Thrills of my city apartment

By Graham Bond ( China Daily ) Updated: 2007-03-27 09:55:27

For a man who grew up in a suburban retirement bungalow, my 38-square-meter city center apartment has taken some getting used to. It's been more than three years now and I'm still not entirely comfortable.

There was early promise. The top floor location in the corner of a rectangular building had me fantasizing about living like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, spying on the neighbors and dining out on the gathered intelligence.

That dream died when bars were placed across the bedroom window, the only one facing the compound's inner sanctum. Now, if I crane my neck hard against the cold steel I get a letterbox perspective on the goings-on. Otherwise, I must content myself with a delightful view of a pink wall.

Though I am denied voyeuristic optical pleasures, my ears are fully indulged. Every night I am led toward sleep by a veritable FX studio of sounds, ranging from the tragic, to the silly, to the downright annoying.

Firstly there's the cat which I suspect once had the same nosy impulse as me but somehow got its head stuck between the bars as he was straining for a view. He's been howling in anguish ever since, only resting at the precise moment I pull on a nightgown and head out to save him. The virtuoso symphony of pain resumes upon my return.

Then there are the marbles. My schoolmates and I were generally content to limit our games to the playground but I guess that was a more simple age. Today's youth are driven creatures, willing to go to extraordinary lengths to master their art. Indeed, every morning and evening, I am treated to the sound of a child assiduously hurling a handful of small, circular objects at the skirting board of an adjacent room. They bobble around for a while before being collected and hurled again. And again. And again.

Perhaps the most dedicated of my neighbors is the cooking enthusiast who loves meat balls to such an extent that he wakes at 6 am to begin chopping the day's quotient. As I nod, nearly napping, suddenly there comes a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping on my bedroom wall. It certainly gets the juices flowing.

I could expound at length upon the convivial games of mahjong that clatter on into the wee hours on floor five; the wannabe Tibetan nomad on floor four who generously shares his small but high-quality collection of Dao Lang with anyone willing to listen, and even those who aren't; or the motorcyclists who park their vehicles with a gratuitous rev of their engines as if to say: "Friends, neighbors, the night shift is over I AM HOME."

And so, on reflection, perhaps my fantasy about recreating the events of Rear Window may come true after all. In Hitchcock's film, it's the nagging wife that gets bumped off. I have a feeling that any one of a number of my neighbors might go the same way.

Alternatively, I could just rent a new apartment.

(China Daily 03/27/2007 page20)