It’s time to move.
We’ve been in the same place for nearly three years. It’s been good, but Mrs. Imagethief’s business is growing, I’m spending some of my time working at home, and let’s not even get into the whole child-number-two discussion. The upshot is that we need a bigger place.
I hate almost everything about moving. It’s disruptive. It’s a pain in the ass. It’s expensive (although less so in China than elsewhere). There is the great mystery as to whether you’re trading your current decent landlord (I’ve been lucky) for Empress Wu. There’s the great computational axis of price vs. commute vs. school vs. amenities vs. could our ayi get here? The only good things about moving are being able to slough off a layer of useless house-cruft — all that stuff at the backs of closets– and the feeling you get when you finally have the new place set up the way you want, before the cats have salted everything in summer cat hair and little, scattered pills of cat litter. I have many miles to go before I have my feet up on that particular ottoman of satisfaction.
Until then, I must endure the great drudgery of plodding through empty apartments. The other day I had to reel in an agent who was about to take us to look at some places renting for RMB40,000 a month. Hold on there, tiger. I know you’re paid based on the rent, but if I could afford that kind of ticket my personal flunky would be taking the first look. Not me. Our budget is decent, but we’re still squarely in the making-some-compromises bracket. It says something about China that our current leading-candidate apartment had an unflushed toilet full of shit and yet our conclusion was still, say, not bad. In the US realtors tell you set out fresh cookies when people are coming to look at the apartment. In China you get a bog full of crap. But you also get new floor boards, so take the bad with the good, I guess.
I don’t want to complain at length about all the miseries of hunting for an apartment in China. Well, strictly speaking, that’s not true. I do in fact want to complain about them and I have done so at length. But I also want to focus on just one thing that gets up my nose every time I tour apartments in China. It is not, despite what you might think, piles of human waste. It is the light fixtures.
To gather all my complex feelings about this into just three words, what the f***?
It’s true, many Chinese apartments have appalling furniture. My solution to that has been to buy my own furniture and look for unfurnished or partly-furnished places. I’m completely willing to have redundant crap dragged out of the apartment as a condition of rental. That couch that I wouldn’t sit on without wrapping my ass in saran-wrap and sunscreen? Adios, muchacho. But lights are built in. There is wiring, and screws and god knows what. And if I unplug this wire, this being China and all, there is a chance, however small, that all the stop-lights in the neighborhood will turn green at once or the neon sign on the restaurant across the road will spell out a dirty word and my visa will be canceled for gross disturbance of public order.
None of which would matter if the light fixtures weren’t so consistently awful. I’m not talking some rarefied, well that’s a bit unsightly thing. I’m talking full-on psychotic awful, like having Damien Hirsch Hirst* as your interior decorator and coming home to find pickled sharks lined with halogen bulbs hanging from your ceiling at face level. I’m talking 1970s Disco Inferno throwback nasty that makes me think of lime green shag carpets and Ford Econoline vans with bubble windows and airbrushed paintings of topless space-vixens deflecting lightning bolts with Gibson “Flying V” electric guitars. If you’ve ever wanted to see what it would look like if the space-ship from the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind landed in your living room, I’ve got the apartment for you. If you want to know what it would look like if Louis XVI had escaped the guillotine, sneaked out of France disguised as un ouvrier Chinois (quelle humiliation!) and wound up in a downtown three-bedroom in Beijing on a middle-class Chinese salary, I’ve got the apartment for you.
What is this fascination with chandeliers? Listen: If you’ve got a stately pile in the countryside with forty acres (or, this being China, 240 mu) of grape vines and a grand hall with a thirty-foot ceiling that requires banquet illumination, then fine. Get a chandelier. I’m not saying it’s a good decision, but it’s at least technically defensible on some kind of inbred, blue-blood clause. But if you’ve just bought an urban pre-fab concrete box with eight-foot ceilings, a three-foot chandelier is simply not going to work unless you’re renting your apartment to Wee Man from the “Jackass” movies. Sooner or later, someone is winding up in the hospital having bits of Swarovski shrapnel irrigated out of their eyes. Plus, if you are renting your apartment to Wee Man, a stack of turds in the hall bathroom is likely to be the least of your problems when he moves out. Make sure you get the deposit in cash.
Lights, dude. How hard can it be? It’s the illumination that counts, not the number of fronds on the fixture or getting it exactly the same shade of pink as Aphrodite’s hemorrhoids. A big factor in choosing our current apartment was that it had naked bulbs in the ceiling. All we had to do was hang shades on them. Less is more. Think minimal and simple. Especially –and I cannot stress this enough– if you want to rent to foreigners. We’re weak. Our eyes bleed if we see too much brass filigree at any one time. Easy test: if your light fixtures make my son either giggle or cry, I’m not renting your apartment, even if the fridge is colossal and the toilets just came out of an autoclave and the bathrooms smell like a strawberry muffin factory. It’s that simple. When I stagger home from work late and flick on the living room light, I don’t want my first reaction to be cardiac arrest. I don’t want to feel compelled to place a panicky phone call to SHADO. I don’t want to crack my head into the goddamn thing when I stumble into the kitchen in the middle of the night for a biscuit. I don’t want to find freaking bats hanging from it.
I don’t, in a word, want this:
Now, really, is that too much to ask?
Previously in the Imagethief apartment-hunting annals:
- Infernalture (August, 2006)
- Apartmental, a part mental (February 2007)
- The devil wears Prada and won’t rent me an apartment (March 2007)
*You can see how up we are on our modern art.
Sorry, but pickled sharks lined with halogen bulbs hanging from the ceiling at face level would be kind of awesome.
It would be briefly awesome, like owning a husky. But just as the charm of the husky wears off after it eats every pair of shoes in the house, the charm of the sharks will wear off when you realize what a pain they are to keep clean and after you’ve cracked your head into them one too many times and paid Hirsch enterprises for the maintenance (apparently the pickled animals need regular work). And I say this as a big shark fan who’s generally in favor of sharked-themed decoration.
For me it’s a toss up between the furniture and the lighting, but both, by and large, are the worst parts of the apartment search in China. As far as furniture goes, two words: radioactive orange. Why? Why is this an option? Even Ikea is guilty of this.
I wish I had taken photos of the lighting fixtures I’ve seen. Some had shades with images of naked women on them (this right above the bed, of course), some were halogens at the ends of infinitely adjustable tentacle arms, ready to freak the bejeezus out of you in the dark. I remember one that was clearly someone’s interpretive art project, involving pulleys and wires meant to raise or lower the light. As ugly as it was, it might have made a shred of sense were the light not already way too low to begin with. Oh, and the pulley was broken, so you couldn’t adjust the height anyway.
So to Chinese landlords I say this–the simpler, the better. We laowai don’t want 热闹. We want our sanity.
Did you develop your upper-body solely by curling the iPad?
I hear you, man. The centerpiece of our living room decor is an overhead lighting system consisting of orange puff fabric fanning out in a circle from a burnt-umber center fixture. No matter how many times I try to talk myself into it, the words “Giant Hemorrhoidal Baboon’s Ass” takes over my cerebral cortex. Despite being an awesome name for a mediocre indie band, it is NOT the phrase you want to use when describing your interior design scheme.
@Maoxian: Yes. I was a 98lb weakling until Steve Jobs made me a real man.
@Jeremiah: Dude, party at your place under the psychedelic baboon’s-ass light. Post a picture!
Weird light fittings were typical in US apartments too IIRC… but this just looks “nouveau riche”…
=)) Sorry, I just had to laugh looking at the photo. -_-
Anyway, I don’t like chandeliers. They’re hard to clean and don’t like the lighting quality either.
Good thing our dormitory is good enough.
What if the chandelier was a miniature version of the NDU rocket?
My favorite case of bizarro chandelier placement was in a hotel in Shanghai: having decked the place out in everything that a dimwitted pathological gambler from South Jersey would associate with luxury, they found themselves (I’m assuming) with a couple of crystal-dagger chandeliers left over. Some people — we call them ‘quitters’ — would probably have thrown up their hands and conceded that they had probably had enough excess already anyway, but these guys took that lemon and made lemonade by hanging the chandeliers, at urinal height, alongside the urinals in the men’s room.
Several apartments ago, when I had just returned to Beijing and was desperate to get out of the youth hostel I’d been staying in, I rented a place in the “CBD总部公寓,” having not realized until about a half-second after I signed the lease that for the duration of my stay there I would be too embarrassed to actually tell people where I lived, and would have to resort to giving them vague, gnomic indicators of the general area. (“OK, come south from Guomao. No, further. No, I’m not in “Rich City” – that’s too far south. OK, now turn left and head west for about a kilometer. It’s the place with the — um –the — oh, hell — it’s the CBD总部公寓.”
The decor of the place was actually pretty inoffensive by Chinese nouveau-riche standards, but there was still lots of marble and pink and blue neon track lighting hidden in the living room ceiling moulding, leading a couple of friends who were on their first visit to China to dub my apartment “the First Pimp Bank of Beijing.” After that, my tenancy in the place became a battle between my liking for that moniker and my dislike of basically everything else about the place. Dislike won, and I’ve been living mostly in low-renovation 回迁房 housing ever since. I’ve had to get good at wiring fuses and improvising repairs to my water heater, but at least I don’t get class rage against my living room.
First laugh of the day. Worth the wait.
Will, I will say this in my politest tones, resisting the overwhelming urge towards vile profanity: imagine everything you just said, but from the vantage point of my 6 feet and 6 inches.
Welcome to my nightmare.
There’s only one solution: Have your lower legs removed.
Don’t ask me how I know this, but I’m betting that a previous apartment-searcher brought an 8-yr-old boy along with them, and the 8-yr-old boy had to answer the call of nature in that bathroom.
Sounding a bit Sinocidal these days ;^)
回迁房 are not immune from bad taste. Not by any means. My neighbour over the hallway (this was the top floor where all the flats were smallish but duplexes, so the upper level had a slanting ceiling) had hung out the entirety of said slanting ceiling with fake plastic vines and grapes. I used to take unwitting friends in there on many a pretext, to watch them desperately bite their lips to avoid laughing.
Or maybe he was just making his first step towards the 240 mu of grape vines. I didn’t use his bathroom so don’t know if there were chandeliers lurking.