The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week

It has not been a good week.

The “unseasonably cool” weather, which was pleasantly in the mid-seventies, has ended and Guangzhou is having an Indian summer – it’s back to the high eighties/low nineties, high humidity, and moody low lying clouds that loiter about the skyscrapers dithering about if and when to rain.

So I am sticky and hot, and disinclined to be cheerful in the face of challenges. So of course, it is time for things to go wrong. First, I had my first round of parent-teacher meetings at school. These actually went well, after a stumbling start. Lucky for me, I have more this coming weekend. Then, the toilet in my apartment abruptly stopped working. Now, I’m not an inept girl when faced with plumbing issues, but my abilities end at plungers and fiddling with bits in the tank to get the water to stop running. Having exhausted my skillset without solving the problem, I was forced to consult outside help. So down to the building management office I went, where I explained the issue [don’t get too excited: they speak English there] and they sent a plumber. Now, the plumber doesn’t speak English, but he fiddled about for a while, and then explained  the problem in basic language. I thought I was following along fine, but then he asked me if I wanted him to do what he was explaining/half miming (my comprehension was ‘moving the toilet to get at … in the area below the toilet). And I was confused, because, well, yes? Of course I want you to fix my toilet? What, am I really going to say ‘No, thanks, that’s too much effort; I’ll just live without a functioning toilet in my apartment?’’ So, I caved and called my Chinese-speaking friend and did the classic “you tell my friend, then give me back the phone, and she’ll tell me, and then I’ll tell her my reply, and give you back the phone for her to translate.” I really need to get on with some hardcore Chinese lessons. Long story short, we arranged for the plumber to come back at 4:30 to do this whole shebang. (It turns out to be a huge clog, which I will not describe because I am trying to erase the memory from my mind, but now everything is fixed.)

This allowed me a few hours to attempt my other major problem of the day: our internet doesn’t work. Now, it stopped working last Friday evening. This had happened to a friend of ours a week or two ago, and it was because the automatic bill payments she’d set up were in fact not working, and so she was two months overdue and they cut her off.  We figured we had the same problem (bank transfers won’t work here if your name isn’t a perfect match to the name on your bank account, and Chinese people cannot handle English names, just like English people can’t handle Chinese names). So, on Saturday evening, after work, we went to China Telecom and paid our bill. They said service would be back on in half an hour. It still wasn’t on in an hour. It wasn’t on the next day. It wasn’t on on Monday or Tuesday. At this point, I’ve exhausted my ‘fixing the computer’ skills, which are slightly more extensive than my plumbing skills, but still pretty inept. All I can find is that the computer can’t detect the IP settings, and there may be a problem with the DNS server. On Wednesday, in our next free time, we went back to China Telecom. Now, they’ve got to be tired of seeing me. No one there speaks any English, and dealing with my limited Chinese skills has to be just as trying for them as it is for me.  I explained our problem as best I could, and they gave me a helpless look, and gave me a phone number for IT help, where they supposedly speak English. Now, I say ‘supposedly’ because I have called this number about twenty-five times since yesterday and have yet to have anyone answer in any language. And now, my phone is malfunctioning. It isn’t reading any bars of service, even when my flatmate’s identical phone is right next to it with five bars.

However, this is not the end of my litany of issues. Last night, after the plumber left and I’d tried the IT line a few more times, I did a load of laundry so I’d have some clean uniforms to wear. Our washing machine has been finicky since we moved in: sometimes it won’t run the spin cycle and you have to trick it into running or just hand-squeeze your clothes before hanging them up. Last night, though, it hit a new low point when it refused to run the rinse cycle, or even to drain. So I fished my clothes out of the soup, wrung them as dry as I could with my hands, and hung them up. Today it is pouring rain and misty, and the humidity feels like I’m living underwater. Suffice it to say, my laundry is still on the wet side of damp. And the washing machine still hasn’t drained. Sigh.

All in all, I managed to solve only one of my problems this weekend. I managed to connect to the internet at work long enough to check my email and see that my family enjoyed a beautiful weekend up to camp, and that the trees are turning lovely colors. Fall is well underway. I feel like I’m in an eternal dog days of August. Oh, but how I miss home at the moment. I’m not hugely homesick, that is, I’m not feeling an urge to flee, but I feel out of touch. Part of this is the strange weather, part is the long period of non-communication I’ve had without internet access, and part is a feeling that my grand adventure of living in Guangzhou is not contributing to my life in the ways I expected it to do.

On the upside, what with National Day holiday and a weekend of placement testing instead of classes, I got to go to church two Sundays in a row. The Guangzhou International Christian Fellowship is quite large and a little bit… I don’t even know. Modern, perhaps? Certainly the music is a little more gospel/Christian rock than I’m used to. The minister also mentioned the Devil and the spiritual war for possession of mankind’s souls about 100% more frequently than those topics have come up in my past 23 years of church-going. On the positive side, the minster has a Scottish accent and the sermon was thought-provoking, and I actually caught some references from my current Read-the-Bible project (for those keeping up at home: We’re up to First Samuel today. We’ll be 25% of the way through the Book by the end of the month). Anyway, the sermon topic was decisions. As in, we have to make them. We have to make them all the time, and the decisions we make have consequences. Then the minister challenged us to examine the decisions we’d made in the past week or month or year and decide how we felt about them. Coming to Guangzhou? I’m still okay with this decision, even if it’s not quite what I imagined. I may not be learning the lessons I expected, but oh, I am learning lessons.

Well, this post is already much too long, so I will end here. Hopefully, by next week, I’ll have some happier stories to tell and news of my successful internet/phone/washing machine fixing strategies. Before I go, though, I just want to wish everyone in the US a happy National Coming Out week. It’s a hard decision, to live openly, especially when you don’t know the people around you very well, or you live in a conservative society, or a foreign country. But some decisions have to be made.