ENTERTAINMENT / Hot Pot Column
Thrills of my city apartment
By Graham Bond (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-03-27 09:55
For a man who grew up in a suburban retirement bungalow, my
38-square-meter city center apartment has taken some getting used to.
It's been more than three years now and I'm still not entirely
comfortable.
There was early promise. The top floor location in the corner of a
rectangular building had me fantasizing about living like Jimmy Stewart
in Rear Window, spying on the neighbors and dining out on the gathered
intelligence.
That dream died when bars were placed across the bedroom window, the only
one facing the compound's inner sanctum. Now, if I crane my neck hard
against the cold steel I get a letterbox perspective on the goings-on.
Otherwise, I must content myself with a delightful view of a pink wall.
Though I am denied voyeuristic optical pleasures, my ears are fully
indulged. Every night I am led toward sleep by a veritable FX studio of
sounds, ranging from the tragic, to the silly, to the downright annoying.
Firstly there's the cat which I suspect once had the same nosy impulse as
me but somehow got its head stuck between the bars as he was straining
for a view. He's been howling in anguish ever since, only resting at the
precise moment I pull on a nightgown and head out to save him. The
virtuoso symphony of pain resumes upon my return.
Then there are the marbles. My schoolmates and I were generally content
to limit our games to the playground but I guess that was a more simple
age. Today's youth are driven creatures, willing to go to extraordinary
lengths to master their art. Indeed, every morning and evening, I am
treated to the sound of a child assiduously hurling a handful of small,
circular objects at the skirting board of an adjacent room. They bobble
around for a while before being collected and hurled again. And again.
And again.
Perhaps the most dedicated of my neighbors is the cooking enthusiast who
loves meat balls to such an extent that he wakes at 6 am to begin
chopping the day's quotient. As I nod, nearly napping, suddenly there
comes a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping on my bedroom
wall. It certainly gets the juices flowing.
I could expound at length upon the convivial games of mahjong that
clatter on into the wee hours on floor five; the wannabe Tibetan nomad on
floor four who generously shares his small but high-quality collection of
Dao Lang with anyone willing to listen, and even those who aren't; or the
motorcyclists who park their vehicles with a gratuitous rev of their
engines as if to say: "Friends, neighbors, the night shift is over I AM
HOME."
And so, on reflection, perhaps my fantasy about recreating the events of
Rear Window may come true after all. In Hitchcock's film, it's the
nagging wife that gets bumped off. I have a feeling that any one of a
number of my neighbors might go the same way.
Alternatively, I could just rent a new apartment.
(China Daily 03/27/2007 page20)
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