trust issues

Chinese people have very interesting ideas about trust. I am forever having Chinese friends or even strangers on the bus, tell me to be mindful of thieves trying to steal my purse. It has a long strap, so I wear it diagonally across my body, and it usually falls behind me. It has a snap closure, so I very seriously doubt that short of cutting it off of me, there's any way anyone could relieve me of it, or any of its contents, without my knowing. They always want me to wear it in the front though, so I can see it and be sure.

Chinese are also people that put bars on their apartment windows... regardless of whether they live on the first floor, the sixth floor or the twentieth floor. Naturally, The Crack Den 2.0, my old first floor apartment in Songyuan, was an unfortunate, rare exception to that rule. People were always telling me there that I shouldn't open my windows even if I was home because I might not hear an invader. Here in Xiamen, my eleventh and a half floor bedroom windows have bars on them (though they're not very secure so I'm not even sure what the point is). My eleventh floor living room balcony does not have bars.

So you have things like that, where people are maybe a touch paranoid, but then you have things that go 180 degrees in the opposite direction...

As I've mentioned before, China basically doesn't have clothes dryers (I have met one person that owned one in past 14 months). The washer will either have a killer spin cycle or it won't spin at all and you'll have to manually move the clothes to the "dryer", which will just spin them a bit.

So everyone hangs their laundry out to dry. Everywhere. Apartment building rooftops, public parks, in front of restaurants, I mean everywhere; there is always laundry hanging in random places you KNOW nobody lives. And apparently no one is worried about their clothes being stolen. Now, I don't worry about my purse being on my back or someone coming in my eleventh story window (heck, if they can manage that, I will just GIVE them something for the effort, I'll be so impressed), but my laundry is something I wouldn't leave to dry outside of my own apartment.

More importantly than clothes, let me tell you about money. Actual money. A lot of businesses that I frequent don't have a cash register. Maybe they have a cash drawer, a completely unorganized drawer full of loose change and bills with absolutely no system of accounting for it at all. Or if they're fancy, maybe they do have a cash register, but usually the cash isn't divided like you might think, with a slot for the 1s, a slot for the 5s, a slot for the 10s and so on and so forth, the cash register is just a facade for the cash junk drawer. And it's common for someone to give me change out of their own pocket instead of the drawer. You trust your employees this much?! Granted a lot of businesses are small and family, but not everyone there is family...

And then there's the weird situation I am in with my rent and utilities. I pay rent quarterly here, same goes for utilities (water and electric). My landlord gets the bills for the utilities and then I pay when I pay rent.

After living in my apartment for one quarter, when I should have seen my first round of utility bills to pay, the property manager said she didn't have them because she had too many properties to manage, she just told me an arbitrary amount and expected me to pay. After quite a bit of back and forth, I paid the random amount and she agreed to email me all past and future utility bills. Never got a thing. 

After the second quarter I was here, I asked for the bills so I could pay, but she wouldn't even let me pay rent, she was on holiday and couldn't be bothered to pick up any money I transferred to her. I ended up paying rent three weeks late and still no utility bills. She told a Chinese friend of mine if she didn't produce them I didn't have to pay.

This sounds great and all, except that this woman has 3,500 RMB in deposits from me that I want to get back when I move out- 3,000 RMB for the apartment and 500RMB for utilities. I'm thinking if she keeps not asking me to pay, she's going to screw me in the end, never show me any bills and keep my deposit. My Chinese friend says that the landlord and I are friends so she probably just won't make me pay at all. What?

So, we don't trust people with purses and breaking into our apartments, but we trust everyone in the public with our laundry, all employees and utilities don't need to be paid... or something like that.