Still the Season to be Scamming

I ran into an old face in my building earlier this week: my one-time rental agent. We took an elevator together, and he made a big show of hurt feelings that I hadn't recognized him immediately. I asked what he was doing with his time (not adding the "now that you've left or been fired from the rental agency"), and he said just the usual: collecting rent.

Near rent-day last year, I'd gotten an early "reminder" about rent from a number I didn't know, asking when I would have time. I had responded that I would pay rent on the usual day, in the usual way, and asked whether that was 可以 (keyi--acceptable). The response I got, at 11:00pm that same night was an emphatic "No okay. Where are you when?" I wrote back that I'd pay through my normal routine and said no more. (Nersey had pointed out that, near the end of the year, more thieves are out and people are trying more little scams to make fast money, so I said as little as possible.)

The next day, when I went to pay rent, I asked the office staff about the telephone number I'd been getting messages from. They claimed not to know it, and I suggested that they ought to notify the police that a former employee was likely using his old work numbers book to steal people's rent money. There's no way of knowing whether they acted on the advice, but seeing the man in my building makes me think they did nothing. Perhaps my one-time agent (whose name--for those potentially renting from the same company and getting odd phone messages around rent time--is the same as a famous city at the mouth of the Chang Jiang river) has gone into business for himself...a particularly illicit sort of business.

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"Rent Troubles"
Originally posted: 03:41, 2007-09-20

Now that the issue is resolved, I can talk about the last week's panic over my apartment. Late last week, Nersey passed the news on to me that I shouldn't give any money whatsoever to my landlord's proxy. Apparently, I'm renting through a real estate company: not the real estate company that helped me find the apartment, but a real estate company advertising through the real estate company that helped me find the apartment. The proxy, who had given me a bank book for bills and rent, had been fired, and his company had called Jia to get word to me about this. No word was given on whom I was supposed to give my rent to.

With rent day approaching, I needed to figure out whom to pay. Thinking that someone from work might be able to call my building's property management to find out, I tried unsuccessfully to get my building name written down. This led to the qing ni xie fiasco I mentioned a few days ago. That day, Whitetooth agreed to drop by my building during the week to talk to the property management.

Monday afternoon, as I was heading out to work, the security guard stopped me at the door. He spoke at me for about two minutes, and I was able to pick up the phrase deng yi sha (wait a moment) and a lot of repetitions of shang and xia (up and down). I waited for five minutes, said I had to work. "Deng yi sha. Deng yi sha." With a bunch of hand gestures, the guard got across the point that someone had come to see me and had gone shang on the elevator while I was coming xia. (This was a source of much amusement for him; I don't know whether it's because his sense of humor is very simple or because this is about the most sophisticated joke he and I can both understand on opposite sides of the language gap.)

The person I was waiting for came back down, and rushed over to ask, "Do you remember me?" I apologized, said that I didn't. "I was here when you buy the apartment," he told me, handing me his business card: a fold-out Amway catalogue. I told him I remembered him. "We need for a copy of your passbook." I told him I didn't have my passport. "No, the one we gave you, the management passbook."

"You mean the bankbook?"

"Yes, bankbook. Bankbook. We need for a copy." I told him I didn't have the bankbook on me and that I was on the way to work. "This will only take a minute, only a minute." Besides, I explained, the bankbook was supposed to be for my bills, and I didn't usually give copies of bank documents to people I don't know. "We met. Remember me?" I explained that I'd met him, but didn't really know where he was. "This is my name right here." Finally, I explained that I had just been told not to give money to the person who had signed my rental contract, that I didn't know whom I was supposed to deal with regarding my finances, and that I was going to have to have a friend call the real estate office to set up an appointment with someone. "They don't speak English there, though."
"I know. That's why I will ask a Chinese friend to call."

"Oh, okay, and they will tell you that I am person to give money." I said that this may be the case and, if it was, that I would meet with him once an appointment was set up. We parted ways, and the next day Whitetooth called the offices on my account, then called back to tell me that a woman would be at my apartment between 10 and 11am on Wednesday. Whitetooth had some of the same apprehensions about the Amway guy as I did, including the question of why you'd give someone an Amway business card when you were coming to talk about real estate. He also pointed out that the Amway guy's Roman-lettered name was not pinyin but something else.

Wednesday morning the woman came to the apartment, and we went across the street to photocopy the bankbook. I asked where her office was, and she didn't understand me. She spoke a handful of sentences I couldn't understand at all. (I'm used to not understanding what people say to me, but this was different; I couldn't make out a single word in what she was saying, as though her dialect was so different from the Mandarin I'm used to not understanding that it may as well have been Thai. It could have been Thai for all I know.) I had to call Whitetooth to have him explain that I wanted to pay my rent, and that I wanted to do it in an office where I would be given a fapiao (receipt). He too had trouble understanding her, but gathered that I should follow her.

Slowly, she led me to the busstop. This is a good time to point out that this was probably the most timid woman in the world. When she walked, each step only carried her maybe three inches, and when we had to cross roads, she hesitated and hesitated, her face screwed up fearfully. As is common with many Chinese, she seemed terribly concerned that she would lose me in a crowd, and she managed this by "leading" me in Chinese fashion: gesturing with one hand in the general direction we're going, then walking slightly behind me. At restaurants, this can be uncomfortable, since it means you're always guessing at which table you're being led to; in the street, it means that you navigate with a series of tacks, zig-zagging across the sidewalk as you try to guess your destination.

We took a bus just around the corner. Normally, I'd prefer just to walk the distance, but the bus was welcome, given just how slowly the woman moved. From the busstop, she slowly led me across the street and up into an office building. She took me into a little back office, said, "Deng yi sha," and went back into the main office. In a few minutes, she returned with another woman (this one her polar opposite, very lively) and together they handed me a slip of paper. Since I hadn't paid the rent yet, I assumed this was the original receipt from when I signed for the apartment and tried to explain that I wanted to pay the second month's rent and get a receipt for that. This proves very hard to do when you don't know the words "pay" or "rent." The woman pointed again and again to the slip of paper, which I was trying to read, and talked so quickly that I couldn't understand anything she was saying and was becoming distracted from the task of trying to read. They quickly gave up on me and went back into the main office, where I could hear them talking on the phone to someone.

While they were gone, I got to take a good look at the slip of paper and realized that it was in fact a receipt for my rent payment, dated that day. Usually, people make sure to write out such a receipt only after they've gotten the money, and a great deal of showmanship goes into the writing and stamping of all documents. For whatever reason, they'd had the receipt all ready before I even came to the office; perhaps they didn't want to feel rushed when painstakingly copying my name into the appropriate blank. (Chinese often have a hard time reading English written in all capital letters.) It's actually a very efficient way of handling the whole receipt business, which will hopefully catch on. I called the one woman back in, said "Haode haode, kan de dong." ("Okay, okay, I read and understand.") I paid my money, tucked the receipt into a book in my bag, and thanked everyone. One of the women tried to ask or tell me something about a number on my contract, and I had to admit I kan bu dong (read but didn't understand). Apparently it wasn't important, since she didn't press the issue.

As I was leaving, my phone rang. Whitetooth was calling to explain the problem with the receipt; they'd called him. I said that everything was all right and he said, "They're really impatient there. One person said something I didn't understand and then immediately handed the phone over to someone else. I'm not stupid or anything, just don't understand that one thing they're saying. I don't care who it is; I'd rather talk to a janitor if he can say something simply." After I got off the phone, the timid little woman led me to the elevator and then asked the first thing I'd understood all day, asking if I knew how to get home. I thought, "It's around the corner, I think I can manage," but just said, "Dui dui dui." (Yes, yes, yes.)

So everything is resolved. I know where I can walk to to pay my bills, and since the office is right near a Croissants de France, I stopped and had a cup of coffee and a chicken curry pastry on the way home.

"Six Days in Nanshan: Day Six"
Originally posted: 10:58, 2007-09-02

Though I'd gone to bed early the night before, I slept until ten. (This probably sounds early to those who know me back home, but twelve hours away here I'm generally a morning person.) I took a cold shower because I didn't know how to get the water heater working, got dressed out of a suitcase and went for a walk. In part I was just looking to see what was in the neighborhood, but I was also looking for the tell-tale Kodak sign that usually means photocopies are available. After one false alarm (a hair salon with a yellow and red Kodak sign) and walking a few blocks, I found one, ran off a few copies of my passport and headed home.

On the way back, I ran into Little-little, a Chinese friend I'd known in Bao'an--quite odd to see him in Nanshan. I've since run into him again; it seems he has a business partner quite close to my apartment and is often in the area. We had a short talk, then he called Jia, apparently just to tell her he'd seen me. I walked back to the apartment building, where at 1:00, my landlord's proxy was waiting, and angry at my having kept him waiting for two hours. Though he'd told me he'd be there at two, he'd come at eleven instead; either he was reading 11 as a Roman numeral 2, or he'd changed his mind and expected me to have known.

Though I tried handing over my passport copy in the lobby, he insisted we should "do our the business" upstairs in the apartment. We headed up, and he quickly made himself at home, giving me instructions on the use of every item in the building and apartment. Most of the advice was unnecessary, such as his helpful advice for the elevator: "This is up button; you want go up, push this button; this is button down; you don't want to go up, puch this." Perhaps he thought I was confusing the up button with the Chinese character ge and wondering why the building had a large counting-word machine in the lobby. After twenty minutes of experimenting, he managed to get the water heater working, then gave me a stern warning to always keep the gas valve closed while it wasn't in use. I soon realized I'd gotten my first really bad houseguest in China.

My landlord's proxy is a nervous little man who chainsmokes (loudly, with a wet smacking of the lips to accompany each drag), interrupts his sentences regularly to clear his sinuses with a pinch of the nose and a snort (drawing attention to the half-inch of untrimmed nose hair growing past the rim of each nostril), and who thinks his English is quite good. Though I'd only expected to be giving him a passport copy, it turned out he'd come to have all the bills settled. His understanding of the English language doesn't include any distinctions between "give" and "gave" or "pay" and "paid," doesn't include the word "owe," and is a bit fuzzy on the pronouns "I" and "you." His explanations of the bill situation (oh, no "bill" or "receipt" in his lexicon) ran much along the lines of "I give you 94; you pay 328; I pay 42, and I pay the 178; you pay you 45." Since his confidence is quite strong, all of this was said at a rattling pace that most foreigners wouldn't use with other foreigners.

After two hours of talk (and exactly 18 cigarettes), he wrote a note in Chinese, told me to show it to my friend and left, telling me to "Ask he if you, I, are lying." I tried explaining that I didn't think anyone was lying, I just didn't understand what all the numbers were about. Inwardly, I was thinking, "He doesn't expect me to know how to use an elevator, but feels sure I can manage bills quite easily when there are no printed bills before me." I couldn't even ascertain from the conversation whether he was telling me I owed him additional money, whether he'd paid utilities, not even whether he was acknowledging that I'd paid the rent and the deposit for the apartment.

After throwing all my windows open to vent some of the smoke in the apartment, I went over to see Nersey for a bit and tell him about my strange visit. He was able to clear up a lot about how bill-paying goes in China, such as how landlords usually set up a bank account for a renter and pay all the renter's bills out of it. The electric bill and such apparently still come; it's just that you don't do much about them except for making sure there's some money in the bank account and checking the bank account activity regularly to make sure your bills are being paid and that no extra money is missing.

Later, I returned home and had a nap. Around dinner time, I went out looking for a place to eat and discovered a run-down little road where the prices are a bit cheaper than on the main roads. All the menus, though, are entirely in hanzi, and there are no pictures; my Chinese will perforce improve eating along this street. I was able to get a plate of fried egg and tomato with a huge bucket of white rice for eleven kuai. It was quite good, but the lapse back to eating the egg and tomato combination hardened my resolve to start learning menu hanzi as soon as possible. (The egg and tomato was actually quite good, but I'm not about to go back to eating egg and tomato three times a week.)

After dinner I went to buy a pillow at Ren Ren Le. The salesgirl tried to make herself helpful by pointing again and again to the most expensive pillow on display, even though I said I didn't like it. In the end, I bought the cheapest one possible (with the same receipt and form dance as it takes to buy a light bulb), went back to the apartment and slept on the couch again.
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In realtime I can now add that the issues of money with my landlord were resolved, not when we both exercised greater patience or worked to speak more clearly. Instead, when he showed up the next day without any real bills or receipts and tried to say the exact same thing, I lost my temper a bit, said things didn't need to be this hard and that I just wanted to be done with all the accounts for the month. The problem was resolved when we went to the buildings main offices and a very patient woman explained to me the bills and who owed what, in Chinese.