adventures in china

Three weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a car crash in my bedroom. Metal on metal, glass shattering, people screaming, all from the corner of my room. I sat up, adrenalin pumping through my dream-filled mind. Am I being robbed again?! Why didn’t my alarm go off?! Are we under attack?! Where is Matt’s laptop? Is it morning?! I leaped out of bed, turned on the light, and realized the air conditioner was in the process of breaking. That was the last time my room was below 85 degrees, until yesterday.

The morning following the air conditioner nightmare, I went to the dorm manager’s office and tried to communicate that my air conditioner was broken. I carefully enacted out the events of the former evening – point to the wall, make a hissing sound like air, say “no” and shake your head, then squeal like a pig to demonstrate that the air conditioner broke after make a loud sound. She sat at her desk, staring into my eyes from behind her glasses with confused fear, masked by a composed calmness – the kind of superficially calm but terrified look a cop gives a man who is on PCP and wandering the streets with a baby in one hand and a crowbar in the other.

After performing the skit several times, progressively increasing the amount of terror in her eyes, I realized I was not breaking the language barrier. Without the ability to speak Chinese I was destined to sweaty nights after field work for the rest of the summer. I turned to leave her office, and as I stepped to the door she said in English “Please, write. I will understand.” I wrote on a piece of a paper that my air conditioner broke in the night. The frightened look on her face subsided and she nodded her head calmly. “Wait tree day, I call technician”

Several days passed. The weekend came and went. I hovered naked in front of my fan to cool down, taking showers and then letting the water fade off my body to enjoy a brief moment of evaporative cooling. Every few days I’d go to the dorm manager’s office, and without having to say a word or act out another skit she would see me coming and tell me “tomorrow.”

It’s sad to think I’ve become dependent on air conditioning. In Wisconsin, I only use it on hot days to keep my frogs cool. I take pride in the extreme temperatures I allow my body to survive in. But it’s different here. It’s not so much that the air conditioner cools the room, but that it dries it out. After spending a morning wading through muggy garden pools and an afternoon in the heat washing buckets on a roof, coming home to a room with an ambient humidity level that’s less than 70% makes the day.

Fast forward to yesterday. Dripping with sweat, my arm is sticking to my desk as I type an email. I look at the floor for a moment to think and sweat drips off my forehead. When you sweat only because you are typing, it’s fucking hot. I get up and turn the air conditioner on. Another hopeless test, one of dozens I have performed on the air conditioner over the course of the last 20 days. This time it’s different though. I hear crackling, air is coming out, and it feels….cool. That night, I wake up to the sound of someone throwing pebbles at my window and realize my air conditioner is spewing pieces of ice all over my room, perhaps coughing up whatever was wrong with it in the first place. Maybe it’s not working correctly.

Today, I returned home from work, sat down in my cool bedroom, and started playing Final Fantasy IV on the DS. Life is good. My tadpoles have been weighed, I have a beer in hand, and my room is a comfortable temperature. Just as I’m starting to battle an Antlion, without even a knock a party of Chinese men comes storming into the room. Three of the men are filthy, these guys do real work, you can tell. One has a tool box, the other two are holding some sort of hose and a gas tank. The last guy is holding the dorm manager’s copy of the keys to our dorm room. They rush through to examine the air conditioner. As quickly as they burst into my bedroom they leave upon determining my room is cool. I follow them out and they enter Brenna’s room. Brenna does not have the air conditioner on, it’s hot in there, and so they climb up and start working on her AC unit. She gives me this panicked, helpless look, a look you would give someone if four Chinese men with unusual tools burst into your house unexpectedly. I run in to save her with my Chinese/English dictionary.

I lead them back to my room with broken Chinese as one stays behind to reattach hoses and tubes and cables back onto Brenna’s air conditioner. A hand is placed in front of the output of my unit. He says things to me in Chinese. I nod. I look up the word for ice in the dictionary and show it to him. He nods. He then turns to his associates and they talk quickly for about a minute, then he brings the remote control for the air conditioner over and shows me how to change the thermostat on the unit. He gives it to me and insists I try. I nod and smile and show him that I know how to push buttons. Then all three men start laughing, pack up, and leave, concluding that the American just didn’t know how to use a remote control. I’m guessing I’m now known in town as the dumbest of the foreigners here, the one who left his stuff by a window and got robbed, doesn’t know how to push buttons, has hair on his face, and is always covered in mud when he goes to lunch. But at least my room is cool.