My New Kitchen

I have a stove now. Before anyone feels inclined to harbor enraged jealousy I should point out that I also now have a kitchen sink. It is not actually in the kitchen, but I feel no need to meddle with semantics.

About a year ago I decided to get my own apartment. My employers own the house in which I have been living the past two years. While paying no rent is nice, there are inconveniences to having my job, home, transportation and most of my translation services controlled by the same people, ranging from mild to just plain irritating. One day I casually decided that it was time to branch out.

Finding a place to live in a tiny, racist farm community that distrusts educators in general and foreigners in particular and where I can speak five words of the language is not as easy as it sounds. I thought it might be wise to enlist the assistance of Boss Lady, but she was personally offended that I wanted to move off of her property. The foreign teacher whom I replaced lived here (for a full few months before quitting), as did his predecessor. Every foreign teacher this school has ever had has lived here, except the school’s first teacher who lived with the bosses in their house. I can only imagine what a living hell that must have been. That teacher quit after two months.  

Boss Lady could not understand why I would want to live elsewhere. So I gave her a list. Probably not the smartest move. One of my complaints was that this house has no real kitchen. There is a room that I like to call a kitchen, but other than a refrigerator there was no way to identify it as a kitchen. It had no sink, stove, or little black roach motels. I have a small electric hot plate, but only one pan can be heated at a time and it takes about a year to boil an egg. I am a foreigner. I have met Phil Collins. I deserve a kitchen. My quest soon became to find a place with a kitchen.

A little known fact about this town is that there are no apartments. It is not that there are no apartments available. Apartments simply do not exist here. But there are houses. Lots of them. I recently found out from a moderately reliable source that the population of my town is 2,000, including all the outlying farms that seem to just go on endlessly. Not only do all of those people live in houses, but many people who originated here and now live in larger cities still own houses here. Many of those houses are empty. It is customary to own property in one’s hometown regardless of where one now lives or even if one never intends to set one’s foot in the dump again. Curiously, people who own houses here do not generally like the idea of renting it out to a foreigner who could trash the place and then skip the country at any time.

During my practically yearlong quest to find a kitchen with a house attached I looked at all three of the properties available for rent. The first was entirely too quaint for my tastes. It was a farmhouse without the farm, designed in turn of the century farmhouse style. Which century I have no idea. The rent was appallingly cheap, but so was the foundation. It was a small house. Not that I need much room, but this was a small house. The doorways were just over four feet high. The roof was slanted. The highest point was satisfactorily high, but the lowest point would have made that guy who sat in the R2D2 suit uncomfortable. In what I suppose was the bedroom was a tiny bed, probably the perfect fit for a 10 year old. I know that Chinese people are not famous for their height, but this was taking that stereotype a little too far. I would have tossed the bed anyway. I have my own and ordinarily I do not like my bed swarming with lower life forms unless they buy me dinner first. The bathroom was appalling. True, it could be cleaned. But the fact that it was outdoors and not attached to the house in any way would have been harder to fix. The one saving grace was that this house had a kitchen.

The second house looked more like every other house in the country. I do not even know if it is Chinese style. Most of the houses I have seen in Thailand, Korea and Japan share similar traits, though Japanese houses are much cleaner and have better roofs. The house where I live now is the same style. But the important thing was that this house had a kitchen. The rest of the house was a desolate shithole, but there was indeed a kitchen. After looking at the house and only vaguely concealing my disgust I was told that the stove, sink, air conditioner (an absolute must around here) and several parts I really did not care about were the property of the people who had just moved out and that they would be taking these things as well. So it was a shithole soon to be without a kitchen.

House number three had no air conditioner, no stove, no refrigerator and no washing machine. But it had a kitchen sink and was about a five minute walk from my school. Boss Lady, who was originally so opposed to the idea of my moving but now encouraged it, thought I should take this house. I pointed out that it had no air conditioner, stove, refrigerator or washing machine. She said that if I renewed my contract for another year she would buy all of those things. An interesting offer, but at the time it would have meant agreeing to stay on an additional 18 months, since I was only halfway through my current contract. At any given time I am never sure that I want to stay here another week, let alone 18 more months. After I thought about it and decided that sanity was fleeting anyway, she tried to make the necessary arrangements with the house’s owner. This proved to be difficult. For about three months Boss Lady and Pi Chi both made near daily attempts to contact this person. I had decided that this meant that the owner was no longer interested, but my translators said that all was well and they would keep trying to reach her. Eventually Boss Lady was able to contact the owner and, even though I had reservations about renting a house from someone who could not be found for three months, we started to negotiate. The house owner said that she needed a six month deposit. I said never mind.

The next day while Boss Lady was trying to encourage me to take this house she told me that a six month deposit was necessary since the owner needed the money to buy an air conditioner, et al. I expressed my confusion since Boss Lady said that she would be buying these items. She then explained that somewhere along the line she convinced the house owner to shell out the big bucks for said improvements. Although I said nothing I decided that this released me from any obligation to sign a new contract. My concern now was when or how I could ever get this enormous deposit back (about US$900). Boss Lady explained that it was not a deposit in the dictionary sense of the word. I was supposed to pay the first six month’s rent in advance. Since the house was dirt cheap and this new arrangement allowed me to delay any decisions about the new contract I accepted this offer and a completely non-binding oral agreement was made.

The following weekend Pi Chi was finally able to contact the house owner who said that the house was still available. This annoyed me somewhat, so I had Pi Chi arrange to see the house as a prospective tenant. The house owner never mentioned to Pi Chi that someone else (me) had already made a deal to rent the place. Originally we were going to have Pi Chi look at the house to see if she liked it and also to see if the rent would be different to someone without a white face. But then I decided that I wanted to accompany her since I had only seen the house at night and figured it might be nice to see it in the harsh glare of daylight. The house owner did not recognize me. She assumed that I was simply some other foreigner, which is an odd assumption in a town that only has one foreigner in it at any given time.

Pi Chi hated the house. That was no surprise since she is city folk and this town is definitely rural. She is also surprisingly snobbish for someone so poor. What mildly surprised me was how much I hated the house in the daylight. Either it really fell apart in the three months since I had seen it last or that blinding sun makes an enormous difference. The first time I looked at the house I did not notice all the holes in the walls or the broken window. I could tell that the paint was bad, but I did not see all those wires hanging out of outlets and from the ceiling. There also seemed to be far fewer living things in it the first time. Pi Chi and I left the house without giving the owner any answer in either direction. The next day Boss Lady told me that the house was no longer available. I still do not know if the owner preferred to rent it to me than me, or if she merely did not want to rent it to either of us. Either way it was no great loss.

Some time later Boss Lady decided to install a stove and kitchen sink in my house. She said that she would put them in if I decided to stay another year, but since she already bought them and they were ready to go I used my two greatest strengths, obstinance and vagueness, to avoid any direct answer to that question.

Since there are no gas lines in this house my new stove is attached to a tank of some kind of gas. No one can tell me exactly what it is. While this might seem dangerous any concerns I might have had were assuaged when the possibly trained technician who installed the gas tank never once removed the cigarette from his mouth while dealing with such a highly flammable device. In as little as four hours my new stove was up and running. Since the burners are of some weird ass design that no one else on the entire planet uses none of my pots or pans fit on this stove, but that was easily solved with a quick 60k drive to the nearest store that sells pots and pans. Now I can actually cook more than one item at a time and boil water in less than 45 minutes. I have to turn on the gas every time I use the stove and it makes a peculiar noise when I turn it on, but I have two hands should one be violently torn from my body in the inevitable explosion.