Wrote this little blurb during my semester abroad in Beijing this fall.
The Flood
Since I didn’t have class on Wednesdays, I gradually slipped into a habit of staying up late every Wednesday and taking the whole day off on Thursday. I did it again that particular Thursday, and slacker’s guilt gnawed at my brain as I walked from the bus stop to my homestay.
Thursday turned out so unpleasant that I may have as well gone to class. Beijing was freezing cold and exceptionally smoggy that day. It was mid November, and the weather was only going to get colder and dirtier.
Early in the morning my $350 ipod died, having been dropped one too many times. Whenever I tried to turn it on it displayed a little icon of a dead-looking ipod with X’es instead of eyes, which I thought was an unnecessarily cruel bit of programming. Friday I had a weekly Chinese test, but I knew I wouldn’t study for it, because I’d been coming down with apathy for quite some time.
Despite having developed bronchitis, I chain-smoked my way through registering for next semester’s classes at an internet café, where I also discovered Bank of America had charged me a criminal amount for a late payment. Normally I succeeded in pushing my progressive slide into credit card debt to the back of my head, but that day I experienced it so acutely that the feeling was almost visceral. I had visions of myself frantically clinging to the edge of a crumbling platform suspended is space like the Bridge of Khazad-Doom, with chunks of it breaking off and plummeting into the abyss below as I scrambled for a firm grip.
I wasn’t too thrilled about my birthday next week either. In a country where drinking age is irrelevant, twenty is no cause for celebration as that final step before the big booze day. In China it just felt like older. No longer a teenager. A teeny voice in the back of my mind suggested that it was about time to get my act together, but I didn’t listen, because I was busy getting horrified by my awful new haircut in the elevator mirror.
I was depressed.
Ipodless and alone in the arctic desert of the inside of my head I trudged through the basement parking lot and made my way up the stairs of my host family’s building, which always astonished me with its gleaming marble spotlessness and dead silence, as if it occupied a separate plane of existence from the rest of Beijing. I turned the key. The heavy front door swung into the apartment with a groan.
My host family’s apartment usually smelled like mandarin oranges, which they’d kept on a giant tray in the living room and consumed while watching late-night Korean soap operas, but this time a thick swampy smell assaulted my nostrils. Even in the near total darkness I noticed the floor didn’t look right. It was way too glossy.
It took me a couple of seconds, but as soon as a realized without a doubt what had happened, I experienced a mix of emotions. On one hand I suddenly cheered up. The shock of discovering the household disaster hauled me out of self-pity and left me mildly fascinated. On the other hand, I felt sad for my unsuspecting host parents who were about to come home from work exhausted, only to discover their living room was now fit for deep sea fishing.
Before proceeding further I took a few moments to admire the scene. It was quiet and dark. The living room was large and rectangular, so that the two-inch thick layer of black water on the floor created a surreal effect. Bright streetlights visible from the floor-length window opposite the front door reflected in the still water. Mao gazed over the whole debacle from his giant poster on the wall, looking pensive and vaguely pleased as usual.
I took a few photos, turned on the lights, and dialed jiejie, my host mom, whom I called “older sister” because she was only 28 and looked about my age. I said: “Jiejie, wo gancai hui jia le, zai ‘floor’ shang you hen duo hen duo shui.” I just got home and there’s a ton of water on the floor. My Chinese was not good enough to try and break the news gently. “Keneng ‘pipes’ huai le,” I added as an afterthought. Perhaps the pipes broke. “Oooooh! Wo kuai hui jia,” jiejie wailed unhappily, I’m coming home soon, which made me simultaneously overjoyed that she understood my Chinese bits over the phone and distressed at her obvious distress. A few minutes later she was in the doorway, looking pretty distressed. I was inside the equally flooded kitchen, trying to rescue some of the rice. My host parents kept it in a cardboard box on the floor. Water had soaked the whole box, but some of the rice bags on top were still dry. As I lifted one of the bags it suddenly came apart in the bottom, spilling hundreds of rice grains onto the flooded floor. I cursed and had a sudden vision of the kitchen floor as a rice patty. “Duibuqi,” I said, feeling unhelpful. Sorry. “Oh it’s okay, don’t worry about it,” jiejie dismissed me and continued wailing in English. “Ooooh. This is awful?!” Her tone half-expressed the point she was trying to make, half-asked me whether she’d used the correct word, as was her habit whenever speaking English to me. I nodded, confirming her choice of vocabulary. I was impressed. If I came face to face with domestic disaster, I wouldn’t be speaking English. What is the Chinese word for “awful”? Zaogao. No. If there was any Chinese expression other than zaogao more worn out by giddy overuse in the halls of my program’s building then it was “wo you la duzi. Zaogao.” I have diahrrea. Awful. There had to be another word. Gouqiang?
“Dui, hen gouqiang,” I agreed. Jiejie gave me a puzzled look and nodded, which could only mean my tones were off or perhaps I’d gotten the word wrong altogether.
“This happened before,” jiejie said. “But never so… serious. Now the floor is completely destroyed!?” She had a point. The living room floors were hardwood and water would have seeped through the cracks by then, which would eventually cause the boards to warp. “Yinggai mei shi’r.” It should be all right. I tried to sound cheerful. “Women keyi kuai da dasao?” Could we perhaps clean up very quickly?
“Ooooh. Shui zai wo de fangzi.” Water in my house. She wailed again, then picked up the phone and dialed the building service.
A man in a dirty green jumpsuit with miscellaneous tools gleaming impressively on his belt showed up promptly and busied himself in the kitchen. As it turned out, water came from the kitchen sink, which was filled with chunks of dark-gray dirt, like bits of cement and black soil, smelling vaguely of mold and oil. It overflowed due to a glitch in the piping system. From the plumber’s thick beijinghua I discerned that a certain pipe had been getting backed up periodically on the second floor, because a section of it was too long.
I tried to think of something to do to help but of course there wasn’t anything I could do. At the same time, shrugging and retiring to my blissfully unflooded room to prepare for my test tomorrow seemed insensitive. Thus I continued to stand awkwardly by the open door eavesdropping on the conversation between jiejie and the plumber. I learned that guan (third tone) meant pipe, and du (third tone) was used to describe a backed up pipe – the same word used to describe backed up traffic.
The flood puzzled me. How could it happen? The complex was only three years old. It shouldn’t be getting spontaneously flooded just yet. I thought back to the words of Dr. Kumar, a Davidson economics professor from India, known for his less-than-positive view of China. His traditional response to comments on China’s economic miracle was: “You shall see, China has rat-sized termites under the rug, yar.” The mistake in the piping system was surely a result of quick, careless building – unsurprising, considering buildings sprung up around Beijing faster than mushrooms after it rains. After asking around later on I discovered that flooding in apartment buildings was quite common around the month of November. This was also the time heating switched on in Beijing. As most buildings were heated by hot water radiators, there must have been a connection between the floods and the extra pressure exerted on pipes around this time.
A human noise in the doorway behind me interrupted my reverie. I turned around and saw a thin little girl in jeans and a bright red woolen vest looking up at me. I put my hands on my knees, leaned in closer, as one does when talking to children, and grinned at her. I asked whether her family were neighbors. She didn’t grin back. “You called for help?” she asked morosely in Chinese and splashed past me into the apartment. Then I noticed her platform shoes and the unchildlike, weary slouch of her body. She turned around briefly and gave me a somber look. With intense embarrassment I realized that I mistook a tiny adult woman for a little girl. The situation was getting more bizarre by the minute. Here was the Chinese version of Claudia from the Vampire Chronicles, trapped in a little girl’s body, which ceased to age after receiving the bite from the vampire Lestat. I watched her walk into the kitchen and loudly join in the conversation there. I shuddered and continued to stand by the door.
Next came an official-looking man wearing a black suit and tie. He took one look at the flood and emitted a drawn out “oooooooaaarr,” then suddenly whipped out a cell-phone and pretended to be making a call, doubtless due to the fact that jiejie came out of the kitchen at this moment looking ready to pounce.
After three more plumbers showed up, dressed exactly as the first one down to the last screwdriver, a policeman with a notepad, and five more cleaning ladies, my gege, my host father whom I called older brother, finally emerged in the doorway. He surveyed the damage, said “ai-yaaa,” and lit a cigarette.
Feeling strengthened by numbers, the cleaning ladies suddenly sprung into action under Mao’s approving gaze from his poster on the wall. They procured dustpans, brooms, and a large plastic basin and began shoveling the water off the floor into the basin. My jiejie joined them, and I would have too, but thankfully there were no brooms or dustpans left. So I lit up next to gege on the couch and spied on the tiny vampire woman out the corner of my eye. There were about fifteen people in the apartment at this stage. Progress was slow at first, but as gallons of water were shoveled off the floor, gege got progressively more cheerful, bless him.
My gege grew up in a poor peasant family in southern China. He was 32, born sometime in April or May. His parents didn’t keep track of his exact birth date, because he was the seventh out of eight children, all of whom – hopefully by chance – were boys. He recalled often going to bed hungry as a child, but had since then managed to attend Beijing University, secure a job in the city, and acquire property in the Haidian district, the value of which has sky-rocketed since he bought it (despite the occasional flooding). Gege maintained diplomatic opinions on many sensitive issues such as The Great Leap Forward, The Cultural Revolution, and Tiananmen, the sole exception being Japanese people. “Chinese people very very hate Japanese people,” he said to me once in English. “You as well?” I asked. “Huhm,” he nodded vigorously and gave me a thumbs up, which seemed comically out of place then, but over time I learned there was a method to his usage of the thumbs up. He used it as a kind of affirmation, for example if I asked whether he’d like another beer from the fridge, or whether he’d seen the latest Prison Break episode.
“Ni kan!” I said, pointing to the yue lai yue – more and more – un-flooded floor, “Yinggai meiyou wenti.” Looks like there won’t be a problem. He emitted a close-mouthed chuckle, as he often did, and gave a thumbs up. We smoked another cigarette.
“Gege, weishenme you zenme name duo ren a?” Why are there so many people here?
“We are owners of the house, so we are god,” gege replied in Chinese, looking pleased. I understood that in China, the more people were sent to deal with a household situation, the more pleased the afflicted owner ought to be, regardless of necessity for so many hands.
While gege and I unwound on the couch, jiejie argued animatedly with the suited cell-phoned man.
“Shi jingli ma?” I asked. Is that the “manager”?
Gege chuckled.
“This is the vice-manager,” he said, and gave me an ironic look that seemed to express my exact thoughts. There was probably an “associate vice manager,” “assistant to associate vice manager” and a few other “managers” down the line. We laughed.
After the water was cleaned up and the service personnel cleared the apartment, gege and jiejie decided to treat ourselves to a dinner out, since it was too late to cook.
“Jiejie, what were you arguing with the vice-manager about?” I asked as we walked toward a hot pot restaurant.
“We want to get compensation from the management to change the floor, but the vice-manger is saying it’s not their fault. It’s never their fault.”
“I see. Well I think that’s really unfair,” I said indignantly, jumping on the chance to use my recently-learned word for “unfair” (bu gongping).
“What can you do?” gege shrugged, “Hei shehui.” Black society. “Bad people,” he added in English, making sure I understood. “They make money for themselves and don’t care about other people’s problems.”
We decided on a nearby zhou restaurant in the end. Zhou is a type of hot grain broth, made salty, spicy or sweet. We ordered three different bowls and shared. Westerners often find the Chinese tradition of sharing plates of food gross and unsanitary – licking one’s chopsticks and then plunging them back into the common dish, or eating out of the same bowl. But when you get flooded out of your apartment in the middle of winter with nobody to complain to, it’s the little rituals of comradeship one finds comfort in. To hell with sanitation.
