WARNING: I AM USUALLY NOT ONE WHO APPRECIATES STORIES CONTAINING DEFACATION, AND I AM CERTAINLY NOT ONE WHO HAS PREVIOUSLY WRITTEN SUCH A STORY, BUT TODAY’S EVENTS, FOR REASONS UNKNOWN TO MYSELF, DEMAND TO BE TOLD.
There are times in life when one is ruled by the heart, times when one is ruled by the head. In China, there are times also when one is ruled by the plumbing.
Adam and I had grand ambitions for the day — we planned to catch up on laundry, dishes and clean the house before heading out for groceries that we could prep to make the busy week ahead more manageable.
Unfortunately, the water was completely off again this morning. Dalian has a water shortage, and this has become a normal part of life for us. Usually when this happens, we just wait until the afternoon, when it turns on again and resume our water using routine. During average times, we keep a few buckets of water on hand for flushing the toliet and other cleaning and bathing purposes, but considering the amount of mosquitoes recently, I had decided to dump the buckets just yesterday, as I worried about the little fuckers having more places to breed. I did this right before I made an intestine thumping spicy Sichuan soup.
Those of you who know me well cannot accuse me of having the greatest amount of common sense. In retrospect, however, I have great enough analytical power to understand how the events unfolded as they did the following morning. There is a reason that the Chinese name for diarrhea, la duzi, which translates to “pull on the stomach”, has such a literal meaning.
There are cynics out there who believe that Adam and my relationship has been all fun and games over here on this exotic continent. To those people, I ask you this: how many times have your and your loved one’s poopy shared a common bowl? For those of you who are turned off by bodily excrement, this entry only promises to get worse from here on out, so perhaps you’d better leave.
This morning, we do all that we can possibly to the apartment without water. Adam sweeps the house, defrosts the fridge and uses the ice to wash the dining room floor. I dust the furniture and wash the windows — all with one handy industrial cleaner that smells as about unnatural as anything can possibly smell. It smells like its made of the chemicals of chemicals, and as such, it wipes out all the filth of the natural world quite effectively. Alien robots would approve of this and serve it as cocktails.
My eyes fall upon my natural beauties — my plants. The Nebraska girl rises up inside me, the theme music from “Little House on the Prarie” swells, the hands of My Antonia grasp my own in a ghostly grip, and I am feverishly upon my plants, repotting some, playing with the clones of others, trimming, sifting, digging, mixing. Before I know it, my hands are covered with dirt, and with as much hope as someone who looks at a plum tree hoping it will quench her thirst, make my way to one of the sinks in the shit smelling bathroom. Of course, there is no water. In half an hour five eight-year-old children will come to my home for a lesson. I wash my hands with some of the ice that Adam has scraped off the freezer and eat some fried rice.
Before the children come over, I make the impulsive decision to rip off a long strip of tape on the bathroom door. I do this so that I can close the door fully, as the contents therein are getting stinkier by the minute, and with the tape in place, there remains a dangerous crack for the noxious air to escape. I wouldn’t mind if just the children were to notice this, but the parents come over as well to watch and to throw their kids dirty looks if they answer one of my questions wrong. I’ve been trying politely to get rid of them for weeks, but they insist on watching the lessons, and so I’ve given up, as I don’t want to hurt the relationship or the chance to keep making such easy money. The usually sit quietly enough in the corner on the floor under the shadow of my bamboo plant where they take furtive notes.
I smell a little ripe, and my hands are dirty, but the bathroom door is closed, and I’ve got a great lesson planned for the day, so I’m happy. I get paid, the kids leave, and I go to the bathroom only to discover that by taking the tape off of the door, the door has become locked from the inside. We call the landlord who says to call her parents. We call her parents and explain the situation. They say they’ll have someone over soon. It’s 2 p.m.
Adam and I make some disposable bedpans out of various empty plastic bottles. We make do, but do not make doo doo. If those who always drink wine are winos then I must be a watero. It’s too hard to abstain, so I decide to take a nap. It’s 3 p.m.
I go to sleep. I dream about jugs of cool dragon well tea. I dream about swimming. I wake up at 5:30.
“The water just turned back on,” Adam says gleefully from the kitchen, where he is washing dishes about as happily as one can wash dishes.
“And the maintenance workers?”
“They haven’t come yet.”
One up, one down, we work together to wash some dishes. I call both the landlady and her parents again. No one answers the phone. Adam and I try the door again. We take the handle off, but it doesn’t change the situation. We try the credit card down the door crack. Nothing changes. We use screwdrivers, files, cursing. Nothing changes.
We decide to go ask some of our neighbors, who run a concessions stand, what their take on it is.
“Just kick it in,” they advise us. “A locksmith can cost up to USD 10.”
“I don’t know,” I say to Adam, “If our landlord would like to eventually find the door frame broken.”
It’s 7 p.m. and Mr. Landlord shows up. He’s baffled by the situation. After trying for an hour, he gives up and calls the locksmiths — two rough Dongbei guys who puff on harsh cigarettes as they fix the door.
First they pry the damn thing open. Next they use… TWO pieces of tape. One piece goes over the latch, one piece goes over the lock.
“Leave this tape here,” they say, “and you won’t have a problem getting into your bathroom again.
Now we really can’t shut the door, but at least we were able to flush the toliet for the first time that day, and we could stop peeing in water bottles.
Relaxed and happy that not only does the plumbing work, but that I can freely enter my bathroom, I decide to take a shower. It’s 10:30 at night. When I get out of the shower, I discover Adam on the phone.
“That was the neighbors downstairs,” he said. “They told us we shouldn’t shower every day because the water leaks into their apartment.”
I should give an introduction to these neighbors here. They’re a hateful little couple who live one floor down from us with a violent senile grandma and an invisible little kid. They have spoken poorly of us ever since our window fell out of its frame and took out their laundry rack on its way down six stories last year. There was, I guess I should confess, one other incident — that being on Christmas Eve last year we were playing James Brown until 2 a.m., but I feel that in every other case, we’ve been hassle-free neighbors.
There are times when I really feel what I think is the American in me, and my reaction to this rude phone call was, “I can shower whenever I damn well please! It’s my house, it’s my right!” and so on and so forth. I’ve prided myself in my conservation of water, the brevity and rarity of my showers. Who WAS this asshole to call us so late at night and tell me not to shower?
Adam and I went downstairs to explain that we felt that if the shower was leaking, he should be in contact with our landlord. He had the number. What could we do if there was a problem with the pipes? We already had an overturned crockery dish in the shower to keep the water from not going down that particular drain that we have to always tiptoe around. I also told him that in my country, it wasn’t polite to handle problems by calling your neighbor so late at night and telling them what to do. He responded by saying that maybe the problem was that I couldn’t get used to China. I asked him if someone called him late at night and told him not to shower whether or not he would think it was rude. He said he would not think it was rude. His wife said that if we wanted to know what rude was, we should look at ourselves — coming home so late and always talking in such loud voices. Didn’t we know we kept their child awake? (I have never seen this child or evidence of it, but every time we have a problem with these people, they bring up their “child.” ) I know late for them must be nine at night because we never come home later than that. We didn’t get anywhere with these people. We just made it worse. They said that they had called our landlord, but our landlord hadn’t said anything about it to us.
When I got back to the house, I was really upset. I called the landlord who said there was nothing we could do — that we should ignore them. He told me not to be mad, but I was fuming. I couldn’t understand why our neighbors, if they had continued to have this problem or any problem, couldn’t have just come up the stairs and talked to us at a reasonable hour in reasonable tones. They knew we could speak Chinese. We had tried once to go down and talk to them before, but the old woman cursed us and slammed the door in our face after she saw who we were.
It seems like the problems we often experience with people here are the same problems we face with the mechanics of things in China. I don’t know why the water stops running, I just know I have to wait. I know I can’t fix it. I know that maybe no one can. I just know I have to wait. Sometimes I have to wait a day. Sometimes two. I have to make do with what it gives me. I don’t know why the door is broken so that without tape it locks and with tape it’s impossible to close, and maybe even the workers don’t know either. They just knew how to rig it so that it wouldn’t be a problem for the present. I don’t know why the pipes of our shower leak into the neighbor’s apartment downstairs. We just have to put kitchen crockery there to keep the water from going down too fast. These human conflicts — will they always be so temporarily solved? Will the drama always be so quick and strong to arrive, so quiet and anti-climatic in its departure? Will we ever really understand the nature of how and why things went so terribly wrong? And when is it going to all stop smelling like shit?
About
Megan Shank is an editor, writer and translator living in Shanghai, China.
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