All that glitters is not caulk

As I have written before, entirely too much of my life in China revolves around trying to fix things. First of all, that already is my nature, as I am an obsessive fixer. Second of all, every thing in China needs to be fixed.

This is no country in which to be an obsessive handyman, as I have mentioned ten or twenty times before. Everywhere I turn, something needs done or done right. However, this new item takes the grand championship.

I was walking down a hallway a few days ago. There is a large floor crack that has been covered with a metal threshold. The piece was sticking up well off the floor, so I pulled it off and set it to the side so that no one would trip over it.

I expected that the piece would be held down with caulk. Everything in China is held together with caulk. The only problem is that no one knows how to apply it.

This reminds me that I have a long list of caulk-related photographs that I have intended to post. I will get back to them, even though this particular entry is going to supersede all of them. Other than its general and appropriate uses, I have seen caulk used to do the following: hold down floor tiles, hang pictures, fix pipes, plug wall holes, and on and on. It's as if caulk was the first home-improvement substance they ever learned about, and they think it fixes everything. Caulk is the duct tape of China, except that it is even less useful than duct tape, which is actually only really good for, I don't know, sealing ducts? I was already horrified by how many lame attempts at duct tape repairs I see in America. It is far worse with caulk in China. There are likely to be entire buildings here held up with caulk.

Actually, that last one is a little too close to the truth. I don't like thinking about the construction of Chinese buildings, as I just barely noted in my last post.

Back to the caulk. I see it everywhere, but rarely have I ever seen it applied well. Honestly, I think that half the problem is that the Chinese construction boom is so vast, that anyone who has any legitimate skills and experience already has a job somewhere. The repairs are all left to the unskilled.

Whatever. Back to my story. I pulled up this metal threshold, and then inspected. I'd like you to look closely at the photograph and see what they had used to hold it down. Don't read ahead until you have guessed.



That's right, boys and girls... it was held down with....

GLITTER GLUE! That sparkly decoration that has graced millions of grade school posters!

I really should make more jokes here, but I'm speechless.


I went down the same hallway only 1/2 hour later. I'll say this for Chinese workers, they are prompt. They were already sticking it back down. This time, they were using a hot-glue gun.

I suppose that is better than using duct tape, but maybe that's next.

Little Sister is Watching You

I thought I would tell a little story that you all might find amusing. This one happened a few weeks ago, and it combines two facets of the daily life in China experience. First, the "hardware wars", my ongoing quest to find all of the little fasteners and doodads I would like to have to get our apartment set up properly. Second, the constant feeling that you are being stared at and talked about by scores of Chinese people.

I've explained that first issue in detail already, so I'll skip over it and go on to the second. We get watched all the time. Here in SIP (Suzhou Industrial Park) it isn't so bad, because there are a lot of Westerners. However, the deeper you venture into real China, the more intense it gets, and it is often no more than a street away. I've been riding my bike a lot, and whenever I leave the main streets and go into the side neighborhoods, what little Western Civilization there is here disappears instantly. People look at me like I'm the first gringo they've ever seen.

It can get a whole lot worse for others. We were in one local store with an African family in line in front of us, and they were stared at by everyone the entire store all the way to the door. Some friends of ours have a little girl with striking blue eyes, and she gets crowded by women wanting to pick her up. I hear the same kinds of stories from families that are very blond. Garden variety blondeness doesn't seem to attract much attention, but there are several Swedish and Finnish families here, and I can only imagine how much they get stared at (Lars and Ulrika, don't let that discourage you from visiting us).

Local people don't just stare at us, they stare at what we are doing. At the grocery store, they are often fascinated with what we are buying. I still don't understand much they say of course, but I'm learning. They will talk about what we are buying, how much we might be spending, etc. Friends have had incidents in which passers-by go so far as to dig through their shopping carts to see what they have in them.

Back to my story. One of the main hardware items I wanted to find were wall anchors. As I said before, even the Home Depot-type store doesn't have a hardware section. However, I have found that a few items of hardware are scattered throughout the store, placed with other items with which you might need to use them. That is the way I finally found some wall anchors, which were inconspicuously hung on a peg near some shelf brackets. I've since bought several packages, just to keep them on hand.

Chinese shopkeepers and cashiers can be real busybodies, and it is not unheard of for them to arbitrarily decide that you don't actually need to buy a specific something. An extreme example of this happened to a music teacher friend, who failed in an attempt to purchase an accessory for a musical instrument, simply because she couldn't convince the owner that she had one of those instruments at home. I've heard other stories from friends of not being allowed to purchase the last of an item! With such scenarios in mind, I bought my wall anchors only two packages at a time, as I didn't want them to think that I was depriving someone else who might need them for the shelf brackets they were specifically placed next to.

The last time I bought some wall anchors, I happened to also be purchasing some "floating" wall shelves, for which the mountings are invisible once they are installed. I had put the shelves in my cart first. When I picked up my two packages of wall anchors, a store employee happened to be right there. From the moment I touched the packages, it was clear that this small young woman was not at all satisfied with my selection. She really wanted to say something, and she continued to follow me from a distance as I went through the store.

Finally, I passed again by the same spot where I had picked up the anchors, and she made her move. She said something long and complicated that included the word "no", and then she reached into my cart and picked out the anchors and put them back on the peg!

I politely smiled, and I took them off again, saying in English that yes, I did want them. She took them out of the cart and put them on the peg again. This time, she reached into my cart and began to unwrap the shelves. I realized at this point what she was up to. She was trying to show me that the shelves already had anchors included.

I smiled, and took the wall anchors from the peg again. This time I kept them in my hand, which completely flumoxed her. By this time, however, a second, older woman had approached, and the younger woman began to explain the situation to her with a staccato urgency. With the assumption that the older woman was being dragged in because she understood at least some English, I said "I understand, I want to buy these for something different".

The older woman looked at me. The younger woman looked at her. Then, without warning, the older woman reached up and gave the girl a solid "you idiot" slap to back of the head. She said something, and then shuffled away shaking her head and muttering to herself.

The girl gave me a big sheepish grin with a shrug, and then slinked away.

I made it home with my wall anchors.

My kingdom for a threaded doohickey!

I noticed the other day that basically all I have posted about is hunting for food. I don't want to make it sound like I have some obsession but, well it has been an obsession. The sad part is it hasn't been looking for good food so much as looking for any food. We've really been struggling to get a normalized pattern of groceries and meals based on locally available stuff. I've written about western foods mostly for the entertainment value, but we are trying to "go native" to a certain degree, and most of our food has come from regular stores and our local "wet market" (produce).

Of course, it hasn't been just food that we have needed to search for. All the little odds and ends that make up a household have to get found, from school supplies to outlet splitters to laundry soap. Now, finally, our basic routines are starting to feel established. I've been joking that we are moving out of our "hunter-gatherer stage".

On the issue of tools, however, I'm still feeling very Stone Age. China these days is an advanced society, but labor is very specialized. Not a job gets done that you don't have to pay someone else to do, and that is really annoying me when it comes to minor household repairs and such. There is absolutely no do-it-yourself culture of any kind, and therefore, the tools and supplies are completely unavailable. The big grocery stores have a tool section about like what you find at an American grocery store. We went to a store called B&Q, which is a Home Depot-ish type store. It had fixtures and materials (like laminated flooring, stoves, sinks, etc.) but very limited offerings of parts, hardware, or building materials, or tools. Literally, what it has to offer is not much more than one would find in a Walgreens grocery store in the U.S.! No one I have asked so far knows where to buy real tools, either... it really is bizarre.

I'm not just saying any of this on my own authority either. We have met a friend who works for Black and Decker here. He says there is virtually no consumer market for tools in China. Only the professionals have them. I use the term "professional" very loosely. I'm thinking of starting a special blog series titled "Really, Really Bad Caulking Jobs". Several pictures could come from our apartment.

I have a pretty good selection of real tools coming in the stuff we shipped, but they won't do me much good, because I can't find any of the little bits and pieces that you need to ever fix anything. All the screws, brackets, and little hardware doodads, they don't exist! Based on available supplies, I can't even fix basic things like cracked outlet covers or the water stream that runs over the edge of the tub and puddles the bathroom floor. I really, really miss having a standard American hardware store. Not only did it hold lots of useful stuff, but the hardware store was always my sure-fire-no-questions-asked errand. It could always get me out of the house! (Where you going honey? Oh I just need some stuff at the hardware store....) A guy can always find something useful in a hardware store, even he didn't know it existed, and even if it fixes a problem he didn't, until that moment, even know he had.

I will get back to my quest for food later, right now, I wan't you to just go to a regular old ACE hardware store for me, wander up and down the aisles, and take it all in. When any of you come to visit, I'm going to give you a list of things to bring me.