I cannot for the life of me remember how many times I have moved. We moved when I was two years old, but I have no memories of that. I have vague memories of the little house I lived in for the first two years of my life, but those could be memories of photographs I have seen of the house. We stayed in the house I remember most from my childhood for a long time. Until we started moving again. This is the house my sisters and I were accused of trying to burn down. We could have for all I know, but they say we did not, and they were always older than I, so I am inclined to take their word for it. There is also a far more likely suspect. When an angry crime has been committed and your main suspects are a four-year-old child and a violent sociopath, you should probably rule out the four-year-old.
This is the house where I never had a bedroom. I slept in a bedroom until I was six years old, but I slept in a sleeping bag inside a closet. This did not seem unusual at the time. And we were not even Irish. It is only when you become an adult that you realize how bizarre childhood is. Not that my siblings had it much better. They slept on beds in bedrooms, but their bedrooms were also the only entrances to other rooms. This was not a house designed for privacy.
One day when I came home there was a fancy new bed in the living room. I was told it was a gift to me from my mother. This was very unusual. The bed stayed in the living room for a long time. At age six I was not the Herculean specimen that I am today. Moving a bed from one room to another was beyond my power. Getting someone else to do it was even less likely. Eventually the bed was moved to the garage. That is where I slept until we moved out of the house. Sleeping in a garage without insulation is not the exciting boy scout adventure it seems. Fortunately, we did not live in Minnesota. The garage was also never cleaned. Ever. Most of what I know about entomology I learned as a child.
This is also the house that had one bathroom for about 50 people. The less said about that the better.
This house had a large front yard, which was the perfect place for children to run around sprinklers. And it was large enough to hold all the bloody bits and pieces of a litter of kittens that had been violently torn apart. The house was on a very wide residential street on which our cats loved to sleep. We found more than a few of them dead as the day they were born. I do not remember a single driver ever stopping after running over our pets. On one occasion I was in the living room eating a bowl of Sugar Smacks when we heard about a dead cat in the street. We went out to take a look and I got a good view of the cat’s brains spread out in a tire pattern. It looked a lot like the Sugar Smacks. The rest of the cat’s body was intact. The car ran over only its head. When I went back in I tried to finish my cereal but was unsuccessful. I have never eaten Sugar Smacks since.
But the best part of this house was the backyard. It was huge. There was a large walnut tree in the middle of the yard that we used more for climbing than picking walnuts. We let most of the walnuts rot on the ground. We were never the smartest people in the world when it came to grocery management. There was also a very large brick barbecue grill near the tree. I only remember it mostly broken apart, but according to old photographs it was once an impressive outdoor kitchen. My friends and I would always try to climb higher up the tree than each other. All of them fell out of that tree at one time or another. I never did. One of them fell on a mangled brick and concrete wall. I do not remember if he broke anything, but his back was badly cut.
I vividly remember the day we moved out of this house. I walked through the rooms when all of our crap was finally removed and thought it strange to see the house I had lived in for almost all of my life completely empty. To this day I have lived in this house longer than any other.
Once the moving began it never really ended. We lived in several houses before I went to high school. We were in one for about seven months. What I remember most about this house was that it had air conditioning. I thought this was the greatest thing in the world. I would not see such an electronic marvel again until my first year at college. The air conditioning came in handy because this was an unusually hot summer. I spent most of the summer drinking a soda called Aspen. It was an apple flavored drink made by Pepsi that boasted the most caffeine and sugar. That might be why they discontinued it. I think Aspen was my gateway drink to Mountain Dew. I loved Aspen until it left me and I lived off Mountain Dew until drinking it interfered with living.
I got my first taste of apartment living just before high school. The building called the unit we were in a townhouse, but it was really a large apartment. The benefit to living in an apartment was that we had access to something I never thought we would ever have; a swimming pool. It was not at all private and at one point the building manager put a fence around it, making it impossible to run around and jump into, but it was still a swimming pool.
When I went to college I lived in at least three or four different apartments. Two of them were in the same building and had not only a swimming pool but also a hot tub. A hot tub is a very good thing to have when you are in college. This and driving a van in high school did more for me with the ladies than my hunger strike physique and sarcastic indifference.
After college I moved pretty much every time I changed jobs. I would usually try to commute only to give up and move. And then repeat the process for the next job. Sometimes I would grace relatives with my delightful presence. If it is any consolation I reaped the karmic rewards when Pi Chi’s sister lived with us for a year.
Eventually I moved to the other side of the world, where everybody walks on their hands and hamburgers eat people. This curtailed my moving habits considerably. I have mostly lived in two cities the entire time I have been here, not counting the first few weeks before I found a job. I stayed in the little farm village for almost three years. That is longer than I lived in most apartments in my own country. From there I lived in Pi Chi’s apartment for about a year. With her younger sister.
The difference between Pi Chi’s sister’s freeloading off Pi Chi and my freeloading off my relatives is that Pi Chi’s sister had a job the entire time she lived with us. She then made and continues to make more money than Pi Chi and I combined. Although that does not say much. She also makes more money than Pi Chi, Pi Chi’s second sister, Pi Chi’s second sister’s husband and I combined. She also drives a very expensive car that she could sell if necessary. But she would never need to because her parents own a relatively new and sufficiently spacious house with enough spare rooms for her and other wayward adult children if the need ever arises. Also unlike me, Pi Chi’s younger sister has a healthy relationship with her parents and has spoken to them in the past ten years.
I moved into Pi Chi’s apartment the day I left my first school. I did not have a job and was in no hurry to find one. After working six days a week I wanted to take some time off. This is not as easy as it seems when you live in a country where your residency is predicated on your employment. I have also noticed that no matter where in the world they are, most women are not thrilled when their man has no job. But when I got back on that horse I found myself working 45 minutes away from Pi Chi’s apartment. A 45 minute commute in the real world is nothing. Around here it is like slowly peeling off a layer of skin from your entire body in one motion while peddling a unicycle with one toe and juggling Fabergé eggs. On a moonless night while wearing sunglasses. During a typhoon. While you have malaria.
In order to take Pi Chi’s car to work I had to wake up at the crack of ungodly early and take her to work. After my work I had to go to her work to take her home. This is logistically very easy, but annoying when you consider that she works days and I work nights. We both had to wake up early and get home late every day. She had to wait around her work for about five hours, which only meant that she would do more work. Off the clock. This kind of thing is not rewarded in her country. It only encourages the people in charge to create more and more work. I had to wake up about ten hours before I had to go to work. If it sounds like slacker whining to complain about waking up early in the morning, try waking up ten hours before you have to go to work every day and see how your day goes.
I tried to find an apartment closer to my work, but Pi Chi and I would have lived apart since there is no way in hell she is ever going to live anywhere near the tiny town where I work. Pi Chi is a bit of a snob and can only live where rich people might conceivably live. Even though she has never been rich. There are no rich people in the town where I work. No rich person could ever live there without losing face. It also might be impossible to find an apartment in that town.
But it was very easy to find an apartment closer to Pi Chi’s work. Her hospital owns two separate apartment complexes right next to the hospital. The older complex is full of older buildings where hospital staff live. We looked at a few apartments there and hated them. Pi Chi hated the fact that none of them would ever impress anyone and I hated the fact that they all sucked like a drunken prom date who is about to vomit.
The second complex is much newer and nicer. And more expensive. It consists of four buildings. One is used as a temporary hotel for relatives of patients. Another is supposedly going to be a hotel. Some day. This country is littered with empty apartment buildings that the owners would rather see empty than rent or sell for a lower price. There are also more than a few buildings that no one seems to know what to do with. So someone comes along with a rumor about what it will eventually become and everyone accepts it as fact. The old condemned telephone company building across the street from Pi Chi’s old apartment is going to be a shopping mall. Some day. That is what they told her when she bought the apartment 15 years ago.
Two of the apartment buildings in the newer hospital apartment building complex are actually used for apartments. I was told they only had three-bedroom apartments so that is what we looked at. The first thing I noticed in all of the apartments was light. Chinese people are deathly afraid of sunlight. They cover themselves like non-French Muslims from head to toe when they go to the beach. They walk with umbrellas on moderately sunny days. And they all cover every inch of their windows. Most of the apartment buildings I have seen here have small windows. I am not even sure why they have them at all since windows are obviously festering portals of evil sunlight. But the newer hospital apartments had large windows. In every room. Sunlight was penetrating those apartments from every direction like a teenager lucky enough to have a drunken prom date who is about to vomit. The first thing Pi Chi said was that we would need to buy curtains. I told her that was simply not going to happen. I found the one building in the country where I do not have to turn on the lights in the daytime. Since it was high enough to be above the surrounding buildings I saw no reason to cover those windows. Unless Superman flies by, no one will ever be able to see in. And Superman almost never comes here.
The newer hospital apartments also had another rarity in these parts. They had real kitchens. Every other apartment I have seen in this country has at best a half-assed kitchen. It is usually a sink and maybe a stove against one of the walls. Even the nicer apartments where the “rich” people live have shitty kitchens. But these were real kitchens. Not only were they separate rooms but they also had more counter space than any kitchen I have ever had in any country. When I saw these kitchens and the windows I knew we were going to live in one of these apartments, regardless of how unlucky the address might be or where the bad spirits are or whether there was good 風水 or not.
By living very close to her hospital, Pi Chi could walk to work and I could take her car without having to wake up at any particular time. We assumed that selling her old apartment would help pay for everything. What we failed to realize is that this country is littered with empty apartment buildings that the owners would rather see empty than rent or sell for a lower price. It is very much a buyer’s market, and none of the buyers are very interested in her apartment. It is not fancy and it is nowhere near anything interesting. Pi Chi hopes it will be worth something when they build that new shopping mall across the street. I think it will be worth something when the sea rises enough to make it beachfront property. Unfortunately, no one around here wants to live near the beach. Too much sunlight.
Now I have moved yet again. It turns out there are one-bedroom apartments in this complex. I could have saved a small fortune if someone had told me that a few years ago. Or at least enough to take a nice vacation. We have decided that it might be a good idea to save money. Try as we might, we cannot get much younger and the older we get the closer we are to the shit hitting the fan. I can only work up to a certain age in this country and old people are treated like lepers here anyway. Poor people are not treated any better in my country. When Pi Chi retires she gets an impressively small check. When I am forced out because old people should be neither seen nor heard I get nothing.
The best way to save money as far as I know is to make more and spend less. Pi Chi will never make more. She is a nurse. They are underpaid everywhere in the world. She is a seasoned veteran in management at her hospital and already making more than they are willing to pay. I can only make more money if I go back to some tiny farm village. There is no way I can do that and live with Pi Chi at the same time. Spending less money is even more difficult. Pi Chi is physically incapable of saving money. She has had the same steady job for over 15 years and I recently saw her bank statement. She had less to show for those 15 years than I make in a single day. And what I make in a day would not impress anyone. I am our only hope of ever saving any money. So you know we are screwed. I only spend money on rent, food and gas. As long as I drive to work I need to buy gas. Food here is very cheap and what I spend each month is less than I would spend in a few days in the real world. Rent is the only thing I can cut back on.
We paid sweaty manual laborers about NT10,000 to haul all of Pi Chi’s crap from her old apartment to the three-bedroom twenty minutes away. That is about 4,000 Mexican pesos. They had to use a large truck with a crane. I drove all of my crap over in her car. In one trip. By comparison, one of the few people who will ever read this blog paid sweaty manual laborers about NT5,000 to haul his crap, his wife’s crap and his young daughter’s crap to a completely different county. If I have told Pi Chi a million times, I have not told her enough, but she has too much crap.
When we moved from the three-bedroom to the one-bedroom Pi Chi found a good deal and only paid the sweaty manual laborers about NT7,000 (3,000 pesos) to move most of her crap to the one-bedroom and some of her crap to the old apartment. Not counting all of the crap I broke my back moving in the week I broke my back moving her crap. We only had a week to move because Pi Chi loves few things more than doing everything at the last minute. We had access to the new apartment for about a month before we started moving and we have had access to her old apartment for years. I could not move anything to the old apartment until the last week because the building decided to change the locks on the elevators and never bothered to give us the new key. This proved to be a more difficult operation than one might assume. I could not move anything to the new apartment until Pi Chi cleaned it which, true to form, she only wanted to do at the last minute. If you have ever lived in rented apartments around here you know that the previous tenant probably trashed the place. I think it is considered unlucky to clean an apartment when you leave. Or at least a dishonor to the spirit voices in your head. I could have simply cleaned the new apartment sooner, you say. You obviously do not know Pi Chi. It is not clean until she says it is clean. Ironically, her standards of clean are much lower than mine. Have nightmares about that if you dare.
So we went from a three-bedroom to a one-bedroom in the same building. Everything is the same style, but smaller. The kitchen is much smaller and not nearly as impressive. All that counter space is gone. The windows are just as big, but now we face another building. So now we have curtains to keep out the evil sunlight. Gone is the extra bathroom. I think one of the reasons Pi Chi and I are still together is that we have never had to share a bathroom. Until now. Time will tell how well that works.
We have lost the spare bedroom. In the three-bedroom apartment we used one bedroom as a bedroom, conventional as we are. Another bedroom was an office of sorts. Meaning it had all of our computers and all of Pi Chi’s research materials. And they needed their own room. I have the same small laptop computer I have had since before I left the real world. Everything about it is out of date, but if I buy a new one here it will have a Chinese keyboard and getting an English version of Windows will be difficult. I have enough experience with local service personnel to know that they will do their usual half-assed job and I will have to waste too much time and energy dealing with the consequences of their lust for apathy. And I know that Windows sucks fat ones, but that is what I still use.
Pi Chi has three or four computers. They all serve a different purpose and some are owned by other people and organizations. Her research sometimes requires her to have multiple computers in multiple locations. It also requires a large collection of medical journals, in many of which she has articles published, most of which I translated, in few of which am I credited. But some of my photographs have been published in said journals. For some reason this is not on my CV. And I am probably not credited with those either.
What was once quietly tucked away in a bedroom is now in what I assume is meant to be a dining area. We rarely dine anyway.
The third bedroom in our three-bedroom apartment was used as a guest bedroom. Almost all of our guests were relatives of Pi Chi. They usually stayed in our apartment because it is very close to her hospital. Whenever anyone Pi Chi knows needs to go to the hospital they go to hers. The great thing about universal healthcare is that it is dirt cheap and nobody goes bankrupt from hospital bills or dies because they cannot afford a procedure. The bad thing about it, at least around here, is that everyone seems to go to the hospital for every little thing. Most of the people in the emergency room at Pi Chi’s hospital are there because of traffic accidents. The second largest population are there for minor headaches and coughs. These people go to the hospital if they sneeze. This makes any hospital visit a lengthy ordeal. Unless you happen to know a head nurse whom the chief of staff has a crush on. More about that later. I go for a state-required physical once a year. Having Pi Chi there cuts my waiting time down drastically.
I say that we moved into the one-bedroom to save money, and that was always my primary motivation, but eliminating the ability of Pi Chi’s family to spend the night was not a completely uninfluential factor. Most of them live within a thirty minute drive anyway. Why do they need to spend the night. Now they can go to the hospital from home like everyone else. Or stay at the hospital’s patient hotel.
But in the rare event that anyone wants to visit me, all is not lost. We no longer have an extra room, but now we have an extra apartment. Since no one showed any interest in buying Pi Chi’s old apartment during the two and a half years it was on the market we have decided to use it as a storage space. Try as she might, and believe me she tried, Pi Chi cannot fit all of her crap into this one-bedroom apartment. If anyone comes from out of town we cannot offer a spare room, but we can offer a spare three-bedroom apartment in a secure building (by local standards) with a fully functional kitchen(like area), air conditioning in most of the rooms (an absolute must), a bed, plenty of couches and chairs, a full dining room set, free parking (a rarity around here), a pool (usually empty), and boxes of crap we could not fit into our apartment. I plan to move more crap in when Pi Chi is not looking. The spare apartment is conveniently situated between two 7-11s. As is every other apartment. And there is a brand new KTV across the street next to the abandoned telephone company bulding. I have no idea if they offer special service but I am sure the drinks are watered down and overpriced. Mountain Dew is available nearby.
