The Studio Studio Journal

Monday 18th February
Studio Studio’s email drone, Warren, writes back to my complaint. He ignores the filthy toilet, the cigarette butt in the sink, the continually leaking cistern that I turn off at night to get some sleep. He also ignores my comments about the pubes on the floor, the broken window, and the absence of promised cable television.

Instead he homes in on the gym membership.

He promised gym membership in his original email, but after I moved in, his front-office drone, Eason – nice guy – told me you only get a gym membership if you rent for 6 months in advance.

Now the email drone accuses me of asking for a free gym membership. “I never told you you could have a free gym membership,” he writes with barely suppressed violence, adding that if I don’t like the facilities, I should consider going elsewhere.

Think I’ve met the Chinese version of Basil Fawlty. Then again, that’s the whole of Hong Kong’s “service” sector.

In the absence of any possible coherent discussion of the real facts of the case, I elect to pursue the “communications problem” angle.

I call the front-office drone and explain that “I think there has been a communication problem.”

He agrees.

“Yes, he says, “I think it is a communication problem.”

“Yes,” I say, “it’s a communication problem.”

We thus agree that Warren is a twat without saying that Warren is a twat. “A twat” is “a communication problem”.

Eason says he can get me a gym membership, but I will have to pay. But this will solve our communication problem. No one loses face and Warren is not directly called a twat.

This strategy does the trick. I do not have to talk to Warren, who has taken umbrage at my complaints and accused me of something I never said. Warren will take satisfaction in my paying for something I had agreed to pay for at the outset.

Problem solved. Although I never had a problem paying to begin with, and my room is still full of fucking pubes.

Tuesday 19th February
Gym membership will come later in the week. “It will take me a few days,” says front office drone on the phone.

Cleaners come and use my dish sponge to clean the room.

Buy new dish sponge from the supermarket to do the dishes.

Thursday 22nd February
Gym membership will come tomorrow.

Legal notice taped to front door of Studio Studio.

Studio Studio is being repossessed.

No mention of this from Studio Studio staff.

Friday 23rd February
Gym membership will come on Monday.

Woman trapped outside her Studio Studio bedsit-cum-studio apartment. She locked her keys inside when she went to the gym. Call Eason on my cell. He comes to let her in.

“Did you know we’re being repossessed?” she says, then, “you’ll have to move.” She won’t, because she signed up for 6 months.

Monday 25th February
Gym membership will come later in the week.

Tuesday 26th February
Cleaners come and use my dish sponge to clean the room.

Buy new dish sponge from supermarket.

Friday 29 February
Collect gym membership.

Too fat and lethargic to go to gym.

Saturday 30 February
Email down. Calls to Eason rewarded with his coming round and turning the email back on. I guess he just turned the power on and off. This guess is based on the fact that the electrics in my room are fucked and there are regular power surges that turn off the current to my computer. Lights flicker, power sockets fizz when you put a plug in, and you have to put a plug in or take one out every five minutes – there are not enough sockets to accommodate a lamp, a kettle, a microwave, a fridge, a TV and my laptop. Yesterday I left the fridge unplugged all day by accident. At least the microwave was plugged in though.

Sunday 1st March
Finally go to gym. California Fitness.

Muscle-bound Chinese-Americans polite to me.

Am I that old then? Or just fat?

Monday 3rd March
Can’t move after gym.

Internet down. Call Eason. He comes and fixes it.

Tuesday 4th March
Realise the walls are paper thin. Kept awake all night by the tall Serbo-Croat woman with a face like a bag of chisels who moved in next door yesterday and spends the entire night talking to her friend who has come over for vodka and a conversation that sounds like two women with colds clearing their noses.

Wednesday 5th March
Woken by a Cantonese old lady yelling at someone, presumably her husband. I guess she’s yelling “Where’s me fucking teeth, have you seen me fucking teeth? I put ‘em down here and they’ve gorn. Where the fuck are me teeth?”

Realise dimly that it’s like this every day, it’s only today that I’m more aware of it. It’s like being in student dorms, but filled with deaf pensioners.

Realise I’ve been behaving like a student by drinking late, when I should be behaving more like a deaf pensioner.

Realise that if you grow up with these constant invasions into your private space your conception of private space is ruptured. There is practically no conception of private space in Hong Kong.

Thursday 6th March
Main water supply is switched off. I discover this after having a crap.

Start thinking of SARS and its relationship to sewage.

Fill the cistern from the shower and flush the crap into Hong Kong’s vanishing harbour.

Later go to the gym so I can use their pissoir.

Friday 7th March
Water supply still out. Call Eason. He says, “Yes, I know.”

“When will it be back on?”

“There is a problem with the main water supply. You can use the shower to fill your cistern.”

“I’m doing that already.”

“Good. That’s okay then.”

Saturday 8th March
Water supply is back.

Monday 10th March
Notice to quit posted on all doors inside Studio Studio. Repossession not mentioned. Those who have paid for longer will be relocated to Studio Studio’s other building, in Wanchai, near all the underage Thai prostitutes dancing on bar-tops. I will have to fuck off somewhere else.

Fortunately I have already made other arrangements, and will move down the road to a rival cubicle-away-from-home-arrangement called City Lofts.

City Lofts doesn’t have any lofts, just rooms. Small rooms, but they look nice.

Tuesday 11th March
Receive an email from Studio Studio thanking me for my interest in renting from them. It is the same email I received when I first moved in. I wonder if Warren has lost it: he is promising me gym membership, clean rooms, views, no pubes, Internet and cable TV.

Then I realise he is responding to my post on Craigslist looking for an apartment.

I write and tell him I am actually already in Studio Studio, but I am looking for another place because the room I am in is being repossessed and he is kicking me out.

He doesn’t write back.

Later I talk to Eason who says the apartments are being closed because of the water supply problem. He says I can overstay if I want. The workmen will tear out the fixtures, but there will be a bed. It's really quite sweet when you think about it.

Wednesday 12th April
Internet down. Call Eason who says he has already gone home. Sounds like he’s having a shag, or watching porn. “Sorry, sorry,” he says. He will fix it tomorrow.

Ask him if it just requires turning off and on.

He says “Yes.”

Ask him “Is it in the hall?”

He says “Yes,” then realises what I am going to do and says, “Don’t touch it, for it is very high up.” I love it when Hong Kongers quote from Victorian textbooks, it’s so heartfelt and winning.

I know that Eason’s thinking “Shit, this guy is gonna get a serious shock from our fucked up wiring. What will we do with the body?”

I walk into the hall while promising Eason on my cell I won’t touch his router and find the router amid a maze of crazy cables up near the ceiling.

I turn off the power as Eason promises me he will come first thing in the morning.

I turn the router back on as he apologizes for the inconvenience while ploughing a furrow into someone in a motel, walk back to my room and check my email as I accept his apology and wish him a pleasant evening.

Thursday, 13th March
I like my privacy. A bit weird I know, but it’s this thing I have. I have stuff, so I like to keep it private. Journals and shit like that. I also have stuff I value, like my passport and airline ticket. Money too.

So I put this kind of weird personal shit in a suitcase with a combo lock and use a random number to prevent access. Weird, I know.

Anyway, every day I set the lock to a number like 3-3-3 or 6-6-6. Today it was 3-3-3. When I get home it is 3-3-4. I wonder if I’m getting paranoid, but I haven’t smoked dope in about 20 years because it makes me paranoid.

So here’s what I figure. I guess that for convenience, people will use these consistent numbers, perhaps with one digit altered. So, they set the combo to 3-3-3 to lock it, but when they need to get into a suitcase, all they do is flick one number over, rather than all three. So, they flick to 3-3-4, and they’re into the suitcase.

And I guess if you work in room service you get to know these human foibles. So, you change one number just to see if the suitcase will open.

Then again I could just be fucking paranoid.

Friday 15th March
Schlepp my gear in suitcases across Causeway Bay and up five flights of stairs strewn with cigarette butts into my new abode, City Loft. Ex-ex-wife calls to talk about kid while I’m doing this. I am not late with payments, she just wants to talk about kid. I try to explain that I am sick and trying to lug suitcases up stairs. I cough vehemently.

“Christ, you sound like shit,” she says.

I thank her.

She says I should have settled in one place, implying I am too old to be doing this, starting again in a foreign city.

I want to tell her that I would have settled but left the place where she still lives because of irreconcilable differences: I couldn’t tolerate her shagging the neighbourhood. But I don’t say anything, just cough more.

She asks if I’m seeing someone.

I tell her I’m seeing an awful lot of myself lately. She says something about that being sad, then hangs up.

My new abode by night is brightly lit with neon from the restaurants and bars that fill the street with a hubbub of crowds until three or four each morning. Cannon Street is the thriving alternative hub of Hong Kong side. Goth kids, punk kids, rapper kids, all imitating a disaffected teenage insouciance, sulky and gorgeous, with a trendy throwaway nihilism imported from the West. But they smile when I smile, say sorry when they block the stairwell whilst having a group chain-smoke, show due deference for my age and aching limbs. They wear black because they wear black, punk their hair because they punk their hair, wear ridiculous glue-on dreads because they wear ridiculous glue-on dreads. They maintain the surface of disrespect for authority, but like all things imported to the city it has mutated.

I open the blinds and startle the diners in the trendy restaurant across the street with my flaccid middle-aged body.

I close the blinds. I have moved to City Loft.

Fuck it feels good not to hear that woman yelling about her fucking teeth to her husband.