It feels a bit awkward to admit, but between living at home in high school and on-campus in college, I’ve actually never needed to find an apartment before.
Fate’s decision to put me in China for this first-time experience reminds me of my father’s decision to teach me to roller blade on grass before pavement. Just as the unnecessary and absurd difficulty of trying to roll on dirt meant that balancing on smooth asphalt seemed easy when I finally tried it, finding a place in the US will be a cinch by comparison.
My apartment search began online. I went on 58同城 (58 tong cheng), a site which is essentially the equivalent of Chinese Craigslist. Already, my mother is surely excited at the prospect of me running into the Chinese equivalent of the seedy people who doubtlessly propagate the darker corners of Internet personal ad sites.
All of the ads would begin with the same line: 一室一厅一卫, or “one bedroom, one living room, one bathroom.” So far, so good. I like bedrooms. I like bathrooms. I can do this! But then came the furnishings.
I was told that the room came JingZhuangXiu, 精装修. I knew that ZhuangXiu 装修 meant “furnished” but I wasn’t sure what Jing meant in this context. Was the room fully furnished? Or un-furnished? It seemed to be important, so I moused over the word Jing and I remembered again why this language is so damn hard:
Was my room furnished with the spirit of a mythical goblin? Was it furnished with selected rice (archaic)? Or was everything covered in… essence? There was nothing for it. I would need to go visit myself to find out.
Real estate in China moves quickly, and housing is extremely expensive to buy. There is a joke about a person who regrets not starting to save up money earlier in order to buy a house, and so he invents a time machine and travels back in time—to the Tang dynasty, 1300 years ago. So, like me, most people rent, using companies with names like “I Love My Home” to help find them places to live.
I arrived at the local branch of I Love My Home to find an office the size of a small hallway crammed with four computers, six employees, and ten pictures of happy Chinese grandparents blowing bubbles on a emerald-green lawn with cute kids in pigtails.
My hard-won knowledge from my market research was quickly thrown aside. “I want to find a place in the Hua Qing Jia Yuan housing area,” I said, following the advice of friends who had lived there comfortably.
“You don’t want to live in Hua Qing Jia Yuan,” my agent told me while getting me a cup of water. “That place is a dump. You might get sick there, or robbed. We’ve got a new building nearby, we can find you something there.”
And it was only twice the price I was looking for!
I was still interested though in taking a look, as today’s mission was more about doing more research and less about signing a lease. We walked out the door and Wenchao, my agent, led me to a small electric motorbike with a tiny seat on the back. I put my bag in the little basket on the front. She handed me the keys.
“Can you drive?”
“I’ve never driven one of these before.”
It was amazing how little impact that sentence had on her. Wenchao seemed completely unfazed that she was going to hand over her life to the random white guy who had never driven in Beijing traffic before. But the more I protested, the more it became clear that I was either leaving the office on that bike or without looking at the apartment.
And so I learned a lot that day: that driving directly against traffic is sometimes, if not always, okay so long as your vehicle is small enough that it would be totally destroyed by impact, and that the sixteenth floor is too high for thieves to climb into but the eighth floor is not.
I also learned that looks can be deceiving. The “brand new building” was in fact so new it wasn’t done yet. The place I looked at had four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a small kitchen, but there were some problems that seemed to be more worrisome to me than to the agent.
“My roommate’s room doesn’t have a door,” I said, looking at the gouged-out doorframe.
“That room’s a bit cheaper,” she said.
In the end, something about the agenting process was off-putting enough that I decided to go back the next day and try to get in touch directly with some apartment owners looking for subletters. My demands aren’t all that stringient; so long as there are no goblin spirits, I’ll be happy.