments. Awesome work.
Dan, I really enjoyed this installment of your blogs. Your humor and wit won me over this time! Keep blogging.
interesting story, i happened to know Alex who recommend me to read this story. Dan u have made a right decision to be the tenant of Alex, he’s a mighty guy, an expert of “guanxi”
Oooops…Sorry Dan,now seems I am the first one in your building who knows about the apartment secret between Alex and you…:) This is Diana and I live upstairs in the same building as you do.It was Alex who recommended me your article and blog.Actually he is the landlord of BOTH of us…Alex was already excited about your coming before you moved in and he showed me your place then.U’ve done some awesome job!And yes,moving is a pain in the ass…
Diana,
You are always welcome in 1304. Come by and visit your neighbors sometime.
Dan
Alex’s apt block wouldn’t be Pensinsula Gardens would it? aka Ban Dao Hua Yuan. That would be a cohinkeydink. Where did you get those blinds? I want…
I like the beach scene and am glad that it is still there. Looks like you guys are going to be quite comfy. Just hope the rats from the gym don’t move in. I think you jinxed yourself by saying you hadn’t seen any in the apartment. Hope you guys are well.
Lawrence,
The blinds — and almost anything else you see in the apartment … except for the palm tree window — can be found at IKEA.
Dan