The China Lawyer Blog

We were invited by Chinese friends to go their very loud, fun near year’s banquet (that’s the Chinese new year), and my boy Leo must’ve been held by everyone there. See the video, followed by one that shows the outside of our house on the day after the Chinese New Year–see what the firecrackers do to the place we live.

The banquet

The day after

One of the themes of my work in China, including this blog, is the cultural issue of how Chinese are raised never to ask why or question authority, and the consequences of that. The ramifications are everywhere, and I’m seeing them again here in my new home in Xining. Last week, the management at this living area, which is Xining’s most expensive and most luxurous, posted a notice that electricity would be down for the entire complex, more than 2,000 apartments, from 10am until 5pm. I asked why, and how old and sick people would survive without even an operating elevator in buildings that are more than 15 stories tall, and the standard answer, which I now accept, was essentially, “Well, we posted a notice, so you were aware of this, so its up to you to deal with it…”

And now this week, the latest is how water heaters here, which are individually installed in each apartment but are pre-selected and bought en masse by the management, are now snapping at night since whoever ordered these things never either discussed it or thought twice about, but should’ve bought ones that can withstand sub zero temperatures. No discussion, and now most of the people here have no hot water. Here’s the video…

Let this be a lesson to any to-be-renters. First the video…

Here’s the progression of events:

We moved into Xining’s nicest apartment complex, and rented an apartment for about USD $275 a month from a local retiree who obviously made a lifetime investment, and were are his lucky tenants. I knew after living in China for nearly six years that whatever has been installed in this apartment would obviously and certainly be the cheapest possible fixtures that China had to offer in this apartment. But that was ok. I have money to pay for fixing it.

But it still has managed to piss me off, so I am writing about it.

First the furniture. We bought our own furniture on Taobao, China’s ebay. My wife somehow thought it was a good idea to ship about 1,000 pounds of wooden furniture with a queen size mattress 3,000km to this edge of China, and when it did arrive, she had to engage in protracted negotiations with the delivery people to get it from the train station to here, since it was so heavy. Then me and the driver of the tiny delivery vehicle that carried it the last few km had to make 15 trips up 10 flights with the furniture, which when unpacked was only slightly less complicated to assemble than a nuclear power plant. No instruction manual, thousands of slabs, multiple boxes. And so I found someone to assemble it, and he did, and now a week later we have furniture, but the bed is already beginning to snap.

But I am digressing. I want to tell you about the locks in this apartment. As the video explains, we have five indoor doors, and our landlord obviously paid a total of less than USD $3 for all the locks in the house, including installation, since now a week later three don’t work. But the story here is what we did about it. My general rule for getting anything done in Chins is to assume that whatever the rule or law is, and whoever has responsibility for doing something, makes no difference, and that the work is going to be done wrong. The concept of work pride has not yet permeated the culture here.

So, after a few days of locks falling off, I decided the logical and only course of action was to pay someone from a lock shop to fix it. Duh. But, my wife persuaded me that the more proper, Chinese way to handle this would be to see who had responsibility at the get go. The lock company? The landlord?

And, so we called the landlord yesterday, got a reply question whether we really needed locks and door handles, or could get by without them (wife replied diplomatically that we need them to prevent our kid and dog from getting into places they shouldn’t, my reply would have been more direct like this: shut up idiot and fix the locks), and we got an early morning visit from the landlord today. He’s a nice fellow, about 55, retired, and from my perspective a trip out here from the city where he lives to fix a lock that he could pay someone less than USD $5 to do was a waste. But whatever.

So, his first question was, again, whether we needed functioning locks. We answered the same. Then he tried to fix one of the locks himself, which he couldn’t really do because it is broken and requires tools. And so we talked and talked, and after two hours (I no longer lose my temper in these conversations, unless I am having the conversation myself, but in this case my wife was talking with him) it was agreed to call the management office to fix this, even though that would involve a fee of about 50 RMB (USD $6), with the question of who would pay that being left unsaid. Two hours later, the management office lock guy didn’t come bye, the landlord mentioned that he could find someone for 10RMB ($1.50) on his own, and left, and was immediately followed, like we were watching a sitcom, frankly, judgment by timing and sequence of events) by the management lock guy, who spent thirty minutes explaining to my wife why any effort to use such cheap locks were barely as likely to succeed as a full court push to sell a licensed copy of Microsoft Windows in this city, and he left, undoubtedly wondering why my wife didn’t pay him, and my wife was also thinking first about how much to avoid paying him, and then only about how to get the locks fixed. Money first, here, after all.

Then, again, like a sitcom, the landlord reappeared, even as my wife was calling him with the expert conclusion that the locks would have to be replaced, with a guy who obviously was not happy about the measly 10RMB (USD $1.50) that the landlord obviously had told him he would pay him, presumably only if he succeeded in getting the locks fixed. He did not like Jack sniffing his leg, and he took five minutes to tell the landlord that the locks were, as we’ve been told repeatedly in the course of our 6 hours together (now approaching 2:30pm), useful only as tire chains, if they were connected to tire chains, and nothing else.

Then another one hour talking, about the baby, with the true thought passing through the back of my wife’s and the landlord’s minds that the other person has enough money to pay for this, since as I’ve said money is also first and foremost in the minds of my wife and whomever she is speaking with, the the landlord concluded that he would in fact have to get a locksmith to fix this.

And I went to sleep. And thirty minutes later he called my wife, and asked if I wouldn’t mind terribly walking half a mile to my car and driving him into the city to find the locksmith.

To which I said, as I rested comfortably next to my infant son, exhausted from long nights feeding him and struggling to get enough air here at 2,200m: “Yeah right”

And that’s why now at 9pm, the locks are seriously broken, the dog can get into the kitchen, and it’s why I made the video above. Good luck to you renting an apartment in China.

As mentioned previously, my family has moved 2,000 km west of Beijing to Xining, capital of Qinghai province, and it is from here that I will be doing a lot of my work, and continuing this blog. What prompted the move was a few things: pollution, a desire for something new, and because Xining is really nice.

We drove out here in October looking for a new city to live in, and Lanzhou was originally the goal. But, Lanzhou was even dirtier than Beijing, and though we didn’t have much hope for anything better when we headed west from Lanzhou, we were delighted by what we discovered 2 hours further down the road in Xining: a small, modern city surrounded by mountains, and about as clean as China can get. There are large seeming unpolluted rivers on the road here from Lanzhou. Mountains everywhere, and sheep climbing on the mountainside tended by herders, and something I had never seen before: the emergence about 50km outside of Lanzhou from an enormous orange cloud of dust that shrouds Lanzhou and makes the sun seem like you are viewing it through a colored, cotton curtain. I don’t know what in Lanzhou creates such a disaster, but it disappears on the road to Xining, fortunately.

There wasn’t much nice housing in Xining, and we had difficulty even figuring out how to rent a place. There are just a 2 or 3 decent apartment complexes (and I mean by that a place that has living conditions better than a medium security jail in the USA) but fortunately the nicest one, where we rented a place, is spectacularly nice: Shangri La, or something close to that, since it is pronounced in translation. Just awesome actually.

This complex has about 15 buildings built already in the Spanish style that I see every time I head out to Stanford University, with the red tile roofs, and each building is from 8 to 20 stories high, plus there’s more under construction, so I’d guess there are about 2,000 units already. Parking obviously wasn’t planned well–typical of China–so only a few of the buildings have a completed underground garage, and everyone else scrambles for a free parking space on the small main dividing road, which makes that chaotic. There’s a luxurious gym and membership club with a pool where they sell one year passes for 10,000 RMB, which is more than 5 months of our rent, so there’s a mismatch there. The place is empty, so I’m wondering if they created the first parts of this as a facade to entice the sale of the other units rather than to actually make money.

The city is less than one kilometer away, taxis here are just 6RMB for the first 3 km or so, so for less than one USD I can go where I want, and I already can travel everywhere with my car anyhow. There’s a small mountain with a road next to the apartments, and it winds upwards for a long way, so after we drove it for 10 minutes or so we just decided to turn around. Locals refer to the location of places in Xining in reference to the river that flows through town, so everything is up or down, and there’s no left, right, east or west.

I’ll write more about Xining as I stay here longer. Ive managed to fill myself up on the noodles and mutton every day, and its time for a change now to something more nutritious, though it will be hard to get anything more inexpensive.