You ever been in a situation where you did not say or do something to be “nice”? I’m in that situation a lot with my landlords. As I wrote about in Hosting Culture: Our Landlords, both Ben and I were subject to massages we did not want to have. I was also pressured into a gel manicure, something I had said I would never do again after my first experience three years earlier. The massage left Ben bruised for over a weak, and my normally very strong nails are still extremely brittle five months after the manicure. They break at any provocation.
So, was not standing up for myself and what I did or did not want really “nice”? Was it the most culturally appropriate thing to do? Maybe. Maybe not. In China, there is a value, though it is changing, on avoiding conflict for the sake of group harmony. But was that a good reason to just go with the flow on this particular night? Was accepting my landlord’s attempts at hospitality really the “nice,” “interculturally competent” thing to do? I’m really not sure.
However, I am free now from trying to be “nice.” The following story demonstrates why.
It was Sunday, January 20th, when the toilet in one of our bathrooms broke. The water would not flush well, and water would sometimes leak from the bottom when you tried flushing. Upon recognizing this problem, Ben and I stopped using that toilet, grateful we had another bathroom. Ben then messages the landlord, Mr. Liu, about the problem.
Why Ben contacted Mr. Liu is beyond me. I mean, technically, a landlord should come in and fix these issues, or he should call a professional to do it. The problem was that Mr. Liu was not very handy, and he never called someone who knew what they were doing to deal with the issue. This meant that a task that would take a professional only 30 minutes to fix would involve Mr. Liu fussing over it for hours and sometimes days, as my landlady, Ms. Yan, went back and forth to the store trying to get the right tools for the job.
I was, however, in my first trimester of pregnancy. And I was sick as a dog. Imagine having both food poisoning and a cold every day for six weeks… and still having to work. I did not have the mental capacity to worry about the toilet and let Ben take care of the situation.
On Wednesday, January 23rd, Mr. Liu finally shows up to see about the toilet. I happened to be home at the time. I was about to head out to work though, so I was running around the apartment. He went to look at the toilet and said, “Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s working fine. Come have a look.” And sure, the toilet did sort of flush but not in the way it should. It did not bode well to me that he could not see the toilet was broken. How did you fix something when you didn’t think it was broken?
I tried to explain that this was not how the toilet was supposed to work in Chinese, but ultimately had to take him to the other bathroom, flush it, and say, “Do you see the difference?” He did. So, he went about using the plunger he had brought with him, and after about 5-10 minutes of plunging, again determined the toilet was fine. He flushed it for me, and it did indeed flush better. So, he went on his way, and I went to work.
That night, Ben declared that the toilet was still broken. No surprises there. The only surprise was that Ben still contacted Mr. Liu to come and fix it. However, I let him handle it. We still had one working toilet, and that was all I needed for the time being.
On Friday, January 25th, Mr. Liu messages me to ask if I am at home. I said I was at work, but he was welcome to go into the apartment without us there. He did, after all, have a key.
A couple of hours later, the photos and videos started coming in.
Now, this is the point in the story where I must issue a warning. The remainder of the story is not intended for anyone with a weak stomach, who is currently suffering from a stomach bug, or who is suffering from “morning” sickness.
So, Ms. Yan likes to take videos and send it to us whenever they come to our apartment to fix something. Honestly, such video evidence is not necessary to me. If you say you came by and fixed the pipe, then I’m sure that is what you did. However, Ms. Yan loves to offer proof. For instance, when we asked them to have someone come in and clean the apartment before we moved in, which is fairly customary where we are in China, we received videos of Ms. Yan and Mr. Liu scrubbing away at the bathroom and kitchen. Ultimately, we hired someone to help us clean the apartment ourselves.
On this particular Friday, when I received the first video from Ms. Yan, I opened it without a second thought. However, I only watched about 3 seconds of it before closing the video. There were two pictures to accompany the video, and I immediately closed WeChat, the platform she messaged me on. I was in the first trimester of pregnancy and likely to throw up just because. I did not need any provocation.
The video and photos showed the toilet on its side in the bathroom, revealing a whole in the ground, surrounded by human feces, toilet paper, and only God knows what else. In the video Mr. Liu is cleaning up the mess with, and I kid you not, disposable chopsticks.
Disposable chopsticks.
Who would look at a mess like that and think to themselves, “You know what will get this taken care of really fast? Disposable chopsticks.” But better yet, who would look at a mess like that and think, “You know what, let’s take a video of you cleaning up feces with disposable chopsticks and send it to our tenants.”
The photos and video were accompanied by a stern message about not putting toilet paper into the toilet bowl. It also talked about all they had to go through now because of this. There was a strong sense of martyrdom.
My first reaction, believe it or not, was to laugh. It was so ridiculous to me that I could not help but laughing. I even told my director Don about it because he has a strong stomach and a dark sense of humor. When I started the story by telling him that my toilet bowl had broken, he quickly quipped “Throwing up violently into it on a regular basis will do that to a toilet.”
I agreed that morning sickness was more likely to break the toilet than the toilet paper they were accusing us of throwing into it. However, I did not think we broke the toilet with morning sickness or toilet paper.
You see, the apartment originally only had one bathroom. My landlords then installed a second bathroom on what used to be the balcony. So, for instance, we never use the tub in the second bathroom because the water goes down so slowly you would drown before you finished a 5-minute shower. I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but even when just using a little bit of water to clean the tub, the tub just fills with water and sits like that with soap suds from the cleaning detergent. By time the water drains, the tub has watermarks and dried soap stains that makes it look like you had not been trying to clean the tub at all. When Ben’s parents or other guests come to visit, we just have them use the shower in our bathroom.
Now, when we moved in, the bathroom stunk. We assumed this had something to do with the piping. We changed the pipes under the bathroom and kitchen sinks with the help of a professional, at our own expense, replacing the cheap see-through plastic they used with steel. We also installed a feature in the tub and shower to keep the smell of the pipes from coming back up. But nothing worked. We could not figure out where the smell was coming from.
I now knew. The water in the tub drains exceptionally slowly. What about the things that flush down the toilet? Maybe that didn’t go down the way it should either. This is what happens when your “handy” landlord decides to change the balcony into a bathroom.
When I saw Ben, he was furious. He had received the same videos. He had received the same blame for the toilet being broken. He was embarrassed and angry. I told him not to take on the blame for the toilet. I’m sure that thing had feces sitting under it before we moved it. The feces they were cleaning up with disposable chopsticks wasn’t just ours. I quite sure of that.
And perhaps if it had all ended here, I would have still been “nice.” But it didn’t.
When Ben and I got on the bus to go home, I realized I had been put into a WeChat group with Ben, Mr. Liu, and Ms. Yan. The group already had 20 missed messages. And it was all photos and videos of feces. I quickly scrolled through, got the idea, and closed WeChat. I was not planning to look at any of those photos or videos in detail.
Who sends 20+ photos and videos of feces? Was one video not enough? Also, beyond Ms. Yan messaging me the first time with video, photos, and messages I mentioned above, I got similar photos, videos, and messages from Mr. Liu separately. Ben and I are then put into a group with 20+ photos and videos of feces?
Who does that kind of feces? No, seriously, who does that feces? And yes, you can replace the word feces with what I was really thinking in my anger. I held my stomach and tried not to think about it. Do not throw up. Do not throw up. Do not throw up.
I then went back into WeChat, and I deleted my chat history with both of my landlords. I did not need that kind of feces on my phone. I then went to leave the group chat we were put in when I realized that the nail technician who works at my landlords’ beauty salon and gave me that unwanted manicure was also in the group.
Wait, what? Why is she in the group? Why do you think she wants to receive 20+ videos and photos of human feces? I felt now that they were purposely trying to embarrass Ben and me.
Who does this kind of feces?!
Any hesitation I was having about simply ignoring their messages and leaving the group was gone. I left, and I encouraged Ben to leave the group as well. However, when he went to leave the group, he hesitated. “What?” I asked. “What are you waiting for?” He showed me the name of the group: “刘总一家人,” roughly translated as “Mr. Liu’s Family.”
…
You created a group called Mr. Liu’s Family and started it with 20+ videos and photos of feces?
I was so far beyond belief. Would anyone believe this story? I mean, it’s certainly not possible to make this feces up. I could not understand the logic. This was not cultural. Believe it or not, Chinese people do not use chopsticks for everything. They do not take videos of everything that happens in their lives. There was not a single cultural explanation I could come up with for this one, though I’ll admit not spending too much time thinking about it. I was too disgusted by the images, too mentally and physically exhausted from the pregnancy, and way over the antics of my landlords.
I told Ben in no uncertain terms that he was not to contact the landlords if anything else in the apartment broke.
When we got back to our apartment building and the elevator doors opened on our floor, we heard the jingling of keys coming from the direction of our apartment. I noticed that Ben walked backwards into the elevator leaving me to potentially face our landlords alone, but I ran back in as well and hit the “Door Close” button. We went down to the first floor, and Ben said, “This is stupid. This our apartment.”
I was like, starting to laugh again, “I’m not the one who walked back into the elevator.” He was like, “I know. I know. I’m just saying.” We both started giggling like little kids who were hiding from a mean school principle after breaking an unfair school rule. We decided to eat dinner out at the restaurant across the street, and we hoped we wouldn’t run into our landlords. Me, personally, because I was afraid of what I would say in my anger.
We had a nice dinner at our favorite Southeast Asian restaurant before making a tentative trip home. Our apartment was thankfully empty when we got there.
And I’m not sure why I was surprised by this, but I had assumed that after all of those videos and photos that surely Mr. Liu had fixed the toilet. I never questioned this conclusion. All of those videos were of him fixing the toilet, right?
No, apparently it was just Chopstick Olympics.
While the feces around the hole in the ground was gone, the toilet still laid on its side broken. And in the trash can beside it, the offending disposable chopsticks were sticking out. Ben told me not to enter the bathroom. He would have to sanitize the whole place before I could enter it again. I was more susceptible to all sorts of bacteria and germs in the first trimester.
Mr. Yan and Ms. Liu had also been surprisingly quiet after their videos and stern messages. They had said nothing about when they would fix the toilet or explained why it had been left the way it had been. It’s possible they had said something about it in the videos I did not watch. I was not curious enough to find out. To me, silence from them was a blessing. If they never sent us another message, it would be too soon.
The next morning, we called an expert, and the toilet was fixed in less than 45 minutes. It cost us about $20. In other words, we got fast, affordable service that came with a 3-month guarantee. If anything happened to the toilet in that time, they would come back out and fix it for free.
I did not hear from Mr. Liu until Sunday when he asked if I was home. He said he was coming to fix the toilet. I told him he need not come; it was fixed. He apologized for not coming out the day before to fix it himself. He got busier than he expected, and he needed to buy a part. He then told me to come visit the beauty salon the next time I had time. I sent an emoji that was nodding and smiling and left it at that.
I knew I was never going to that beauty salon again. I was done being “nice.” Over the two months since that event, I’ve received individual messages from both landlords and the nail technician, and I leave them unanswered or send a meaningless emoji. For some reason, they still haven’t stopped trying. It is my hope to not see my landlords again until I give them back their keys and walk out of the apartment. If I could, I would also block them on WeChat. However, it is how I pay my rent and get updates on the standing of my utilities. I am locked into this lease until June, and I plan to move as soon as it ends. I did very seriously consider just paying the one month’s penalty and moving right away but knew I couldn’t handle moving in the middle of the semester while also pregnant.
But you know what confuses me more than anything else about this story? Ben is still in the “Mr. Liu’s Family” WeChat group.
God, he’s nice. My better half for sure.
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