Further life and times of *liltayinchina*

I don’t know a thing about economies or the construction business. These topics are important, especially in my chosen field of sustainable design, and so one day I hope to know more. I know even less about these topics in relation to China’s monstrous development. But I’ll tell you what I do know and then I’d like to ask some potentially naïve questions, with the aim of reaching, at least, a common sense consensus.

I know that it rained for about three days straight last week. I know that last fall, my apartment, namely the thin, gray “floor covering” in the bedroom was soggy from some undiscovered leak either in the pipes or coming from external water sources. I know that one day I found a living fungus rooted firmly in the floor covering last fall and that I kept getting ill.

Like I said before, I know that it rained a lot last week. I mention this again because the leak is back. Not only is the rug soggy all along the wall in between the door to the apartment and my standing air conditioner unit in the opposite corner, but there is a smallish lake (or bog since the mosquitoes have returned) outside of my apartment and it pools against the wall sort of where the drainage pipe is for my kitchen sink, my bathtub and my washing machine. But I’ve used these three appliances throughout the winter and not a drop of water would I encounter in the rug or outside the apartment. Obviously, it did rain a couple of times this winter but the spring rains have been heavier and longer. Could the water be dripping through some hole on the roof and slowly but surely collecting under my floor covering? I don’t know and most likely won’t know because the repair work done when we report a problem is shady at best.

Sometime in January, I opened the sliding window in my bedroom only to find that it wouldn’t shut all the way when I was ready to keep the bugs (and birds) out. I tried shutting it everyday, thinking that I could outsmart its stubbornness. When Mike arrived and we were about to set off for two weeks, I sought his manly strength but the window’s stubbornness held out. So the window remained open during my vacation. Upon returning, I informed the school of the problem and a rough and tumble female groundskeeper arrived with a screwdriver. She banged half-heartedly on the window frame for a few minutes, then shouted at it in Chinese and finally managed to shut it with some serious metal-bending efforts with the screwdriver. She tsk-tsked me when I made the motion as if to open it again and said in Chinese, “No use. No good. Bad window. No use.”

I remember the slight feeling of suffocation that occurred as she uttered those short phrases, and with time, I’ve gotten downright itchy at night, knowing I can’t open that window. Around March, I stopped using the heating function of my air conditioner, but the room was so stale and airless, that I started using the fan function. Funny thing, trapped air. Even when a device is used to move it around, it remains stale and stifling, it’s just louder.

For those of you pulling at your collars and inadvertently moving closer to your own open windows, I’ll save you the suspense and tell you now: the window is open. I made a difficult choice the other night after arriving home from painting class to a room that smelled of boiled cabbage and stinking wet socks. I threw the window open as wide as it would go and contemplated strapping myself inside my sleeping bag and tying it down to the air conditioner unit outside of the window, in order to get away from the smells, the awful, awful smells, which you’ll be pained to know, haven’t gone away.

The room smells horrible and I don’t know from where the odor might be coming. On the one hand, there is the marshiness of the carpet. On the other, I’ve continued wearing my winter slippers to protect my feet from the marshiness and so my feet sweat and might be the stinking culprits. The soles of the slippers are slick and often I slide around on my way to the kitchen. I’ve yet to fall flat on my face, but it can’t be far off, especially if the marsh chooses not to recede.

Anyway, that’s what I know. Now, the questions in my mind begin with this one: how is it POSSIBLY economical to build a building so quickly that leaks and broken windows and falling light fixtures and overloaded circuits are a regular occurrence? And these are the problems I’ve ALONE had with my apartment. The apartments below mine, on the 2nd and 3rd floors are also plagued by leaks and Litisha’s entire mattress was waterlogged one day after a leak that had been building in her ceiling exploded through her light fixture. Can you imagine the result of such an occurrence in the middle of the night? How lucky she was that it happened while we were at school.

I suppose that it doesn’t end up costing much if the maintenance crews who are called in choose not to fix the problems, but what happens when the building really does decompose in a year? Do the cheap costs of building a shoddy building in the first place end up saving money even if you have to rebuild the building ten or twenty or fifty years earlier than if you’d done it correctly the first time? Are China’s construction teams and crews really putting up cities of this caliber of craftsmanship? What is to become of the country if so??

I have to add this. It just started raining very hard outside my window and though I am delighting in the sounds of the drops on the tree outside my window and in the thunder in the distance, I fear my marsh is going to be a full-on lake in the morning. There’s also a strong sewer smell creeping into the room and I find that with the movement of the wind, I can gauge when to breathe through my nose and when to refrain. The lights are off in my room, to ward off any mosquitoes that might be looking for a relatively dry spot out of the rain, but the light in my bathroom is still on. I can hear a crazy beetle doing haphazard laps around and around the square-shaped room. On every third or fourth lap, he slams into a shiny tile and falls to the ground. After a few moments of rest, he starts back up again. I’d go turn the light off to give him some peace, but what would he do to entertain himself then??

Now if you’re thinking, “Well, you aren’t usually in your apartment all day long”, I’ll tell you another story of toxification. In this story, replace mould with very nasty chemicals and retain the image of my over-worked immune system, hence the sleepy, sleepy Lillis.

The school has been preparing for a very important review for over two weeks now. An official all the way from the Beijing Department of Education will be visiting the school this coming Thursday. The official’s business is to conduct a thorough review of the school and it’s practices to determine whether additional Government support of the school is warranted. As you can imagine, the school leaders have worked themselves into a frenzy of preparation. The acting principal is new this year and so it is especially important that he, and the school make a good impression. With these pressures in mind, he has been going around ordering the most ridiculous “beautification” acts to be carried out. My favorite (I can say this now, since I’m still alive) was the painting of the metal bars on all of the office windows a shiny silver color. I can’t help but imagining the important official walking no closer than 100 meters from the bars and pausing in his walk to say, “Oh my graciousness, this school is so worthy of our additional funds: your iron bars gleam as if they were made of real shiny silver!”

Let me paint a picture for you:

It is Monday and the students are marching to the field for the morning exercise. The English teachers are relegated to the office and peer out at the students on the field through their office-prison bars. Just a few feet away, a young man who’s life expectancy is most likely not past thirty, stands atop a wooden ladder, delicately daubing the most toxic smelling potion (and as a graduate of an Industrial Design program, this is no small claim, what with late nights of cuddling up to Bondo, epoxy, and spray paint) onto the iron bars. In fact, I’m surprised the silver paint didn’t eat right through the bars given the nature of the smell. Fifteen minutes locked in the room and I couldn’t keep my eyes open, much less blink past the tears that my body was producing because it was in shock. Matt kept saying, “I think I’m high.” Someone else threw up in her mouth. It was disgusting. After another twenty minutes, my head was reeling from a massive headache and I retreated to the courtyard to get away from the most intense of the paint fumes. In the courtyard, the loudspeaker was blaring and the techno-pop music that the students are required to do calisthenics to each morning was pounding along to the beat of my headache. I was ready to call it quits. The painting lasted for another two days and I was indignant at having to suffer through the torturous results to my health.

It shocks me that something like this could occur at a public facility where thousands of people work – are required to work – each day. What haunts me is the fact that the principal felt the shiny bars were more important than the potential health impacts to the students that had to suffer just as we did for those days.

The “beautification” is continuing at a frantic pace now that Thursday is almost upon us and some other ridiculous things have been occurring: during Kindergarten on Thursday, a man relentlessly scrapped the rust-paint concoction off of the huge metal door of the room while I tried to conduct class. The students were delighted with the chaos and I even saw several of them running around with large paint chips after class. During my 2B class on Wednesday, three young men spent the first fifteen minutes of class re-shoeing the chairs and desks (for lack of a better word). They stuck rubber scuff-be-gone “shoes” on legs where the old shoes were missing and bashed them into place with rubber mallets. Julia had a look of extreme consternation on her face as the children whooped and hollered with each bash. It seems that the teachers don’t see eye to eye with the principal’s demand for perfection, or maybe it’s that they expect him to do it on his own time and not on ours. My favorite disruption had to do with the PE teachers. Before the road was re-paved two weeks ago, there were hopscotch and tic-tac-toe courts among other game courts painted on the asphalt. Apparently, this charming characteristic is to be saved and the PE teachers were out hurriedly painting on the new asphalt at the end of the school day Friday. But, somewhere in the chain of command, a misunderstanding of which games were to be painted occurred and there was a huge ruckus after Kindergarten with shouting and pointing of fingers and paintbrushes when several school leaders and several PE teachers argued over which games should stay and which were unnecessary, or “wrong” for the image of the school.

Of the many things that Christy and I have talked about recently, one of them revolves around the issue of being a teacher. We both agree that if teaching were a haloed field, kept safe from politics and leadership bureaucracy, it would be a much-preferred field for many willing and enthusiastic people. For me, however, the politics make the point of the job difficult to see.

I’d do it over again and I’d never willingly leave my children, but it is hard most times and again, I want to say to my teacher friends back in the States, you are incredible people and our communities are lucky to have you and your hard work. As for me, I’m looking forward to health code regulations and marsh-less carpeting.