I was dreaming of delivering a talk, possibly because I’m doing a short presentation on Hong Kong media in London later this month. I’m not the best public speaker, and there was this awful loud beeping noise coming from the audience and interrupting my speech.
It won’t take a genius to figure out that "noise" was my mobile alarm ringing, along with the telephone the building management uses to buzz up to our flat. I grabbed the phone, was told there were workers waiting outside my door, and ran to get dressed. I’d gotten home from work at midnight last night and had overslept.
Today is my day off. I was hoping to go riding again, but a seemingly endless number of workers were scheduled to come over: The PCCW guy to fix the NOW TV that broke a week after they installed it; air conditioning cleaning guys; and IKEA (finally) to put in a bookshelf and clothing cabinet we bought almost two weeks ago.
***
As I’ve written before, this is my 7th home since I moved to Hong Kong in 1999. I’ve never been anywhere long enough to warrant an air con clean, and I’d always been a renter. (Trivia: In HK Cantonese, "owner" and "landlord" are the same).
As I’ve also written before, I couldn’t believe the condition of this place, considering it’s less than 10 years old, not exactly cheap, and in a reasonably nice private estate. You could see the air cons were filthy even looking at them from a distance. Wiping them did no good, because as soon as you touched the filters, piles of bad-smelling dust would pour out. Marc and I have been coughing and sneezing since we moved in, and taking unhealthy amounts of the antihistimine Piriton. I’ve been carrying a roll of toilet paper with me where-ever I go, even in my purse. Now that’s class, pure class.
Even when we kept them on full blast (set to an amazing 16 degrees Celsius), it never got really cold because there was so much crap blocking the air flow. Our first electricity bill was more than HK $2,000 for the first two months; I presume the workers had those inefficient machines running all day.
****
Our contractor, WP Engineering, has been good about recommending and coordinating sub-contractors — curtain-makers, kitchen appliance sellers, tile vendors, wood floor suppliers, air con cleaners etc. It hasn’t cost us any more, but saved us the hassle of trolling for materials and looking up strange companies in the Yellow Pages.
They recommended the air con guys, who have now been here for six-and-a-half hours and are still going strong. I never knew air con cleaning could be so thorough.
****
There are two guys — an air conditioning sifu, and his assistant.
The sifu demanded that anything that would impede his craft — stuffed animals, boxes, books, clothes, furniture — be moved. Then he climbed up on a ladder and inspected our cruddy old machines with a flashlight.
"Aiyaaaa."
"Yes, I know they are very dirty."
"Wahhh. I have never seen…. God help us."
"Yes, the old tenants must never have cleaned them," I tried to laugh. "But they are so expensive to replace."
He seemed to be in a state of mild shock, and I wondered if I should have him sit down on the sofa for a cup of warm milk.
It’s quite a process. The sifu takes the plastic covers off the machines and hands them to his assistant, who washes them in plastic buckets he has set up in our living room. (If we had a kitchen sink or a sink in our second bathroom, it would’ve helped — but those aren’t built in yet).
A protective cloth is laid on the floor. The sifu covers the air con in a white plastic tarp that has an attachment that hangs down, not unlike a giant deflated condom. The machine’s insides are cleaned with a vacuum-like machine, only it uses a high-pressure water spray instead of air. A pink-colored chemical fluid eaks down the condom thingie into yet another bucket.
The assistant follows up and cleans the nooks and crannies with a cloth. The machine is then reassembled.
They came at 10am, and by their noon lunch break, only two of the five machines were done.
****
My friend Daisann wrote long ago about how she encountered the term sifu when she first came to Hong Kong. In the West, you think of a sifu as an wise, old kung fu master, like Pat Morita in "The Karate Kid." But any Hong Konger with a special skill, even air con cleaning, is a sifu. Bring a stained silk scarf to the dry cleaner and, if the girl behind the counter can’t fix it, she’ll say that she’ll consult the sifu. You know, the stain removal sifu.
The air con sifu certainly knew his place. He was infallibly nice to me, his honored guest, but harsh on his assistant. "What kind of plastic tarp is that? That will never do! Will you never learn the right sizing of the plastic tarp?!" The poor kid never spoke unless spoken to. I almost expected his boss to have him get up at dawn to do sit-ups to strengthen his air con cleaning muscles.
The air con sifu explained that the problem with my giant power bill wasn’t because clean cold air
wasn’t coming out. It was because dirty hot air wasn’t going in. ("No
air in, no air off," he said. "Wax on, wax off.")
****
Meanwhile, the IKEA guys came and said I had to move everything out of their way so they could construct the clothing cabinet and bookshelves.
"Who do you think you are? The IKEA bookshelf sifu?"
"Yes."
So all the stuffed animals, boxes, books, clothes and furniture that had been moved for the air con sifu were moved yet again for the IKEA sifu. Then the PCCW sifu came, changed our cable box and chatted amiably to me about how Macs were better than PCs. (I agree).
*****
As soon as everyone leaves, I’m going to go put all my books on the dark wood shelf, something I’ve been looking forward to for weeks, maybe months. I miss my books, and how they were once all ordered alphabetically by authors’ last name for fiction, and by subject matter for non-fiction. Sometimes I just look at them, lining up in my mind the ones I’ve read and the ones I haven’t, the ones I like and the ones I’ll give away, my childhood favorites and my new discoveries. I’m probably one of those people who will never move to electronic readers.
While I find the noise and maah faan of coordinating workers stressful and tiring, I find unpacking therapeutic. Last night, when it was dead quiet here at 1 a.m. and Marc was asleep, I opened a box of coffee and tea things. Gleaming espresso machine. Tiny espresso cups, each individually unwrapped. Tiny matching saucers. Tiny spoons. Sugar bowl. Milk pitcher. Delicate Chinese tea pot and cups. Loose-leaf tea strainer. I put them in the cabinet. I even folded the wrapping paper up nicely so it wouldn’t take too much space in the recycling. Then I cut up the cardboard boxes with a blade, put them out with the garbage, and went to bed.
After working a shift in which my body is leaden and unmoving, but my mind frazzled, it’s nice to do something physical and mindless.
*****
Earlier posts related to Gah! The Move! Can be found here, and here, and here, and here. Also here. Dear God. And I didn’t even document last week, which was the worst of all. If I didn’t spend so much time waiting around for workers to come to my flat, I could write a book.
It won’t take a genius to figure out that "noise" was my mobile alarm ringing, along with the telephone the building management uses to buzz up to our flat. I grabbed the phone, was told there were workers waiting outside my door, and ran to get dressed. I’d gotten home from work at midnight last night and had overslept.
Today is my day off. I was hoping to go riding again, but a seemingly endless number of workers were scheduled to come over: The PCCW guy to fix the NOW TV that broke a week after they installed it; air conditioning cleaning guys; and IKEA (finally) to put in a bookshelf and clothing cabinet we bought almost two weeks ago.
***
As I’ve written before, this is my 7th home since I moved to Hong Kong in 1999. I’ve never been anywhere long enough to warrant an air con clean, and I’d always been a renter. (Trivia: In HK Cantonese, "owner" and "landlord" are the same).
As I’ve also written before, I couldn’t believe the condition of this place, considering it’s less than 10 years old, not exactly cheap, and in a reasonably nice private estate. You could see the air cons were filthy even looking at them from a distance. Wiping them did no good, because as soon as you touched the filters, piles of bad-smelling dust would pour out. Marc and I have been coughing and sneezing since we moved in, and taking unhealthy amounts of the antihistimine Piriton. I’ve been carrying a roll of toilet paper with me where-ever I go, even in my purse. Now that’s class, pure class.
Even when we kept them on full blast (set to an amazing 16 degrees Celsius), it never got really cold because there was so much crap blocking the air flow. Our first electricity bill was more than HK $2,000 for the first two months; I presume the workers had those inefficient machines running all day.
****
Our contractor, WP Engineering, has been good about recommending and coordinating sub-contractors — curtain-makers, kitchen appliance sellers, tile vendors, wood floor suppliers, air con cleaners etc. It hasn’t cost us any more, but saved us the hassle of trolling for materials and looking up strange companies in the Yellow Pages.
They recommended the air con guys, who have now been here for six-and-a-half hours and are still going strong. I never knew air con cleaning could be so thorough.
****
There are two guys — an air conditioning sifu, and his assistant.
The sifu demanded that anything that would impede his craft — stuffed animals, boxes, books, clothes, furniture — be moved. Then he climbed up on a ladder and inspected our cruddy old machines with a flashlight.
"Aiyaaaa."
"Yes, I know they are very dirty."
"Wahhh. I have never seen…. God help us."
"Yes, the old tenants must never have cleaned them," I tried to laugh. "But they are so expensive to replace."
He seemed to be in a state of mild shock, and I wondered if I should have him sit down on the sofa for a cup of warm milk.
It’s quite a process. The sifu takes the plastic covers off the machines and hands them to his assistant, who washes them in plastic buckets he has set up in our living room. (If we had a kitchen sink or a sink in our second bathroom, it would’ve helped — but those aren’t built in yet).
A protective cloth is laid on the floor. The sifu covers the air con in a white plastic tarp that has an attachment that hangs down, not unlike a giant deflated condom. The machine’s insides are cleaned with a vacuum-like machine, only it uses a high-pressure water spray instead of air. A pink-colored chemical fluid eaks down the condom thingie into yet another bucket.
The assistant follows up and cleans the nooks and crannies with a cloth. The machine is then reassembled.
They came at 10am, and by their noon lunch break, only two of the five machines were done.
****
My friend Daisann wrote long ago about how she encountered the term sifu when she first came to Hong Kong. In the West, you think of a sifu as an wise, old kung fu master, like Pat Morita in "The Karate Kid." But any Hong Konger with a special skill, even air con cleaning, is a sifu. Bring a stained silk scarf to the dry cleaner and, if the girl behind the counter can’t fix it, she’ll say that she’ll consult the sifu. You know, the stain removal sifu.
The air con sifu certainly knew his place. He was infallibly nice to me, his honored guest, but harsh on his assistant. "What kind of plastic tarp is that? That will never do! Will you never learn the right sizing of the plastic tarp?!" The poor kid never spoke unless spoken to. I almost expected his boss to have him get up at dawn to do sit-ups to strengthen his air con cleaning muscles.
The air con sifu explained that the problem with my giant power bill wasn’t because clean cold air
wasn’t coming out. It was because dirty hot air wasn’t going in. ("No
air in, no air off," he said. "Wax on, wax off.")
****
Meanwhile, the IKEA guys came and said I had to move everything out of their way so they could construct the clothing cabinet and bookshelves.
"Who do you think you are? The IKEA bookshelf sifu?"
"Yes."
So all the stuffed animals, boxes, books, clothes and furniture that had been moved for the air con sifu were moved yet again for the IKEA sifu. Then the PCCW sifu came, changed our cable box and chatted amiably to me about how Macs were better than PCs. (I agree).
*****
As soon as everyone leaves, I’m going to go put all my books on the dark wood shelf, something I’ve been looking forward to for weeks, maybe months. I miss my books, and how they were once all ordered alphabetically by authors’ last name for fiction, and by subject matter for non-fiction. Sometimes I just look at them, lining up in my mind the ones I’ve read and the ones I haven’t, the ones I like and the ones I’ll give away, my childhood favorites and my new discoveries. I’m probably one of those people who will never move to electronic readers.
While I find the noise and maah faan of coordinating workers stressful and tiring, I find unpacking therapeutic. Last night, when it was dead quiet here at 1 a.m. and Marc was asleep, I opened a box of coffee and tea things. Gleaming espresso machine. Tiny espresso cups, each individually unwrapped. Tiny matching saucers. Tiny spoons. Sugar bowl. Milk pitcher. Delicate Chinese tea pot and cups. Loose-leaf tea strainer. I put them in the cabinet. I even folded the wrapping paper up nicely so it wouldn’t take too much space in the recycling. Then I cut up the cardboard boxes with a blade, put them out with the garbage, and went to bed.
After working a shift in which my body is leaden and unmoving, but my mind frazzled, it’s nice to do something physical and mindless.
*****
Earlier posts related to Gah! The Move! Can be found here, and here, and here, and here. Also here. Dear God. And I didn’t even document last week, which was the worst of all. If I didn’t spend so much time waiting around for workers to come to my flat, I could write a book.
Joyceyland 
Stuffed animals, Joycey? I had forgotten that you were into plushies. Or is it the other way round?
Joyce, I know why we get on so well …. it\’s our bookshelves. Alphabetical by author for fiction and by topic for non-fiction. I thought I was the only one.How about your cd\’s? By composer, instrument or genre?
Yes, Gweipo. Exactly. When I finally got to sit at my desk and write something (Saturday), with the books on the shelves and the office all set, it was my happiest day since we bought the flat back in August. But I have no control over the CDs. My husband, the clutter-phobe, has thrown away all the boxes to put the discs in one of those giant space-saving folders. They are in no particular order. Ditto for DVDs, which are loosely categorized in English, French and Asian. But one cannot have everything in life.
Fumie, Remind me never to tell you anything ever again.
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