The Story of Room 420

SDkhfasujhf,sZgvilysGZDfuiwlg!! :) :) tear of happiness. Ok so I actually wrote that almost two weeks ago, because “sadfkjablwerkuhyvdilbjaw!!” was the only way to write the happiness I was feeling. Let’s back up a few months and I will tell you a little story, the story of room 420.

So, we arrived in China one late evening. After checking in and some struggles with getting our luggage into the elevator, my roommate and I got into our dorm room at about 1 AM. The fourth floor.

Room 420.

Life was good,

Things were swell

The only thing that wasn’t

Was the smell

The smell of smoke

That makes you want to choke

Coming from our bathroom

Almost everyday…

Ok. So basically the fourth floor seems to be where a bunch of smokers live. Our room happened to be in the middle of where all the intense Korean smokers lived. I find it ironic, because I guess that 4.20 is national get high day (at least that’s what some of my friends told me) and we lived in 420. Our next-door neighbors especially loved to smoke in their room all the time, and once every so often, they held drinking parties where they would invite over the entire Korean population and they would smoke. They were really nice people, but because our bathrooms were connected by a false ceiling, the result was our room smelling of smoke. Most of the time I would keep the bathroom door closed, to lock in the thick fog, but after a while we had to open it up to air it out, so we would open up our room door and windows as well. This somewhat worked until it started to freeze outside, and opening the windows for long periods of time wasn’t an option.

I tried everything I could. Several times, I went down to the front desk and explained the problem to see if we could switch to another room. They always said that they never had any open rooms and their solution was to just talk to my next door neighbors about it and tell them to smoke outside. I did. In fact, I talked to them about it quite often. We became great friends, but the smoke and me didn’t. I tried everything I could: taping the vent closed in our bathroom, putting the ash tray that came with our room over the drain of the shower, stuffing cut up towels up the holes under the sink that connected our bathrooms. Taping around the holes of the ceiling – that’s when I realized that the panels on the bathroom ceiling lifted up and our bathrooms were completely connected. So I would just have to convince them to stop. I even tried bribing them with American pizza, and when they were good about not smoking in the room, they would be rewarded with some. Then every time they or any of their friends would see me, they would either say like 10 times in a row, “Duibuqi (sorry) and kind of do like a Korean bow to me. Or they would say with a really excited smile, “Pizzaaaaa!” Oh great. And then, I would firmly tell them that they weren’t going to get pizza if they smoked in the room.

AND THEN, out of no where, an entire week went by without the bathroom smelling of smoke. I thought for sure they had gotten rid of their habit. I saw my Korean next door neighbor by the classrooms one day and he asked me if my room had smelled like smoke lately. I said, “No you guys have been great!” “I changed rooms,” he replied. What the?! Really!? He then told me that it was just him that switched with one of his friends, and that the other roommate was still their but had a new roommate. So I skipped back to my room, completely content with life, thinking all was well….

AND THEN!!! A few days later, the smoke was back, this time, the most intense it had ever been! I opened up the bathroom door and the thick fog went swarming out with an alarming stench that followed. I wasn’t even going to try to talk to my next door neighbors about this one. I was done. I was going straight down to the front desk and was going to face them like a Chinese person.

I called up my good friend Sam, from Iraq, who is in his fifth year studying here. He’s working on his masters in Chinese, so he is pretty fluent, and he accompanied me down to the front desk. I knew if I was going to do some serious persuading, I was going to need a translator to help get my point across! My basic conversational Chinese skills were not going to cut it. Basically it went down like this. “Listen, I need to change rooms, today! No matter what.” And after some 30 minutes of us arguing, I wasn’t going to give up, because I knew that they have rooms open, they just don’t usually let one person switch to another room, in fear that word might get around and they may have a lot of people coming to the front desk and wanting to switch rooms for this and that reason and causing huge fiascos.

AND THEN, I finally heard these glorious words come out of one of the worker’s mouths, “Ming tian zao shang ni ke yi huan fang jian.” (Tomorrow morning you can change rooms!!) Sam and I had convinced them that they did have a room open. The next morning, Kayli and I were able to change to another floor and another room and it has been such a huge blessing!! Now you can see why the only thing I was able to type a couple weeks ago was, “SDkhfasujhf,sZgvilysGZDfuiwlg!! :) :) tear of happiness. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Sometimes, I used to dread coming home to my dorm because I hated the smell and I just never knew when the thick fog of smoke was going to attack. Now, I love coming home, and feeling safe and happy. These last two weeks have been a breath of fresh air, literally. (well, kind of, just because living in one of the most polluted cities in the world isn’t a really a breath of fresh air haha but that’s another story) But, this experience definitely has made me more grateful for home and it’s taken on a whole new meaning.