No. 5

Date: March 28, 2016

Status: Dripping on the rug

              After a lazy Monday morning and a lunch of questionable dietary value (are yogurt, nuts, and dried squid a lunch?), I put on the latest episode of the "This American Life" podcast, cranked the volume, and hopped in the shower. As I sudsed up my long hair, I strained to hear the quieter moments of the podcast, but I got the gist of it. Soon I moved to the conditioner, lost in the story of a family whose take on the American Civil Rights Movement varied from generation to generation. As I began to rinse the conditioner from my hair, I heard a sound that didn't seem to fit with the podcast. In fact, it was louder and seemed much closer. I realized that someone was knocking on my door, though I didn't expect anyone in all of China to be doing so. Who could it be?

              Here I'd like to pause and acknowledge something. I have not posted to this blog in quite a while. I wish I could say I'm sorry, but I'm not. I wasn't feeling the need to write for a while, and as much as I'd like to get in the habit of writing consistently, I'm just not there yet. So that's out of the way. Now back to the story.

              So there I was in the shower, perceiving a knocking--no, a pounding--at my door. My first thought was that it was probably someone with the wrong apartment number, as I wasn't expecting anyone. Then I remembered that the podcast was turned up pretty loud, but that had never been an issue in the past as the thick concrete walls of the building seemed to absorb nearly every sound, apart from a jackhammer carving out a renovation in the early morning.
              Hurriedly, I threw on a bathrobe and my (very Chinese) house slippers, and ran to the peephole to catch only a fleeting glimpse of the knocker's back as he or she stepped into the elevator. I sighed, exasperated that I had dripped all over the floor just for that. I turned down the volume on the podcast and returned to rinsing my hair.
              Before long, I heard another pounding on my door. Ceaseless, ceaseless pounding. A Chinese knock is not rap, rap, rap...pause...Rap Rap Rap...pause. No, a Chinese knock is just an incessant pounding that continues until the door can be pounded no more because the door has swung open. To the Western ear, this sounds frantic. Having already turned down the volume, I thought perhaps it was someone coming around to read the gas meter.
              I'd never had an apartment before that had a gas meter, so I'm not sure how other areas deal with it, but in China, someone comes to your home unannounced, and asks to be let in to go to your kitchen and read your meter. I discovered this in November when I was throwing a little birthday celebration at my apartment. First my fellow foreign teacher arrived with his two Chinese friends. At the next knock, I eagerly opened the door, only to find a stout little woman with a clipboard, yelling at me in Chinese. Luckily one of my coworker's Chinese friends was able to translate and explain that the little old woman was only there to read the meter, and apparently hadn't arrived for my birthday party after all.
              I recalled all this as, for the second time, I pulled my bathrobe over my dripping skin. I turned a knob on the door to slide open a little metal panel (the sort you'd use to ask for the password to your secret criminal hideout), and I saw two brown eyes, framed with wrinkles, straining to keep level with the opening.
              "Ni hao," I said hesitantly.
              I shouldn't have said anything. I should have let my blue foreigner eyes speak for themselves because the next thing I heard was a solid wall of the local dialect of Mandarin, with pinyin and tones like I had never heard before.
              So I hit her with my go-to response for such situations: I hear you, but I don't understand. "Ting bu dong," I said.
              And she hit me back with the usual, "Ni ting bu dong a?" followed by another wall of Yangzhou hua.
              Despite my less-than-presentable appearance, I knew I had to make my foreign-ness more apparent and perhaps give the woman an opportunity for miming. So I opened the door and let her eyes fall upon me in all my bathrobed glory.
              Seeing me, she continued to babble on, increasing her speed and volume, which we all know is the best way to make yourself understood when speaking to someone unfamiliar with your language. I made it clear that I didn't understand. 
              Soon she got to miming. She tugged at the collar of her shirt, pointing at it imploringly. "Yes, ma'am," I thought, "I'm already quite aware that this is not the proper attire in which to meet one's neighbors." 
              Then she began pointing up. Up, up, up, her finger jabbed. Suddenly it occurred to me that I might be in danger. Perhaps someone had jackhammered too far in their renovation efforts, and the whole building was about to fall down, and this woman was telling me to throw on a jacket and get out. With all this going through my mind, a paint chip let loose from the ceiling and came to rest right there on my doormat. For a moment, I thought my worst fears were confirmed. But the woman wasn't pulling me by the arm to get me out of the building. There didn't seem to be an immediate threat. And the ceiling seemed to be missing quite a few chips of paint. 
              The woman's next course of action was to unbutton the front of her sweater and press the fabric between her palms. She seemed very concerned that I wasn't dressed for the apocalypse.
              "Deng yi xia," I told the woman, which means, "Wait a moment." I shut the door.
              I thought that whatever the situation, I ought to call Karen, Shane School's current helper of foreigners, and get some real clothes on.  

              I grabbed my phone. And as I threw on the nearest clothes, I heard more pounding on my door. Annoyed that the woman didn't apply "deng yi xia" to enough time for a person to get dressed, I slipped on my shirt, zipped my pants, and threw open the door.
              Well, it was a good thing I had gotten dressed because now the woman was standing there with her equally elderly and frantic husband. And I soon understood why she had produced this secret weapon, for he could say English words. I wouldn't say he could speak English, but he could say English words.
              The man made the same motion of tugging on his shirt. But to this he added, "Clothes, clothes."
              The woman looked at me expectantly. I wanted to say, "Yes, I'm wearing clothes now; thank you for noticing! What do you want!?" But instead I said, "Deng yi xia," and scrolled through my phone's contacts for Karen's number.
              When I lifted the phone to my ear, I suddenly realized how nervous the whole ordeal was making me as I struggled to find the words to speak to Karen. "Hi, Karen," I said. "Um, are you busy?"
              "No, I'm not," she said.
              "Can you, uh, talk to these people at my door?"
              She agreed, and I handed the phone to the woman. After a moment's conversation, the woman handed the phone back to me, and Karen revealed the whole mystery to me. "They are your upstairs neighbors," she said. "Their baby's clothes dropped down to your apartment."

I never hang clothes outside of the balcony as there's plenty of room inside.

              "Oh!" I exclaimed as everything suddenly made sense. Thanking Karen profusely I ran to my enclosed balcony, and opened the window. Sure enough, fluttering on the series of metal bars outside was a little hanger with a pink baby shirt on it. I snatched it up and returned it to the concerned grandparents, who were very grateful.