It’s been a long July. In addition to getting ready for a much needed vacation to the Great Lakes and making sure all my grad school t’s were crosses and i’s appropriately dotted, I’ve also been preparing myself for what was certain to be a rough encounter with landlord’s henchman as I leave my apartment in Changzhou. And rough it was. Fortunately for the Annals, money was discussed at length. I stayed out of it for the most part, my own henchperson taking my place in the conversation. The added layer of headaches that would undoubtedly come up in trying to make the conversation drift into English just wasn’t worth it. And so off they went.
The voice you hear is that of the building’s super, or at least as close to a super as we have. She’s calculating to see if I owe the landlord money or, as I believed (and was right), he owed me money. So imagine a lovely older Chinese woman poking at a piece of paper with the butt end of a pen as they says each number.
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There are a couple words I missed in the middle, the [gei gæʔ] which are not numbers and likely just the next item on the list.
7 1 8 [gei gæʔ] 7 4 7 2 4
[ʨʰiɛʔ ieʔ baʔ gei gæʔ ʨʰiɛʔ sz̩ ʨʰiɛʔ liæŋ sz̩]
For those keeping track, I recorded this right on to my phone, using the built in microphone and my t-shirt as a pop filter. I think It came out pretty well, considering. Here’s the full clip:
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I hate that apartment handover confrontation. We’ve been lucky that our last two landlords have been good, rational, relatively young people, but I’m still psychologically scarred by the landlord before that and the torrent of Anhui princess bullshit we had to put up with before finally getting (part of) our security deposit back.
Yeah it’s pretty much my least favourite part of moving. I’m not at all sure how this happened, but I actually got all of my deposit back. Having the sofa collapse when the building super sat on it, only to have her then cuss the landlord out for being a cheap bastard, probably helped a little.