After Lisa's husband got involved, she asked me to pay 2,000 rmb a month for the use of her cave-like home.
We both laughed when she said it. No harm, no foul. I started looking for a good commercial bakery location.
The Mah Jong Parlor
Thursday, May 17.
Today I work 1 to 9 pm. Yesterday at Web Daniel said he’d help me look for a store front today. He would come to my place after dropping off his son at school. We had agreed to meet around 8 a.m.
I had set the cell-phone alarm for 7:45 am. It hadn’t gone off by the time I woke. It had been another rough night. Every two hours awakened, read my Kindle until the eyes felt heavy, slept another couple hours only to awaken again. I stretched and yawned, and felt like it must be time to get up.
As it turns out, I had carelessly set the alarm for 8:45. My internal clock had gotten me up at 7:55, and I set about quickly washing my face and dressing. I was grabbing a granola bar from the cupboard when the phone rang. Daniel was patiently waiting in his car, reviewing his English lessons.
We walked around my neighborhood on DongFang Rd. Up and down we walked, calling any cell phone number we found on shuttered shops. The side of the street where my apartment is has been redeveloped in the past few years. The opposite side of the narrow two-lane road is old. I have often thought that those buildings would soon be scheduled for demolition and redevelopment into expensive apartments. These old buildings stand between the Grand Canal to the north, and the spreading up scaling of the Hutang district. On the southwest corner of my development’s block new shops are opening, keynoted by a sleek new Audi car dealership. The first shop I showed Jane was a few doors down from that dealership.
That shop owner was asking 68,000 rmb a year for 45 sq meters. Today we were looking at stores less than two football fields to the north, where the asking prices are a fraction of that.
While Daniel waited for me he took a quick survey of the shops just west of my complex’s north entrance. Together we walked down the length of the east end. The redevelopment ended with my building, which is on the northern edge of this complex. Further east the store fronts were deep narrow dark caves, brown stucco and smoked gray. One had six-inch spools of threads spilling out the door. It seems to be a factory for spinning threads for the textile industry. The many colored spools are loaded into gunny sacks, onto a blue three-wheeler electric cart and carried off. Most of the other shops dealt with food of one sort or another. Steamed bread, a muslim place with flat breads, a tiny grocery store. There is also a mechanic’s shop for repairing ebikes and miscellaneous mechanical things. Other shops were still shuttered at this early hour.
We wandered back towards my complex and the car; Daniel felt we had plumbed the depths of the neighborhood and come up empty. I said I’d take him to see the ‘expensive’ place in the southwest corner, on the main avenues of Ren Min Rd and He Ping Rd. We could leave the car and reach it on foot in a few minutes.
Before we got in the car I looked one last time towards the west, on the old side of the street. I saw a blue shutter with a phone number on it. I asked Daniel again if he had checked that end of the block. He said he hadn’t noticed that place.
He read the sign and made the call. The speaker said he’d be right down to show us the place. It was a double-wide shop, over 50 sq meters. We waited ten minutes, and then a tanned muscular fellow with a gold and green knitted shirt sporting racing car logos rode up on his motorcycle. He had a deep voice that oozed testosterone.
He opened the two shutters and let us wander. The first impression to hit the senses was stale tobacco. Every surface was brown with tobacco stains. The floor air conditioner in the corner was thick with it. I fiddled with the grill to see if I could check the filter, but the front seemed rusted shut. There were shiny new mah jong tables with chairs in rows, about eight or ten of them. The room may have been square, but three square pillars across the width of it cut the space into two rectangles, front and back. There is a small room with an air conditioner, suitable for a round dinner table and eight chairs at the right end of the back rectangle. Beyond it a door led to the back. A dark toilet stared at me, as I made a left turn into a narrow room leading to the back door. In that narrow room a sink and counter space had been built from tile-faced bricks. It was crumbling, chipped tile cracked cement stained porcelain sink crooked pipes. Beyond it a step down led to an add-on room with plastic roof and an exterior door. It measured perhaps 9 by 9 ft. Perfect for receiving deliveries, but then, I had no idea what lie behind that door. I know there is new construction just beginning west of this block, at the corner of He Ping Rd. I had no idea what was directly behind this building.
Daniel interpreted now and again, as they engaged in conversation. The asking price was 17,000 a year, he told us. We could have a six month lease, or one year. Wow, I thought. Yes, it would take a major work force days to clean and paint. I wondered how difficult it would be to find that paint that seals in odors. The wiring seemed a mixture. There were extension chords with power strips hanging from walls and snaking along the floor. I observed four ceiling fans, coated black, and a small wall fan. I flicked a switch and the blades began to lazily turn; I flicked it off again.
Then came the kicker. This gentleman was not the owner. He had entered into a lease in October. A few months ago a new, cleaner and brighter mah jong room had opened a few doors down, and was now the place to go. He needed out of the business. He wanted me to give him 15,000. I was stunned. For what? Daniel variously translated it, first as an improvement fee. I would be paying him for the improvements he had made on the place. Huh? The only things that looked younger than six months were the mah jong tables. Then later Daniel tapped into his phone dictionary and translated it as ‘transfer fee’. He said that was a normal business practice. I balked.
He wasn’t asking us for the money outright. He said, if we just had it in our hands while he introduced us to the landlord, he would be satisfied. If we closed the deal, we’d hand him that extortion money. If not, we’d walk away with it.
While Daniel and he had talked, my imagination and I wandered about the place. I saw it all, and it was perfect. Just the space I needed for my bread factory.
I called Jane. If indeed this was the right place, I needed to bring her in on it immediately. I knew what her reaction would be. It is filthy, it is in a working class neighborhood, it is totally unacceptable. It took her a half hour to pull herself together and get to us. She reacted as I knew she would. But she saw how I glowed, and eventually agreed that we should at least consider it. We said goodbye to the mah jong dealer and the three of us walked away. Daniel had still not seen my beloved spot near the Audi dealership. I was hoping our steps and conversation were leading us there, but we stopped at Jane’s car and got in. She wanted to show us the spaces near her apartment, at the south edge of the huge Xin Tian Di park, not far from Web.
Altnernatives
We wandered those spaces. We found a fruit shop that was willing to rent out their space. It was 60 sq meters, including an upstairs room. The upstairs room might have been adequate for a hermit’s life, with a toilet and large living room. But the stairwell inhibited use of the ground level space, and I found it entirely too small.
Nor was it facing the road, Guan Dian Rd; it was in the back of the building, where there was no foot traffic. For this they were asking only 30,000.
In the end, Daniel drove me home. He told Jane he’d look at the shops right under Web. Many of them were empty.
I had only enough time to make my lunch and rush off on my ebike to Web, for the start of a long working day. My last class ended at 8:00.
I called Jane, and asked her if she was home, and if I could drop by. She was pleased. I had to talk to her about this man’s attempt at extortion. She assured me that it was a common business practice, and also agreed with me that it wasn’t right. I told her I thought I was paying him for being a bad business manager.
Tangled Investments--the Bali Coffee Ponzi
We talked again about the possibility of my getting my 50,000 back from the Bali Coffee investment. I said I’d try to get a transaction history printed out, from the bank, to document Bali’s breach of contract.
And now, the unexpected
The next day Daniel came to Web to study. He spent time looking around at the empty shops nearby in the immediate block. I was busy with classes, but he called me to say that he had found something. On Saturday he would show it to me. This had always been the most obvious place for my shop. The German Restaurant had recently opened on the third floor, bringing foreign foot traffic. Web's clients were Chinese of the class that would be interested in trying new cultural experiences. But I had dismissed the possibility from the outset as being simply too expensive, out of my range.
Saturday came and almost went. I started with a 10 a.m. class. On my lunch hour I walked the length and breadth of the mall looking for the phone number Daniel had texted me, without success. After that I was busy with one class after another, and never saw him arrive. At 2:00 I had a free hour between classes, so I ran across the street to look at televisions. Graham, in Shanghai, had emailed me earlier in the week saying he wanted his TV back. I was addicted to the beautiful look of the flat screen tv, so I had to buy a replacement. The landlady had supplied the flat with a TV, but it was thick and old fashioned and I could no longer be satisfied with a 19 inch screen.
Meeting old friends. I intended to do comparison shopping at the three big stores right in the Web neighborhood. But the first one I went into was the last. As I wandered around the flat-screen displays, a salesman approached me and asked me, 'You're Megan, aren't you?' No, I said. He kept talking, and said at last that I had been his teacher at Mechatronics, my first year in Changzhou! We talked about other students and what they were doing now. Then back to the TVs. He showed me the special of the week, selling for 3,500. It was a Haier, a brand I know well as being reliable, with good customer service. Oh, that was more than I wanted to pay. Not to worry, he said, with a broad smile. He gave it to me for 2,300 rmb. And that was that.
I called Daniel, only to discover that he was actually at Web in the computer room, working on the courseware. He said we’d meet at 5, and he’d show me the place. He had ducked out to run a family errand, and it wasn’t until 6 pm that he finally returned. It was a miserable rainy day. We went downstairs and he showed me the place. He spoke to the shopkeeper next door, and learned that the place had rented previously for 28,000 rmb. He obtained a better phone number for the landlady and actually had a conversation with her. During that, she asked him how much he wanted to pay for the place. He said, 25,000. She said OK. He couldn't believe it! He was rightly proud of himself, and wondering what if he had said a lower price. Ah, human nature.
We then drove across the street and loaded the new TV into the car trunk, and Daniel drove me home. On the way he called Jane, and talked about this new possibility. He gave her the landlady’s phone number, and they agreed that Jane would call the woman and arrange a time to meet on Sunday.
What do I think of the new place? I haven't looked inside yet, but from the front window it looks too small. It is 50 sq meters, but no where near the usable space of the old dingy mah jong parlor on Dong Fang Rd. Still, it had been used before for food service, and had a small kitchen behind a serving counter window.
On Friday during English Corner I discussed the latest events with the small group of regulars. Jimmy told me that when it came time for the city’s sanitation inspection, I should tell him. He is a city sanitation inspector, and would take care of it for me. During the course of that hour he also let drop the information that his wife worked for the Security bureau. This is the dreaded PSB. Recently their responsibilities for foreigners had been transferred to the newly formed Foreign Affairs Office, but I imagined that there might still be an opening to get help on the precarious business visa application.
Things were falling into place. I was eager to meet the landlady of this store front and actually have a walk-through.
We both laughed when she said it. No harm, no foul. I started looking for a good commercial bakery location.
The Mah Jong Parlor
Thursday, May 17.
Today I work 1 to 9 pm. Yesterday at Web Daniel said he’d help me look for a store front today. He would come to my place after dropping off his son at school. We had agreed to meet around 8 a.m.
I had set the cell-phone alarm for 7:45 am. It hadn’t gone off by the time I woke. It had been another rough night. Every two hours awakened, read my Kindle until the eyes felt heavy, slept another couple hours only to awaken again. I stretched and yawned, and felt like it must be time to get up.
As it turns out, I had carelessly set the alarm for 8:45. My internal clock had gotten me up at 7:55, and I set about quickly washing my face and dressing. I was grabbing a granola bar from the cupboard when the phone rang. Daniel was patiently waiting in his car, reviewing his English lessons.
We walked around my neighborhood on DongFang Rd. Up and down we walked, calling any cell phone number we found on shuttered shops. The side of the street where my apartment is has been redeveloped in the past few years. The opposite side of the narrow two-lane road is old. I have often thought that those buildings would soon be scheduled for demolition and redevelopment into expensive apartments. These old buildings stand between the Grand Canal to the north, and the spreading up scaling of the Hutang district. On the southwest corner of my development’s block new shops are opening, keynoted by a sleek new Audi car dealership. The first shop I showed Jane was a few doors down from that dealership.
That shop owner was asking 68,000 rmb a year for 45 sq meters. Today we were looking at stores less than two football fields to the north, where the asking prices are a fraction of that.
While Daniel waited for me he took a quick survey of the shops just west of my complex’s north entrance. Together we walked down the length of the east end. The redevelopment ended with my building, which is on the northern edge of this complex. Further east the store fronts were deep narrow dark caves, brown stucco and smoked gray. One had six-inch spools of threads spilling out the door. It seems to be a factory for spinning threads for the textile industry. The many colored spools are loaded into gunny sacks, onto a blue three-wheeler electric cart and carried off. Most of the other shops dealt with food of one sort or another. Steamed bread, a muslim place with flat breads, a tiny grocery store. There is also a mechanic’s shop for repairing ebikes and miscellaneous mechanical things. Other shops were still shuttered at this early hour.
We wandered back towards my complex and the car; Daniel felt we had plumbed the depths of the neighborhood and come up empty. I said I’d take him to see the ‘expensive’ place in the southwest corner, on the main avenues of Ren Min Rd and He Ping Rd. We could leave the car and reach it on foot in a few minutes.
Before we got in the car I looked one last time towards the west, on the old side of the street. I saw a blue shutter with a phone number on it. I asked Daniel again if he had checked that end of the block. He said he hadn’t noticed that place.
He read the sign and made the call. The speaker said he’d be right down to show us the place. It was a double-wide shop, over 50 sq meters. We waited ten minutes, and then a tanned muscular fellow with a gold and green knitted shirt sporting racing car logos rode up on his motorcycle. He had a deep voice that oozed testosterone.
He opened the two shutters and let us wander. The first impression to hit the senses was stale tobacco. Every surface was brown with tobacco stains. The floor air conditioner in the corner was thick with it. I fiddled with the grill to see if I could check the filter, but the front seemed rusted shut. There were shiny new mah jong tables with chairs in rows, about eight or ten of them. The room may have been square, but three square pillars across the width of it cut the space into two rectangles, front and back. There is a small room with an air conditioner, suitable for a round dinner table and eight chairs at the right end of the back rectangle. Beyond it a door led to the back. A dark toilet stared at me, as I made a left turn into a narrow room leading to the back door. In that narrow room a sink and counter space had been built from tile-faced bricks. It was crumbling, chipped tile cracked cement stained porcelain sink crooked pipes. Beyond it a step down led to an add-on room with plastic roof and an exterior door. It measured perhaps 9 by 9 ft. Perfect for receiving deliveries, but then, I had no idea what lie behind that door. I know there is new construction just beginning west of this block, at the corner of He Ping Rd. I had no idea what was directly behind this building.
Daniel interpreted now and again, as they engaged in conversation. The asking price was 17,000 a year, he told us. We could have a six month lease, or one year. Wow, I thought. Yes, it would take a major work force days to clean and paint. I wondered how difficult it would be to find that paint that seals in odors. The wiring seemed a mixture. There were extension chords with power strips hanging from walls and snaking along the floor. I observed four ceiling fans, coated black, and a small wall fan. I flicked a switch and the blades began to lazily turn; I flicked it off again.
Then came the kicker. This gentleman was not the owner. He had entered into a lease in October. A few months ago a new, cleaner and brighter mah jong room had opened a few doors down, and was now the place to go. He needed out of the business. He wanted me to give him 15,000. I was stunned. For what? Daniel variously translated it, first as an improvement fee. I would be paying him for the improvements he had made on the place. Huh? The only things that looked younger than six months were the mah jong tables. Then later Daniel tapped into his phone dictionary and translated it as ‘transfer fee’. He said that was a normal business practice. I balked.
He wasn’t asking us for the money outright. He said, if we just had it in our hands while he introduced us to the landlord, he would be satisfied. If we closed the deal, we’d hand him that extortion money. If not, we’d walk away with it.
While Daniel and he had talked, my imagination and I wandered about the place. I saw it all, and it was perfect. Just the space I needed for my bread factory.
I called Jane. If indeed this was the right place, I needed to bring her in on it immediately. I knew what her reaction would be. It is filthy, it is in a working class neighborhood, it is totally unacceptable. It took her a half hour to pull herself together and get to us. She reacted as I knew she would. But she saw how I glowed, and eventually agreed that we should at least consider it. We said goodbye to the mah jong dealer and the three of us walked away. Daniel had still not seen my beloved spot near the Audi dealership. I was hoping our steps and conversation were leading us there, but we stopped at Jane’s car and got in. She wanted to show us the spaces near her apartment, at the south edge of the huge Xin Tian Di park, not far from Web.
Altnernatives
We wandered those spaces. We found a fruit shop that was willing to rent out their space. It was 60 sq meters, including an upstairs room. The upstairs room might have been adequate for a hermit’s life, with a toilet and large living room. But the stairwell inhibited use of the ground level space, and I found it entirely too small.
Nor was it facing the road, Guan Dian Rd; it was in the back of the building, where there was no foot traffic. For this they were asking only 30,000.
In the end, Daniel drove me home. He told Jane he’d look at the shops right under Web. Many of them were empty.
I had only enough time to make my lunch and rush off on my ebike to Web, for the start of a long working day. My last class ended at 8:00.
I called Jane, and asked her if she was home, and if I could drop by. She was pleased. I had to talk to her about this man’s attempt at extortion. She assured me that it was a common business practice, and also agreed with me that it wasn’t right. I told her I thought I was paying him for being a bad business manager.
Tangled Investments--the Bali Coffee Ponzi
We talked again about the possibility of my getting my 50,000 back from the Bali Coffee investment. I said I’d try to get a transaction history printed out, from the bank, to document Bali’s breach of contract.
And now, the unexpected
The next day Daniel came to Web to study. He spent time looking around at the empty shops nearby in the immediate block. I was busy with classes, but he called me to say that he had found something. On Saturday he would show it to me. This had always been the most obvious place for my shop. The German Restaurant had recently opened on the third floor, bringing foreign foot traffic. Web's clients were Chinese of the class that would be interested in trying new cultural experiences. But I had dismissed the possibility from the outset as being simply too expensive, out of my range.
Saturday came and almost went. I started with a 10 a.m. class. On my lunch hour I walked the length and breadth of the mall looking for the phone number Daniel had texted me, without success. After that I was busy with one class after another, and never saw him arrive. At 2:00 I had a free hour between classes, so I ran across the street to look at televisions. Graham, in Shanghai, had emailed me earlier in the week saying he wanted his TV back. I was addicted to the beautiful look of the flat screen tv, so I had to buy a replacement. The landlady had supplied the flat with a TV, but it was thick and old fashioned and I could no longer be satisfied with a 19 inch screen.
Meeting old friends. I intended to do comparison shopping at the three big stores right in the Web neighborhood. But the first one I went into was the last. As I wandered around the flat-screen displays, a salesman approached me and asked me, 'You're Megan, aren't you?' No, I said. He kept talking, and said at last that I had been his teacher at Mechatronics, my first year in Changzhou! We talked about other students and what they were doing now. Then back to the TVs. He showed me the special of the week, selling for 3,500. It was a Haier, a brand I know well as being reliable, with good customer service. Oh, that was more than I wanted to pay. Not to worry, he said, with a broad smile. He gave it to me for 2,300 rmb. And that was that.
I called Daniel, only to discover that he was actually at Web in the computer room, working on the courseware. He said we’d meet at 5, and he’d show me the place. He had ducked out to run a family errand, and it wasn’t until 6 pm that he finally returned. It was a miserable rainy day. We went downstairs and he showed me the place. He spoke to the shopkeeper next door, and learned that the place had rented previously for 28,000 rmb. He obtained a better phone number for the landlady and actually had a conversation with her. During that, she asked him how much he wanted to pay for the place. He said, 25,000. She said OK. He couldn't believe it! He was rightly proud of himself, and wondering what if he had said a lower price. Ah, human nature.
We then drove across the street and loaded the new TV into the car trunk, and Daniel drove me home. On the way he called Jane, and talked about this new possibility. He gave her the landlady’s phone number, and they agreed that Jane would call the woman and arrange a time to meet on Sunday.
What do I think of the new place? I haven't looked inside yet, but from the front window it looks too small. It is 50 sq meters, but no where near the usable space of the old dingy mah jong parlor on Dong Fang Rd. Still, it had been used before for food service, and had a small kitchen behind a serving counter window.
On Friday during English Corner I discussed the latest events with the small group of regulars. Jimmy told me that when it came time for the city’s sanitation inspection, I should tell him. He is a city sanitation inspector, and would take care of it for me. During the course of that hour he also let drop the information that his wife worked for the Security bureau. This is the dreaded PSB. Recently their responsibilities for foreigners had been transferred to the newly formed Foreign Affairs Office, but I imagined that there might still be an opening to get help on the precarious business visa application.
Things were falling into place. I was eager to meet the landlady of this store front and actually have a walk-through.
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