A funny thing happened last week...

September in Sichuan. The weather starts to cool imperceptibly, signaling the coming of fall—thank god, a break from the heat at last!—before winter falls so quickly upon us, wrapping us all in her cold, damp tentacles. For me, this fall is remarkably like the last one, but in unexpected ways. After a longer-than-expected summer vacation in the US, I wondered how the return to China would go. After all, I'd been in the US for nine weeks—one week longer than my eight-week training last summer. China can be a shock in any season, but I was particularly worried about coming back to the summer heat and it's accompanying smells. In advance of my arrival, I emailed my friend and fellow English teacher, Xiang Bing. She'd been keeping an eye on the place for me while I was gone, watering the plants and (I hoped) reminding the vermin that a human was still the rightful inhabitant of the place.

Well, the plants didn't fare so well on Xiang Bing's watch, though I can't blame her—she didn't sign on for nine weeks of duty, after all. But I was happy to see, or really, fail to see any critters in residence at my apartment when I finally got back. Of course, there was a dead roach or two, but who hasn't seen that on any ordinary Tuesday? I was relieved.

During my first year in China, I found I was able to adapt to almost every aspect of my new environment. My students and I have slipped into a comfortable routine, and I'm making inroads with the English department staff. I'm less than fluent in Chinese, but I can certainly survive. The weather was a challenge, but with layers of thermal underwear and a high-powered fan, it can be handled. The traffic is insane, but I've become a confident jaywalker.

The singular arena in which I didn't feel I was coping well was my squeamishness around all things creepy-crawly. Anyone who talks to me on a regular basis has probably heard about the Spider Wars—HUGE spiders began living in my bathroom, a dank and gross place to begin with. The increase in the spider population made the bathroom a highly problematic room in my apartment. Every time before entering, I would poke my head through the door jam and do a long, slow look around the space in an attempt to determine their whereabouts. If present, I'd generally not enter. What can I say? I'm a baby. They even made inroads into my kitchen before the final battle, which luckily ended with their resounding defeat at the hands of a dear friend and a kitchen spatula (thanks again). I could go on, about the lizard in my gas range, the random appearances of rats in my gas heater exhaust pipe and, of course, there are the cockroaches. Oh, the cockroaches.

You know, all of this, I figured I could deal with. They were smaller than I, every one of 'em, and I always repeated, like a chant, “they are more afraid of you than you are of them.” They never looked real afraid, though. Anyhow. I had steeled myself for another year of dodging the bugs and critters, and I thought that the rats who turned up last winter were also long gone. I was a little overly-optimistic, it seems.

The first weekend I was back in Luzhou, I walked into my kitchen (which I have to pass through to get to the bathroom) and was surprised (!) to see a rat streak across the counter towards the window. As you may have expected, I shrieked and slammed the kitchen door shut. I retreated to my bedroom, in the hopes that it would realize that this was MY space, not his. There wasn't even any food in the kitchen, anyhow—what exactly could that rat be after? The next morning, I cautiously cased the kitchen before entering, and thankfully, the rat seemed to be absent. Sufficiently at ease, I got into the shower. Just as I was rinsing out the shampoo, I cast a glance at the floor, where, to my total shock and horror, was a rat, crawling out of the squat toilet! It was covered in grimy sludge and struggling to make the vertical ascent up the pipe and into the bowl of the toilet. I couldn't believe it—this was truly a nightmare vision unfolding before my eyes.

Well, I didn't stick around to see what it would do next—I got the hell out of there, screaming and dripping, the shower still running. I was in my waiban's office within the half hour, hastily dressed and still wet. When I related the story, she stifled a laugh but did promise to take action. And fast action it was. In under 24 hours, I was moved into a different, recently renovated apartment. That afternoon I sat guard over my possessions that sat on the sidewalk outside my old apartment, as the bang-bang's (or laborers, so called because of the stick they use to carry large bundles) carried it in teams to the new place. A couple of my neighbors asked me why I was moving. At a loss, I just said that they had found a new place for me—we just never got around to “A rat crawled out of my squat toilet” during language training.

It is interesting to be settling in to a totally new place at this juncture. It feels like September 2005 all over again, which ultimately is rather ambiguous. Aren't I supposed to be past this settling-in stage? Shouldn't I be making progress in other, more important ways? Maybe this move will open the door for me to make that progress that I have so anticipated in my second year. Because really, let's face it: I'll probably always be freaked out by those critters that try to inhabit my apartment. Maybe now with them out of the picture (cross your fingers!) I can be less tense, and then more productive in other areas of my China life.



Coming soon: pictures of the new place!