Tonight, after speaking with a good friend about good music and bad religion for a couple of hours, I decided to cash it in for the night.
I stumbled upstairs to the bedroom to discover that the door was locked. I tried all the keys the landlord had given me, but none of them worked.
I worried because I had just bought a heater to stave off the damp cold of a Shanghai winter and turned the thing on full blast to ward off another night of jaw-clenching frigidity, and I didn’t know if it would burn the place down overnight if I left it to its own device.
It quickly became one of those holy-shit-I’m-gonna-have-to-do-somethin’-crazy-to-resolve-this-situation China moments. I pulled myself up onto the rusty laundry rack — which overhangs a three story drop– and kicked my legs up to thus vault onto my bedroom’s balcony and used one of my keys to unlock the grate around the window’s padlock and crawl inside. Thank god I didn’t lock the windows, though I might want to do so while I’m actually sleeping because it would be far too easy for a cat thief with a lock cutter to have the run of the place. The next step is figuring out what to do with this bedroom door.
Although this might sound absolutely horrible to the average reader, say my mother, provided she actually reads this, it’s actually quite significant of the tiny victories of survival one can palpably feel themselves achieving in this country. There’s something so creatively demanding about living in a place that demands innovative (and subversive) physical solutions to things. Like the euphoria of sex or eating or loud music, it pulls blood to the head and the stomach.
After passing through the fear of death via plunging three stories or of the certain fiery annihilation of an entire complex via an unchaperoned heater, there’s nothing as satisfying, shaky, joyous as the belly-full laugh when discovering an opened window at the right time. I also realized tonight that the moon is beautiful seated upon the tiled roof of this complex — especially when it is full as it was this evening.
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