Tag: Apartments

Absolutely the last post on nasty furniture…

…at least until I move again, I suppose.

Imagethief is pleased to report that he has found a suitable apartment all of 100 meters away from his current apartment in China Central Place. Among this apartment’s distinguishing characteristics are its simple and unadorned light fixtures, the willingness of the landlady to remove whatever furniture we didn’t need (a lot), and the relative tastefulness of the furniture that remains. And the price was decent, for what that’s worth.

As part of the move I am abandoning my old desk, a 200RMB piece of Ikea crap that has been with me for a few years and that is so flimsy that my monitor bounces when I type. This is not one of those colorful exaggerations for which I am justly renowned. It is literally true. The desk now has a pronounced sag in the middle, and I figured it was worth replacing with something more solid before it either delaminates into toxic splinters or dumps my 24″ monitor onto the floor in a shower of sparks and shattered LCD panel. Or both, I suppose.

On Sunday Mrs. Imagethief, Zachary and I went down to the Macalline Red Star Furniture Mall on the southeast fourth ring road, not too far from where we live. You may know this mall, which is coincidentally next door to the Macalline Red Star Building Materials Mall and a Decathlon, thus covering all your home furnishing, renovation and fitness needs in one fell, commercial swoop. We had never been there before, and simply thought it was worth seeing something new, rather than either retreating to Ikea or my old standby, the Classic Furniture City mall near Panjiayuan.

I have tried to foreswear Ikea for several years, but like a junkie who pawns his sister’s DVD player to buy a dime rock I keep on sliding back for a cheap furniture fix despite my earnest vows to stay clean. This leaves me feeling filthy and awash with regrets as I invariably end up hating whatever I buy, whether it’s the balsa-wood table that picks up dings when you look at it wrong, the shelves that wobble when the cat sneezes on the far side of the apartment, or the sofa that loses another support strap with a huge TWANG!every other time I sit down on it (really). So I swear off again, but a year passes and there I am checking out yet another “Knasti” bookshelf, the primary value of which is that it comes from a company that apparently provides meaningful employment as product name developers for Sweden’s dwindling population of consonant-happy illiterates. So I feel socially virtuous but poorly furnished and extremely generic.

In the last couple of years my standard dodge has been to go to the Classical Furniture City on the east third ring, near the Panjiayuan flea market and repro propaganda extravaganza. This is one of dozens of malls and neighborhoods (including the entire village of Gaobeidian) that offer reproduction Chinese antique furniture at knock-down prices, and it’s magic for bookshelves, TV cabinets and such, especially if you need small customizations like holes for hard-drive cables. On the other hand, it’s really nothing more than Ikea for Sinofied expats, and if you prowl my friends’ houses you can pretty much see that we all use the same approach and all buy the same rosewood tables and camphor chests. We’ve simply traded Scandinavia for Shenzhen in one episode of culturally semi-appropriate mass unoriginality. But at least it ain’t Ikea and by god, we feel Chinese. Just don’t let your kids lick the furniture, because who knows what’s in that lacquer.

Anyway, the point is that in an attempt to break out of this two-fold rut we went to the Macalline Red Star Furniture mall, mostly because it looked big, and anyplace that big must have something worth looking at. This is a classic example of false logic, like my old college rationalization: Beer is good, therefore more beer must be better. That bit of logic worked right up until it failed spectacularly, with a juvenile Imagethief closely scrutinizing the accumulated plaques on the inside of his dormitory bathroom’s toilet bowls. Surprisingly colorful, if you must know, but harder to see after the third round of violent retching leaves your eyes permanently crossed.

Speaking of violent retching, that’s what I felt like doing Sunday when, upon entering the mall, I realized that this is where all the landlords of all the ghastly apartments I have seen go to buy their preposterous, eye-boiling furniture. This is the place. The Mecca of repulsive, radioactive, filigreed furniture. The Source. The mother lode. As my father observed one day upon watching me sweep the cat litter off my floor for the third time in an hour, when I die and go to hell my job will be to sweep up the cat litter. What he didn’t point out, but which is almost certainly also true, is that my hell will be furnished from this mall.

Imagethief firmly believes that the best way to reduce one’s pain is to share it. Therefore I want to share with you, my faithful (and dwindling) readers, some of the most luminous examples of apalling furniture ever conceived by the mind of man. Should you decide to buy an apartment and furnish it in accordance with the Chinese nouveau-riche-低素质 school of interior design, you’ll know right where to go (you’ll also need to buy a Porsche Cayenne — more on that later). I’m sorry the pictures are a bit blurry. They were taken with a phone somewhat surreptitiously as I didn’t want to be beaten by the furniture ladies. Day after day standing around that stuff must lead to some kind of violent psychosis. And trust me: More detail would not necessarily improve the experience.

Allow Imagethief to escort you on a tour:

Louisiana Bordello Moderne

What could be a better way to put that spare square-footage to work than renting out girls by the hour? In a country with no property tax that’s like printing money. All that’s missing is some furniture appropriate for displaying your collection of emaciated meth-heads in lingerie. That’s where this collection fits in. Because nothing preserves the illusion of virginal innocence like white lacquer, gold trim and purple lace. Just remember to keep the customers off of the couch. The dry cleaning bills are murder.

Charles Taylor’s Mango Lounge

Had a hard day sawing off people’s hands? You’re going to want to put your feet up for some well deserved rest and recreation. This understated set, with its gold-tasseled crimson and zebra pillows, says, “I may decide life and death in this town, but I still know how to relax in style.” Leather arm rests and muted upholstery resist bloodstains and match the seats in your open-top Hummer limo. When you’re done reviewing the latest catalog of small arms from Vyatsky Polyany’s 2010 line (it makes a great coffee table book for that coffee table), you can have the drugged, underage concubines of your choice dumped onto the tasteful king-size bed in the background. The mangoes are wax, so they’re not good for eating, but they’re superb for hurling at the heads of cowering underlings.

You’re Not Important Enough to Suck My Toes

Want something a little more intimate than the Mango Lounge? For the psychotic despot who might fly into a vicious rage at any moment we offer this set. It includes both a throne fit enough to stroke even the most volatile and insecure delusions of godhood and lethal candlesticks for when you suddenly feel the need to beat one or more of your supplicants to death in order to cow the others into submission. This seat is recommended for the fey and serpentine living god who oozes honey but turns dangerous on a whim rather than angry, broad-shouldered Norse warrior types better suited by rough-hewn wood and leather. Also good for lonely people who think they live in Anne Rice novels.

The Chandelier of Damocles

Hosting a dinner party of the damned? You’ll set a properly infernal mood with this elegant dining set in blood-red leather, complemented by a one-of-a-kind chandelier that audaciously combines equally blood-red globes with white leopard-spot lamp shades. Is it hell or Kisangani? We’re not sure, but turn on the lights and watch pure-hearted guests and small animals recoil in terror. Then serve the roast.

Purple Rain

So you finally showed those uppity punks Morris Day and the Time who’s funkiest in Minneapolis and you’re looking for someplace to throw down with the girls from Vanity 6. This tasteful set is fit for even the purplest, if not necessarily for anyone else. Sure, it’s not technically paisley, but with lacy, black filigree and bathed in the tasteful light of a mauve chandelier, who’s going to notice? Accessorize with a marble coffee table and assorted cocaine goblets and get ready to party like it’s 1999. Rear wall mirrors not included.

And Here Is Where You’ll Live

Once you’ve picked out the furniture of your dreams you’re going to need to a crib to put it in. Imagethief recommends Beijing’s Park Royale apartments in the up and coming Shuangjing neighborhood. I have no idea what they look like inside, but with a forecourt statue of a winged goddess in a chariot being pulled by eight raging stallions, all rendered in gold, it seems like one of the few places likely to be able to withstand your taste in furniture.

August 9, 2010
Hey, baby, come up and see my tiger bedspread

Our ongoing exploration of the bizarre furnishings of Beijing apartments has entered what appears to be the “oriental love nest” phase. Surely we must be getting close to the end. Today my eye-sockets were cauterized by this:

As you’d expect along with a tiger bedspread, this apartment also came with a toddler-friendly free-standing glass cabinet full of top-notch imported liquor:

I’m not sure if the liquor was included in the rent. Maybe they would have checked it off when moved out, like a mini-bar. Still, you have to admire the innovative rethink of the old, American “fresh-baked cookies” gambit. Combine a tiger bedspread, glass master-bathroom and liquor supply and you’re damn close to the apartment of China Bounder’s dreams (apropos of this week’s Sinica podcast on the evolution of the China blogging scene). Actually, it was in many ways a very nice apartment. But there’s always that question of the accessories.

July 24, 2010
The last king of Guanhu

Continuing my exploration of the zaniest fixtures and furnishings in China, this weekend I looked at a lovely apartment in Greenlake Place (Guanhu) that was thoroughly trashed by this living room set:

When I finally get around to overthrowing that small, African nation like I’ve been planning, this is the furniture I’ll want in my throne room (although perhaps re-upholstered in leopard or zebra skin). Until then, a bit too grand for my entirely modest ass. Oh, and whether I’m god-king of Botswana or not, that telephone will have to go.

July 19, 2010
Journey to the planet of the electro-squids

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?

July 5, 2010
The devil wears Prada and won’t rent me an apartment

Imagethief hates looking for an apartment. Once I am comfortable someplace, I’ll tend to stick with it unless there is some external factor that forces me to move. That could be a raise that lets me upgrade, the relocation of my office, a crack house opening downstairs (if it was noisy) or, just for example, moving to another city.

A few months ago I briefly looked at apartments in Beijing before ultimately bargaining my rent down and staying put. After that experience, I wrote a post (rant, really) that summed up my feelings about apartment hunting in China. My major complaint was that Chinese landlords are unchallenged in their ability to select the worst, tackiest, ugliest possible furniture for any given apartment.

So I was understandably staggered when just a bit over a week ago I walked into a rental apartment in Shanghai that had some of the nicest furniture I had ever seen. The apartment was gorgeous, with a tasteful paint job, reasonable lighting (another rarity in a country obsessed with colored fluorescent tubes and baroque chandeliers), simple moldings and truly elegant and comfortable furniture. It was on Julu Rd., a ten minute walk from my office, and near a wet market and several pleasant restaurants and cafes. It was quiet and had a big balcony. To top it off, the rent was reasonable. Its only drawback was a microscopic, Hong Kong-style kitchen. But Mrs. Imagethief and I figured we could live with it if we kept our elbows in.

There was, naturally, a complication. I have cats. I had warned the agent beforehand that I have cats. “I have cats,” I said, to minimize confusion. “I don’t want to waste time. Make sure any apartment we look at doesn’t mind cats.” This instruction, along with several others of lower importance, like my budget range, was ignored.

As we looked at the apartment I asked the agent, “How does the owner feel about cats?”

“There are some concerns,” he said.

Undaunted, I said that I was interested. He said he would look further into the cat issue and let me know.

The next day I was requested to appear at the apartment along with my cats so the landlady could evaluate them. I explained that the cats were still in Beijing and an introduction would be somewhat impractical. A compromise was struck. Could I bring photographs instead?

I had Mrs. Imagethief send me the most cuddly, harmless, nauseatingly cute, aw-shucks photograph of the cats that she could locate (see below) and I printed it out in color. What I didn’t point out is that the reason the cats are so serene is this photo is that they are in shock from being transported from Singapore to Beijing and spending 48 hours in Chinese animal impound. In a spectacular piece of extra-credit work, Mrs. Imagethief also shot a digital video that convincingly shows that the cats will energetically scratch a scratching post but cannot be enticed to sink their claws into the sofa. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get that video into a portable format in time to take with me.

I arrived at the apartment at the designated time and waited along with the agent. When the landlady swished in I knew I was in trouble. She was immaculate. From the perfect hairstyle down to the tiny pair of sparkly, silver shoes, she was a picture of high-fashion perfection. She also radiated a brittle arrogance that I associated immediately with one or two of my particularly fabulous ex-colleagues, a trademark of those Chinese women that have painstakingly and fastidiously elevated themselves above the long-underwear dowdiness that still pervades so much of the country.

She did not, in short, appear to be the kind of person well-disposed to a dusting of cat hair on every surface.

She was also not the landlady. She was the landlady’s good friend. The landlady herself was pregnant in Hong Kong, and this woman had been entrusted with the task of vetting potential tenants. It was a responsibility she took seriously. Where did I work? How long had I been in China? Was I single? Did I absolutely have to keep the cats? Wouldn’t stuffed cats do just as well?

Still, she was supportive in her own way. “I can see that you have good taste,” she said with the deadpan sincerity with which you might compliment an extremely simple third-grader, “because you like this apartment.”

You see, she explained, the concern is that the furniture is all imported. The bed alone, I was warned, was worth some RMB 20,000. And it was nothing against animals in general. She had a dog, after all. (I could picture it — something microscopic and high strung. A colicky cotton ball with a diamond collar, protruding eyes and an angry snarl.) Dogs stay on the floor. But cats, well, they like to jump on top of things. And her friend, I had to understand, was her colleague from Vogue, and she was very serious about the condition of her apartment.

Vogue.

I had watched “The Devil Wears Prada” a week or two before and had laughed off the attitude as Hollywood hyperbole. And yet here it was in front of me, big as life. They reallyare that self-consciously fabulous. I am the product of a bookishly unstylish bloodline and I have no experience dealing with this sort of person. It was like being in the presence of an extremely fashionable space alien. I mean, what common ground do you really have?

Well, she had heard of my company. I guess that was something.

She said she would go back and discuss it with her friend. She also suggested that they would put a list of all the furniture and its values into the contract (actually a sensible idea). Then she turned to the agent and in Mandarin laid down the bottom line on rent. It was incrementally higher than I wanted to pay, and I was slightly annoyed that she didn’t say it directly to me. But it didn’t matter. I had already written off the apartment.

Even if her absent friend had agreed to my tenancy I had mentally abandoned it about the time I was indirectly complemented on my taste. The world is full of imperfect and obsessive landlords, but the thought of having a phalanx of neurotic fashionistas riding shotgun on my tenancy was more than I could tolerate. It wasn’t just the cats. I’m big, klutzy and drop things. I sit on the couch after sweaty workouts. Mrs. Imagethief and I cook smokey, spicy things that stink up the house, and then eat off the coffee table while we watch TV. I drop my underwear on the bedroom floor. Mrs. Imagethief and I would have made noisy, spring-rattling whoopee on that expensive, imported bed. There is a reason why leases have “normal wear and tear” clauses, and that reason is me.

And I have enough stress in my life without having it transmitted at me by a landlady who’s going to worry if I sit on the couch in riveted Levis, let alone do any of the things above.

The next day, even before we heard back from the landlady’s friend, I called the agent and told him to forget it. That was probably exactly what the owner was hoping for, but it spared us all the uncomfortable last dance.

I defaulted to my second choice. It’s in an uglier building and it’s a tattier apartment. The couch looks like it was lifted from a frat house yard sale and the dining room table is so hopeless I told the agent to get rid of it. But the place is big, nicely painted, and has an enormous kitchen and an unobstructed view of the entire eastern half of the city. It’s a five minute walk from the office.

And the landlord doesn’t care about cats. For that kind of serenity, I’ll go downmarket.

Would you trust them on your couch?

March 27, 2007
Apartmental, a part mental

As regular readers will know, Imagethief has been on cross-assignment to his company’s Shanghai office in recent weeks. The company is, meanwhile, attempting to persuade me to consider semi-permanent reassignment to Shanghai. I have not yet made a decision about this (and if my landlord in Beijing is reading this, we’ll talk).

In general, I really like the company I work for. They’ve taken good care of me, provided training, put up with my idiosyncrasies, and were patient with me while I spent my early months wrapping my head around the cataclysmic, nationwide fun-house that is the Chinese media. Because of that I was willing to listen to when they suggested that relocation to Shanghai might be good for my professional development.

They say that whichever Chinese city you come to first is the one you build an attachment to. I suppose this argument might break down if your first port of call was Linfen. But I came to Beijing by choice, and I’ve certainly become affectionate for the city. Beijing, for all its impersonal ministries and immense boulevards, has an intimacy and a grungy, eccentric streak that really appeals to me. In a little under three years, I’ve really come to think of Beijing as home.

It doesn’t hurt that I’ve been surrounded by old Beijing-hands who are naturally contemptuous of Shanghai (Schwankert, I’m talking about you), or that I’ve been writing about the city’s eccentricities for That’s Beijing semi-regularly. So I came to Shanghai with the casual, Shanghai? Pfeh! disdain of the confirmed Beijinger.

Imagine my surprise at discovering that Shanghai is really not bad at all. It has a very different feel than Beijing, for sure. As David Wolf said to me over lunch Friday, in explaining the difference, “Beijing was created to be an imperial capital. It has always been a Chinese city. Shanghai was created to be a treaty port, and foreigners have always been a part of its identity.” He also advised me to make regular trips back to Beijing for sanity checks. Fair enough. But I’ve quite enjoyed the time I’ve been spending in Shanghai, and the city has its own personality and charm, if that is the word to use. My office and apartment are both in a very pleasant part of town, which does help.

Speaking of my apartment, however, I have some complaints.

The company provided the apartment for me to use during my cross-assignment. A previous expatriate employee of ours had lived in it for about four months and had then left China. The week before my Christmas break I had quick look in the apartment to see if it was habitable. It was, depending upon your point of view, a relatively high-end local apartment, or a relatively low-end international apartment. Perhaps the latter, given that it had international cable TV channels. It had plenty of room for me and occasional visits from Mrs. Imagethief. My conclusion was that it was generally fine, although I would have to bring some bedding from Singapore. I told our Shanghai office manager she didn’t need to have an ahyi work it over before my return. That was an inexcusable, rookie error. What can I say? It was night, I was rushed. My due diligence was not superb.

I returned from my Christmas vacation in the US on Saturday, January 6th. On the 7th I flew to Shanghai and went straight to the apartment. There, alone with a suitcase in the dark of a Shanghai winter evening, jetlagged into irascibility, the flimsiness of my earlier appraisal became clear. As did the bachelor existence of the previous occupant. I had not bothered to open the refrigerator during my brief, pre-Christmas visit. Monumental mistake. The entire contents consisted of two rotting, three-week old pieces of meat and a box of Ferrero Rocher candies now infused with the smell of decaying flesh. The rest of the food supply was two things of instant noodles and a huge pile of little sugar sachets stolen from every restaurant and bar in the French Concession.

Three years ago when I first moved to China and did my Wordlink Education language program, they put me up in a very similar two-bedroom apartment. It was fine, but made no provision for the fact that some people might like to cook and eat at home. The total kitchen implements consisted of a frying pan, a chopper, a cutting board, two bowls, two Chinese soup spoons (the boat-shaped ceramic ones that are hard to use for sugaring coffee) and some chopsticks. I had to go down to the CRC supermarket in Wudaokou’s Huaqing Jiayuan apartments and buy a saucepan, fork, knife, round-bottomed pan, plastic colander and a plate. (And I only got this far after several tragic days of trying to eat salad with chopsticks. Oil-slicked cherry tomatoes are a bitch to eat with chopsticks, no matter how dexterous you are.)

Buying forks and can-openers when you’re in the heady rush of fresh-arrival and wide-eyed, goldang, lookit that! culture-shock is fine. It’s all part of the adventure. And I was surrounded by threadbare college students, so living like one was a blast of juvenile nostalgia. I went through a somewhat more substantial stocking of my own apartment in Beijing some months later, culminating in the shipping of my accumulated household worth of stuff from Singapore when my move to China become final.

You forget when you’ve lived in a house or apartment for a while just how much stuff accumulates. Some of it is junk, but some of it is really useful. The great thing about my apartment in Beijing is that it has everything I need (and plenty that I don’t): Dishes, utensils, tools, cables, connectors, bric-a-brac, Q-Tips, spare Kleenex, nail clippers, scissors, scotch tape, shoe polish, laundry detergent, a sewing kit, and so on off into infinity. The apartment in Shanghai had a wok, four bowls, four plates, Chinese spoons, chopsticks, a chopper and cutting boards. It also had, inexplicably, an upright piano. I don’t play piano.

Barring the piano, this was so close to the contents of my Wudaokou apartment that for a moment I thought I had slipped back in time.

And here is where I get cranky. I am now thirty-nine and a (semi) respected China business professional. I have lived here for three years. My wife and pets are here. I have a network. I can get around in Chinese. I did not want to have to relive my starving student days by buying a fucking can opener. I believe that if you are trying to woo someone into uprooting themselves from city A and shipping their wife, worldly possessions and fuzzy kitty cats to city B, you need to do everything possible to make that person think city B is paradise on earth. Three months in a luxurious service apartment refreshingly free of carrion and stocked to the gills with conveniences seems like a good place to start. Once they sign on the dotted line you can always pull a bait-and-switch. But remember, it’s bait first then switch.

I also had to come to grips with the legendary consequences of the south-of-the -Yangtze government heating edict. This is one of those remnants of central planning that make China fascinating at an academic level and a pain in the ass at a practical one. My apartment in Beijing seals like a spaceship (although, like a spaceship, you can also run out of air and die if you don’t ventilate it from time to time). I don’t even need to turn the marvelous central-heat on. The apartment stores solar energy.

My temporary Shanghai apartment, however, leaks like a straw hat and is apparently heated by a small man from Guangxi who rubs sticks together somewhere in the duct-work above the ceilings. At least that’s what it sounds like. He needs to rub the sticks together for four or five hours before they generate enough heat so that my breath doesn’t fog in the living room. I needed to sort out the arcane timing system which is based on oracle bones and bedsprings. Apparently I am supposed to set the timer to turn the heat on about one hour after I leave the house in the morning. That will ensure that the apartment is damply tepid about the time I get home, rather than arctic. I think the answer is a vastly larger television that would generate supplemental heat, but for some reason the company isn’t buying my arguments.

I can’t imagine why not.

February 6, 2007
Infernalture

Apartment prices are down and my lease is up, so Imagethief has been looking for a new, larger apartment to accommodate himself, Mrs. Imagethief, two whiny cats and the various junk that has accumulated in the past two years.

I hate looking at apartments. The whole process is annoying and seedy, like buying a used car, if you were going to live in it. Of course, if you were buying a car at least the whole process would be over when you drove it off the lot (unless, of course, it was a lemon). With apartment rental, once you sign the lease you then have to deal with the brutal moving. I don’t know about you, but I find it impossible to move without losing at least one thing. Once it was the rice cooker (no big deal — it had bicycle shorts crammed into it, so whoever lifted it deserved what they got). Once it was my wife’s dive computer. This time, if I’m lucky, we’ll lose one of the cats.

Rental agents in China are motley crew, and not all of them strike me as entirely together. One young man greeted me and my wife in a white T-shirt with the sleeves torn off (and wore the same shirt on two separate occasions), and then wondered why the security guard at Huamao gave him trouble at the door. Another explained to me at a certain complex that 160 square meter and 180 square meter apartments “cost the same because the 180 meter ones don’t rent, so the price has come down”. I didn’t have the heart to explain to him that this was both economically impossible, and not supported by the evidence of a real-estate ad listing different prices for 160 and 180 square meter apartments.

But by far the worst aspect of renting an apartment in China is the furniture. In fact, I will extend this beyond China, since I have seennumerous apartments in Singapore and seen places belonging to Korean landlords, and make a sweeping statement: Asian landlords have, on average, the world’s most appalling taste in furnishings and fixtures. If there is a hell, it will have been furnished by an Asian landlord. And, just playing the odds, probably a Chinese one.

What is it about buying an apartment in Asia that makes a person instantaneously lose all contact with good taste and common sense? The furniture I see in these apartments is beyond ugly, ranging from Logan’s Run-style 1970s retro-future abominations that would make orange shag carpet cringe in shame (in the future, all furniture will be inflatable leatherette!) to coccyx-shattering rosewood chinoiserie with all the inviting warmth of an ice chastity belt to faux Louis XIV rococo obscenities that could be lifted from Versailles, if Versailles was in Branson, Missouri and lined with neon.

The other thing that really gets me is chandeliers. If wanted to live in a luxury hotel I’d live in a luxury hotel. I don’t want my apartment to feel like a luxury hotel. I certainly don’t want things that look like inverted, crystal pine trees hanging from the ceiling. These things are like the Chandeliers of Damocles. I’d be waiting for the whole jangly works to tear loose and land on my head as I’m working my way through my morning Grape Nuts. I don’t want to die with my face in a bowl of Grape Nuts and an enormous, crystal pine tree embedded in my skull. The morticians will make fun of my corpse and my family will refuse to take delivery of the remains. The hearse will make jingly crystal noises every time it goes over a speed bump. New-agers will come to worship at my grave. (“He didn’t die! He transcended space-time with the help of crystals in his skull!”) How humiliating. I’ll end up was one of the “odd news” bites in the China Daily: “Foreigner dies in blaze of glory!” It’ll be right above, “Two-headed goat in Shaanxi sings Donny & Marie classics!”

I suppose chandeliers are better than the alternative, which is relentlessly cold fluorescent lighting that makes the inside of the apartment look like a meat locker. Notice how fluorescent light can make anyone look like a serial killer? Under incandescent or warm fluorescent light Mrs. Imagethief is a gorgeous woman with intoxicating, brown skin, lustrous hair and sparkling eyes. Under fluorescent light she looks like Norman Bates’ mother in Psycho. And, if you don’t recall, Norman Bates’ mother was dead. God knows what it must make me look like. Lurch from the Addams Family, perhaps. Or Dick Cheney.

But who will notice the cheap lighting when there is a TV the size of a billboard? Yes, every apartment I look at has furniture that looks lifted from Peewee’s Playhouse, either hallucinatory chandeliers that would make Steve Wynn blanch or soul-destroying dimestore fluorescents and, for some reason, a brand-new flatscreen TV big enough burn your shadow into the wall behind you (but inevitably paired with a 200 kuai cheapie DVD player).

Here’s an idea: Take the money you’ve spent on the forty-inch LCD television and plow it into some decent lighting and tolerable fucking furniture. There’s an Ikea in this town. I know; I’ve seen it. It’s the size of a small planet. It’s Ikea-World. It’s so big that there are probably people who have been lost inside since the day it opened, subsisting on Swedish meatballs that have rolled under the displays. I don’t like Ikea. In fact, in Singapore I was busy purging the Ikea furniture from my house. But it’s so big that, even if they’re catering to dire, nouveau riche tastes, they must have some furniture that, if not exactly nice, is at least bland and inoffensive. I’ll take a piece of furniture called “Kysblispinyx” or some other too-precious Nordic name if that’s what I have to endure in order to have a couch that supports my legs completely rather than suddenly folding down when I slide forward and slamming my face into the glass coffee table. Honestly, why not just have knives shoot out of the cushions?

I know, I know. You’re thinking I should get an unfurnished place and buy my own furniture. I would, but I already had to sell one houseful of furniture when I moved to China. I don’t relish the idea of accumulating another raft of miscellaneous possessions that I’ll have to unload three or four years hence when I move back to Singapore. And, from what I’ve seen, the chances of my buying anything here that I’ll want to treasure for the rest of my life are slim.

So I’m sucking it up. I’ll find a chandelier-free apartment with classy furniture in this town if it kills me. It can be the dankest, most cockroach-ridden, formaldehyde-infused shithole in Beijing as long as the furniture doesn’t give me cataracts. If I can’t manage that, I’ll just buy a used car and sleep in that.

Note: Imagethief would like to tip his hat to his current landlord who, with the exception of the couch, did a reasonable job furnishing his apartment.

August 17, 2006