Meet my Chinese flatmates: Open and Fish

Out of all the many headaches that were involved in house-hunting, finding an awesome flatmate was not one of them. I only had two requirements: 1. She/He should be Chinese. 2. They should be chill.

As simple as those two demands are I didn’t have my hopes up. It’s not to say that all Chinese people are not chill, but it is a more conservative society. People party and drink and go backpacking or whatever wildness much less here. They’re always saying to me, “You Westerners are so much more open than us,” which I assume is their polite way of calling me a flagrant, alcoholic slutbag who lacks any shred of decency.

The other issue is that my digs aren’t so glamorous. Or they’re only glamorous in a bohemian sort of way. I live in Beijing’s hutongs which are beautiful and full of character but are smelly.

Perhaps I don’t give the Chinese enough credit though, because I very quickly found a great Chinese flatmate through a friend. Actually his girlfriend rocked up to check the place out, a very cute stylish 25-year-old in high heeled boots and a big handbag. She took less than two minutes to look at the place and said I seemed nice, so could she take it? And said it would be her boyfriend moving in but that she’d be there a few days a week too. Oh and one other thing, hope it isn’t a problem that they tended to stay out very late on the weekends.

I told her it definitely wasn’t a problem because that was my habit too, to which she laughed and said, “really?”

It was a fine sign of things to come, frankly, because I really like both of them.

The guy turned out to be a 30-year-old computer programmer from Guangdong, with a hipstery haircut and a collection of cool, Timberland shoes from Taobao. His English name is Open, deigned to him by his English teacher because he always sat in class slack-jawed. Her nickname is 鱼 (Fish) and she used to work in events, but one day she came home and told me that she’d quit her job. Didn’t even give them notice, just stopped turning up to work.

Fish is chatty and vivacious, and perpetually surprising me. One day she came home sporting a tattoo of her beloved pet cat, it’s huge fluffy face wrapped around her tiny left arm. But one week later she came back and had an even bigger rose tattoo covered over it because she decided that she didn’t like the idea of the cat anyone once they started putting in the colours.

One unsurprising thing that the couple do is - as promised - go out late on the weekends. It is completely without exception that they will come back around dawn after partying on Fridays and Saturdays and sleep most of the following days. Last weekend, however, Fish was away for the weekend on a (appropriately enough) fishing trip with her family so I took Open out to a party with me. He was a bit nervous at the prospect of going to a “foreigner’s party”, but happily discovered there were a handful of Cantonese speakers present (Mainland Chinese and Overseas Chinese).

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have more entertaining tales of this awesome pair to come.