An Off-Broadway Show: A Place to Live.

April 7th : Ms. Jia, the housing assistant at IUP, sent a short email with a long attachment. With Tsinghua University Foreign Student Affairs Office’s lack of immediate response on the availability of dorms for IUP students, Ms. Jia urged all students to find off-campus housing as soon as possible. The attachment, The Renter’s Handbook, reads like Moses’ commandments - “When negotiating with the landlord, thou shall demand accompaniment to the police office to file for the residency permit” - “Thou shall demand the landlord to operate all appliances to ensure proper usage.” While I was still at school, I didn’t have time to find an apartment, so as soon as I got home I went through one housing site after another, my Chinese electronic dictionary in one hand, the mouse in the other, searching for an affordable place. The Olympics hype cranked up rent rates up to twice the usual rates at most places.

I found an apartment in the Huaqing Jiayuan complex, not ten minutes from my university campus. Fully furnished, safe, close to the market and school - for twice the price of the university dorm (6500RMB per month). Considering that it was the lowest price tag I had found within such close proximity to my Chinese program, I sent an email to the landlord, agreeing that I will live in her apartment for a year and requesting wire transfer information as well as the lease agreement, on which I would send her a scanned copy of my signature. I informed the Light Fellowship Director and asked for a increase on my summer housing budget.

May 20th: Ms. Jia sends another email: “DORMITORIES AVAILABLE! Reserve quickly!”

Frustration.

The next few emails I exchanged with the landlord to cancel the lease, at least the ones she sent me, weren’t pretty. A Chinese neighbor told me that the first affirmative email I sent was as good as the lease agreement or any red Chinese print seal. I was lucky, the neighbor said, to not have been demanded some fee for canceling everything that I had negotiated.

As much as I enjoyed exchanging letters with the landlord in Chinese, the days of this pleasant-culturally-ignorant-and-naïve-American-student-studying-Chinese personality ended. I feel as though the landlord let me go not just out of her kindness but because I didn’t know the subtle formalities in Chinese business.
Chinese business lesson #1: Know the customs.

On a brighter note, my visa just came today. The visa company even gave me a plastic cover for my passport.

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Aria: Annoying China

Reading the news these days really makes me wonder how much of the Beijing I got acquainted with last summer will change. The International Herald Tribune's article “New Rules for Expats in China” (4/23/08) reports on the recent law changes for foreigners in China and stories of law enforcement. The duration of stay offered by a tourist or student visa is more volatile, and the motley of rules that foreigners had been able to circumvent seems to be slowly enforced as the Chinese government and police react to “lewd” behavior and recreational drug use.
For one, China seems to discriminate people from countries that have protested along the Olympic torch relay. A French café owner in Beijing, complying with the rapid change in visa law despite the short notice by the government, cannot get a new visa. Complaining for a reason, the policeman responded, “It’s because you’re French.” A Swiss and a German planned to travel to China together. The Swiss tourist got a visa for thirty days. The German got one that lasted five days. They canceled the trip. Businessmen who travel liberally from Hong Kong to China are not pestered by visas that they never had to bother with. I haven’t read anything about an American tortured by the bureaucracy of the visa, but I’m worried.
Interestingly, the Chinese government denies any change to visa regulation. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu says, “The Chinese people will welcome foreign friends in a warm, enthusiastic and open-minded way.”
Why now? Why does the Chinese government decide to enforce so many laws on foreigners before a ceremony that they hope will attract foreigners? I can understand that Beijing wants to clean up its nightlife scene of all that it deems to be hedonistic excess, but won’t these sorts of restrictions only create regrettable repercussions? By setting up obstacles for us to boggle through just to get into the country, China is only ruining its reputation in our minds.
I’m already annoyed by all the housing issues I’m facing. Tsinghua University is reluctant to offer the Inter-University Program any sort of on-campus housing, so I may have to negotiate with local landlords to rent an apartment for a year. On the bright side, it’ll be an adventure on its own, but I’m also reading emails from the housing assistant at my program that landlord will be especially conniving to rob “foreign suckers” who cannot effectively bargain. Should I take this as a call to study some vocabulary on renting? IUP has already sent out their 学生租房手册. I almost deleted it, but it seems it’s my guide for my first two weeks in Beijing. Beautiful.

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