The politics of cold

First of all let me just say that I fear I jinxed myself with the “un-fun version of camping” comment. At the time I thought that was the worst it could get! Recently, as the weather got consistently colder, the house seemed to as well. We have a fairly typical Asian system, I think. We had a similar one in Malaysia: living, dining, bedrooms each have an air cooling/heating unit; service areas, bathrooms, hallways, kitchens, do not. And each room/unit has its own control. Unfortunately, the system will mutiny as a whole. So after 3 days of having the management company bring one person after another to look at it, shake their heads and walk away, they finally conceded that it was the Landlord’s problem to hire an independent contractor to look at it. With average highs of 44F and a low below freezing, I think you can imagine that 3 days later many regions of my house are uninhabitable. As an architect with a professional’s eye towards efficiency of layout and usage of resources, it struck me immediately as the house cooled down that each of the major living spaces has 3 exterior walls. Not the best way to foster heat retention! Thank goodness for the aforementioned heated living room floor! For the last 2 nights the kids and I have slept in the living room and Heinz joined us there last night as our bedroom is about 50 degrees. But, as we do not expect our container to arrive for at least another 2 weeks, we only have one couch and only dining room-type chairs. So last night my poor husband tried to sleep on pillows on a tile floor while Viv and I were on the couch and Conrad was on a cushion of 3 towels folded in half. And then poor husband had to get up and go to work this morning. This is a level of rustic I did not plan for when I was choosing carefully what to include in my 7-suitcase allotment for the trip over! Thank goodness I did at least include the awesome flannel blankets my dear friend Moe made for each of the kids. Auntie Moe, I was blessing you last night as I curled up with Viv under hers!

So here we are, 3 days later and late Friday afternoon, no less, the Landlord’s contractor has told us (okay, he told me through the Management Office’s translator) that the motherboard and compressor on the system are shot and need to be replaced. Well some things are simply universal and I don’t think much of anything really gets done late on a Friday no matter where you are in the world. We are considering checking into a hotel for the weekend, managed to find one in Shanghai that is pet friendly (Aunt Linda we need you!!!) but the story gets even better: they turned the power off while they were here 2 hours ago to look at the system and for whatever reason could not/would not turn it back on when they left. So the Management Office guy told me he would get one of the handymen on site to come turn it back on (I am a bit baffled that he cannot simply flip the breaker himself? He was part of the team that turned it off originally. But if he’s not willing to do it, I’m sure certainly not!) In the meantime it is nearly dark and I have no lights and now not even my beloved floor heat!! How do you entertain toddlers in the dark? Again, candles aren’t something that I felt the need to make room for in my suitcases! And to top it off, I haven’t got a phone number for the office because there is a closed circuit phone system for tenants to use to call the Office from their houses, but guess what? No power, no phone! Help!!

Thankfully my dear husband has the direct number for one of the head guys and he has called on my behalf: the cavalry is on its way! But this whole endeavor has been so enlightening for me on so many levels. It has sort of been a crash course in Chinese crisis management/customer service and I have formed a lot of impressions. It will be interesting over the course of the next 2 years to see how well this westerner's first impressions stand up. The first, and most significant to me, seems to be a derivative of the Chinese cultural aspect of saving-face. I feel like I am always told what I want to hear, or am simply given no answer at all, so that the people who cannot fix the problem or cannot answer the question are not made to look bad. And it is infuriating and fosters in me a sense of distrust of the people as a whole. It leaves me feeling that honesty is not highly valued. In my head I believe that is probably not a true statement but I cannot reconcile the 2 concepts: saving face through avoidance vs. telling the truth. If you choose not to answer my question at all, how is that not dishonesty? How is there shame in not being able to fix my heat?
The second is the issue of customer service, or lack thereof. I mean, think about it: a communist country really doesn’t need customer service, does it? Recent conversations with a number of different people about the ways in which the Chinese are creeping up in rankings against the countries of the “first world” have left me watching closely how things work here to see if the fears of China taking over the world are as valid as some fear. I truly believe though that as the world gets smaller, more industrialized, and more people have money to spend, customer service will become more important, not less. And although Capitalism IS alive and well and living in Communist China, my recent experiences have drawn me to conclude that the Chinese mindset leaves China with a long way to go before it will be a world player on that stage. Certainly not a scientific study by any means, arguably more opinion than anything else, but it will be interesting to see, as I said, how these first impressions evolve over the rest of our stay here.
At the moment, however, I am more concerned with the impression of my freezing fingers. Heinz is going to stop on his way home and pick up a space heater or two. After being a prisoner of the house for 3 days with 2 rambunctious toddlers, I couldn’t abide the idea of us all being cooped up in one room in a hotel all weekend. Hmm, on second thought maybe I jumped the gun because if I had taken door number one, I would not have had to cook all weekend! Oh well, there is always Sherpas….