Yeah, this post is a little out of character and a bit too long but it’s….cathartic.
YJ and I just spent four days in Beijing apartment-hunting. It did not go well. After trying to decide between two apartments (the cozy love nest or the mack daddy shack) we decided to stall a bit and look some more. One of our agents, Miriam, called us on Saturday, the day we were to leave, with news of a great apartment that would be perfect for us. The following series of events takes place over the course of 24 hours and is so banal and yet so twisted and stupefying that I thought I would let the master, Quentin Tarantino, take a crack at scripting what took place:
I’m American, honey. Our names don’t mean shit.
Miriam was wonderful, sweet, and honest which meant she was a really good person and totally unqualified to work in the Chinese real estate market. Her default expression in conflict/negotiation situations could only be described as “Rabbit versus Mack truck.” She also had the annoyingly common habit of asking YJ questions about me in the third person. This after we had long established on the