The Curse of the Fitted Sheet and Other Tales of Domestic Life in China

It seems we are cursed. When we came to China, we brought one set of sheets with us to get us started, but we accidentally showed up with two fitted sheets. It was really hot when we first got here, so it was okay to sleep without covers for awhile. Eventually I went to the store to buy a flat sheet, but all the packaging was in Chinese, so I couldn't tell what was a duvet cover what was a flat sheet and what was a pillowcase, so I went to Wal-Mart (unbelievable that I have spent most of my life avoiding Wal-Mart and now it is our neighborhood store, where we go sometimes three times a week...the world is indeed getting too small), where the packages were clearly marked in English. I bought a "Flat Sheet," brought it home, opened it, and found elastic at all the corners. With my language skills it is impossible to return anything to Wal-Mart, so we kept it and now we had three fitted sheets, which piled on our bed were warm enough to get us through the cooling fall nights. Weeks later I went to a textiles market with Gina where you can pick out your fabric and have sheets made. Now that the weather has really turned to autumn I thought it would be nice to have some flannel sheets, and since I haven't seen them in the store (and have given up on buying linens at the store entirely), I picked out a fabric and for ten dollars had a set of sheets made while we were at lunch. Gina's Chinese is excellent and she did a great job explaining that I needed a fitted sheet and a flat sheet, but maybe I don't even need to tell you that when we got home (a 20 minute bus ride, followed by a 40 minute subway ride, followed by a 15 minute bike ride), I went to see if the sheets fit on the bed and discovered that he had made two fitted sheets. So, now we have a grand total of five fitted sheets and no flat sheets and I think I'm going to sleep in my sleeping bag for the winter.

Similar to the sheet story is the story of our front door key. Our apartment only came with one set of keys, but people make keys all over the city, so we went to a locksmith and had our keys copied. We have three keys: a key for our building gate, a key for our apartment gate (which is also guarded by a golden lion head), and our front door key. All the keys here are weird. There must be fifteen different templates. Some have four edges like a philips screwdriver, and our front door key is carved on the top and the bottom flat edges rather than along one thin edge like we're used to in the States. This is apparently a difficult key to make and our expensive copy didn't work. Even with a script from Gina about how to tell the man that the key he made us didn't work, many things came between us and getting our key fixed. Weeks passed. Last week we found ourselves in a part of town we'd never been to--a place four blocks from our house where it seemed like no one had ever seen a foreigner before. Shanghai is full of these twilight zones, and while we were exploring on our bikes we passed a stall with key-making equipment, so we stopped and gestured that we wanted our key copied. There was a boy of about 14 working and he really wanted our business so he kept us there even though he didn't have the right equipment to make our unique key. He disappeared into the back and returned with a small rice bowl full of Sprite for us, which we drank and took as an apology. We continued our exploration and came across a small pedestrian street full of vendors, one of which was a locksmith. We watched him work for ten or fifteen minutes on our key. The street was full of food vendors, an outdoor barbershop, and shoe-shiners, and we were stared at by everyone who passed, but the man appeared to be meticulously copying our key and we left happy with our brush with pedestrian life in China and our new shiny key (half the price of the first one we had made). Long story short, it didn't work either, so now we have three front door keys and only one that works. Will we try again? Stay tuned to find out.

Finally, there is the story of the buzzing contraption in our kitchen. It is some kind of gas detector (the natural gas here has no odor, so there's no way to know when there's a gas leak...no smoke detectors either, so there's lots of potential for domestic disasters), which is attached to the gas line into the kitchen. It emits a staticky buzzing noise every morning, which we can't turn off because if we disarm it, it turns off the gas to our house. We're pretty sure it's malfunctioning, but maybe we have a gas leak, but only in mornings? Who knows? Also I think we have a ghost who deep fries in our kitchen when we're gone. Every time we come home it smells like someone's oily Chinese dinner is ready on the table. Gross and creepy.