I arrived in Guangzhou by way of Shanghai at the end of September. The school I am working for found an English speaking estate agent to help me find an apartment. We found a two bedroom apartment not far from the school. The landlord is a short man with pale delicate skin. He is twenty-eight but looks half his age. He is a lawyer but his quiet, shy, deferential attitude makes me unable to imagine how he could ever win a case in court. He uses words sparingly, directing his comments and queries in Cantonese to the estate agent who translates between us. The landlord’s name is Mr Zhao and he is moving out of the apartment into a bigger one a couple of buildings away. He wears loose fitting shorts and t-shirt and carries a plastic carrier bag with his personal paraphernalia: his mobile phone, wallet and the documents necessary for the letting of the apartment. Like many things in China the bag makers are trying to keep up with the consuming passion for English. There is no Chinese on the bag. Instead there is the slogan Nature Collection Underwear in large letters and underneath, the selling point of the ‘Nature Underwear’ Self Enjoyment, Self Confidence as well as Absolute Self. This bag says many things about Mr Zhao. It quietly speaks of his riches and his higher education but it also shows that his level of English is perhaps not as high as Mr Zhao himself may like to think.
The apartment that he rents out to me is a good size, well equipped with air-conditioning, a TV, fridge-freezer and water heater. Tomorrow he will bring me a washing machine, he tells the estate agent and sure enough, when I arrive at the apartment to move in, the washing machine is there waiting to be connected. The apartment is dirty, uninhabited for the past few months but still it takes Mr Zhao two days to finish clearing out his belongings, leaving me with an odd collection of things that he does not want and which I immediately put into the cramped second bedroom.
The apartment is on the 10th floor of a relatively new apartment building guarded by a collection of young men and women who hurry to open the front doors for those occupants they recognise. The friendliest of the security guards giggles like a child when I speak to him in Cantonese, bending almost double with his delighted laughter.
The view from the windows sweeps across a huge swathe of Guangzhou, looking to the east towards the commercial and financial districts. Distant shiny new apartment buildings are masked with pale grey smog, shooting up into the sky like young seedlings. China is a country in which buildings seem to be planted rather than built, construction moving at such a speed that within a month a street can be transformed with new apartments and shops.
Closer to my building the houses are smaller and older, squat four storey structures that I can look down on from above, the roofs quickly but poorly repaired with corrugated iron and stone tiles. There are gardens on the rooftops with vines growing over bamboo stakes, herbs and flowers overflowing their terracotta pots. The alleyways between the buildings are narrow and busy with passers-by and street hawkers with their trolleys loaded with anything from fruit to clothes or toothbrushes. They lay their wares down on a cloth on the pavement calling out to pedestrians, one eye open for a police patrol. To me these streets are more interesting than the distant apartments. Here the people play ping pong, crowded around tables that are too close together, separated from the street by a rusty fence. Or they sit around rickety tables playing mahjongg, poker, chess or dominoes. There is a leisurely pace to the life, cyclists moving slowly, trying not to break a sweat in the early autumn humidity. Their lives are separated from the rush of the main road, taxis vying for pole position at the traffic lights, passengers darting through the closing doors of the subway trains, running across the pedestrian crossings, defying the forbidding whistles of the traffic wardens.
