Community: Real Life

The Broken TV


Liz

Liz is a 24-year-old who has decided to take a break from city life and visit one of the most mysterious and colourful countries in the world.
Entry: 3

As Liz tries to deal with day-to-day chores, she finds the novelty of life in China is starting to wear off.

Some of the quirks of the town I live in are driving me slightly crazy. The next person who plants their eyeballs on me while I'm standing right beside them may get said eyeballs poked out and the next person who queue jumps, especially where a toilet is involved, may end up with their head down said toilet.

And there's the general dodginess of everything, the way you have to check, double check, squeeze, smell and taste everything before you buy it. If you don't, you may find the t-shirt you bought has unravelled on the way home and is now just one long piece of string, or a box saying 'pistachios' is actually mothballs. Or even realise that your soy sauce has been manufactured from human hair.

But there's definitely an upside to the dodginess. Here, you don't have the dilemma of choosing between Nike and Adidas sneakers; you can get both in the one pair. Swooshes and stripes living together in harmony.

Even though I can't sleep at night for worrying about how Stephen Spielberg's going to feed his family, I can't resist the pirate DVDs. It's not the movies themselves, it's the covers. Each one claims to star Tobey Maguire, be it Gone With the Wind, Apocalypse Now or whatever. They write any old crap on the cover as long as it's English-ish. Often they've found a review of the movie, but haven't realised it's actually a scathingly bad one. Sometimes the connection is pretty abstract. Cleopatra has a blurb about how terrific Catherine the Great is. Gus Van Sant's film Elephant has a paragraph pulled from a random website saying, This website can help you learn all about elephants..." And then there's my copy of Elf, which is rated R18.

Actually, I love a lot of things about this place; the very same lack of rules that often drives me nuts is also what makes the place fun, relaxed and gives it this great feeling that 'anything goes'. Apart from looking foreign, nothing you do here will get you stared at. If you look foreign, you might as well do what you want because you're going to get stared at regardless. You can hang your underpants out to dry on a tree in the middle of the road, because that's where the sun is. Four people can ride a motorbike, because they fit. You can carry a six-metre ladder on a bicycle, because that's your only way of getting it from A to B. Anyone can put a gas cooker on the back of their bike, park on a street corner and sell hot fried squid, or peel some pineapples and sell them on sticks because they need the money, and if the police come they can just run away.

"The next person who plants their eyeballs on me while I'm standing right beside them may get said eyeballs poked out."

One of my favourite things is siesta time. At one o'clock people drop whatever they are doing and snooze, be it in a restaurant, a park or a wheelbarrow on the footpath. Some offices have fold-out beds; in others, staff simply collapse at their desks.

But enough of the good stuff and back to me going crazy...

The other day my toilet was blocked. I tried to call the school to ask them to get a plumber, but when I picked up the phone I discovered it wasn't working. I couldn't go out to use a public phone because I was waiting for the TV repairman.

So, later there was a knock at the door. Great, at last, the TV will be fixed. I opened it to find a very glamorous TV repairwoman. She sat down and looked around my apartment for a while, then finally got up and started poking at the TV. She then asked, You have...?" and mimed a screwdriver.

Do I have a screwdriver? It was one of those 'China' moments; a moment when I abandoned all hope of ever having a clue of what the hell is going on. Then I gathered myself and asked Who... are... you?" and she replied: I am the Master of the House". There was another pause, until I finally put two and two together and realised she was the landlady, and owns the TV.  I still don't know why she came over without a repairman or even a screwdriver, or what she would have done with one if she'd had one.

I'll spare you the rest of the story, involving visits from various TV repairmen, mutual allegations about parts being stolen from the TV, uninvited neighbours and landlady's friends coming in to rubberneck and walk around my flat picking things up. Suffice to say, my TV still doesn't work.


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