xyt, if you don’t like this kind of thing, don’t come in~
About My Private Residence
It has been more than a year since I moved from the former “Yangroupao Dwelling” into my new home; after going to graduate school I simply stopped applying for dormitory housing, so I can be said to have settled down here. At the very least, before I have children, this will certainly be my permanent residence.
I once wrote a special piece on “Yangroupao Dwelling” and posted many photos, yet after moving into the new place for a year I still never mentioned it on the blog, merely slipping the new address in quietly in “Suixuan Has Been Implemented.”
The reason I didn’t write about it was that however I wrote it, it would inevitably smell a bit like showing off, so I thought I’d better keep a low profile.
To this day quite a few classmates and senior and junior schoolmates have visited my private residence, many of them invited by me. As for others who want to come visit, as long as they are interested in philosophy of technology, philosophy, or in me personally, I am also happy to welcome them. But the problem is that inviting others over to visit is also very easy to be taken as a kind of showing off.
Of course I am not bringing people here to show off. In fact, it’s not that I don’t enjoy showing off: the virtue ethic of “striving for excellence” that I endorse emphasizes honor and encourages “showing off.” If a person has a sense of honor and can take pleasure in displaying his own excellence, that will further impel him to pursue excellence, and that is a good thing. The key is: what should be shown off is oneself. One cannot say that some other person or some other thing unrelated to me is amazing, and then I go and show off for him, as if I too thereby gained glory. One should show off the excellence that belongs to oneself and pursue one’s own honor, rather than wallowing in vanity under false pretenses (glory that has nothing to do with oneself).
Therefore, what I want to show off is always my own stuff—for example my thoughts, my philosophy, and other accomplishments I have obtained through my own efforts and with my own hands. So I am more than willing to speak my own views to others, and on the blog I keep displaying my writing incessantly (what is truly worth showing off here is not the quantity of the articles, nor even their quality, but the systematicity of the whole blog), and all of this can be counted as showing off. As for my private residence, apart from proving that my parents are still fairly well off and quite fond of me, it has nothing whatever to do with any of my own achievements worth praising. So what is there to show off about? It’s not that I don’t want to show off; it’s that there’s nothing to show off—on the contrary, if my family were destitute and bare, perhaps I could at least bring it out to show off indirectly for a moment (though even that would be beside the point): look, my thoughts grew up under such difficult conditions. But now it is the opposite: displaying such superior conditions of mine is simply a shameful thing. Of course, in fact it’s nothing much anyway…
Since it’s all no big deal, I might as well publicly show off a bit on the blog. For the whole of Suixuan can be said to be a self-presentation of mine, and of course it should include all aspects of me. The main thing is that I don’t much like letting people know things about me through indirect channels like gossip and the like; if you want to know about me, you can obtain it directly from me. And since most people are not keen on directly communicating and talking with me, then my blog is at least first-hand information. I am open to anyone who wants to know me or get close to me. Of course, if you have no interest in me, then there is no need at all to read this sort of article; this post is written only for friends who are interested in my life.
Back to the point, let me begin with the origin of this apartment:
Before moving here, I had already lived in “Yangroupao Dwelling” for a year. The living environment was really not very good: the seemingly never-ending “construction… construction…”; the radiators had no heat, ventilation was poor, so much so that I declared I would “rename Yangroupao Dwelling Winter-Cold-Summer-Hot Dwelling.” Personally I could still endure it, but with the previous lease about to expire, I started wondering whether there might be a better option.
But after all, you get what you pay for; around Peking University it was no longer possible to find a room somewhat better for 1100 yuan. Considering that the next year would be the Olympics, and not knowing whether I could find a stable place to live, I thought that rather than searching for an expensive temporary place and moving around repeatedly, I might as well simply buy an apartment outright!
I was the one who first proposed this idea. At that time (May 2007) the stock market was at its peak, and I knew that my parents’ financial strength was sufficient to cash out a little less than half of their shares and buy an apartment in Beijing without damaging their vitality (buying a good apartment in Shanghai would be comparatively difficult). I also knew that however many times stocks may rise, if you never realize the gain in cash, you can never say you have made money. (This year’s market has demonstrated this merciless truth.) Real estate, by contrast, no matter how badly it may plunge, can at least guarantee its “use value.” Turning the money snatched from the stock market into real estate, which can both preserve value and be practically useful, was of course the wise choice. As it happened, by the very end of the month, just before the “May Thirtieth Massacre,” the cash-out was completed.
It was hard to find listings in Zhongguancun and the surrounding area. The only new development left was “Zhongwan International,” an off-plan property at the end of 2008, while second-hand listings were difficult to come by. In the earliest period we found a place near Lin University, a small unit of a little over sixty square meters. It would have suited me perfectly to live in, but the location was really a bit remote. It was said to take nearly half an hour by bike to Wudaokou, and the surrounding living facilities and transportation environment could only be described as average. The price seemed to be above 11,000 yuan per square meter. We also found a few similar locations and unit types, and the prices were all around 12,000. At the time I thought, well, let’s just treat it as getting more bike-riding exercise, since these kinds of apartments are not very easy to find anyway.
If that seller hadn’t delayed our meeting several times because of private matters, perhaps this apartment would already have been bought. But then my mother came to Beijing to replace my father in the search for listings, and the best luck combination burst forth again—several of the apartments our family owns were initiated by me, but taken by my mother. Once my mother got into action, she happened to get in touch with a piece of agency information, and then under the agent’s guidance she casually looked at an off-plan apartment that had not originally been on the list (this apartment was not entrusted to this agency; rather, the agency had seen the sale information online and taken it into its own listing pool). As soon as my mother saw it, she was very taken with it, saying it looked so big and spacious—in fact, the sense this apartment gives when seen is far, far smaller than what its building area would suggest. My mother’s eye is unreliable, but that is precisely where her luck lies!
My mother told me about the situation and asked me to go see the apartment. At the time I was lying in bed with a fit of laziness, and said there was no need for me to go, just buy it! Of course, it wasn’t really that I was lazy to that extent, but that when I heard the address of this place, I knew there was no need to even look at it!—Zhichun Tower. The “heartland” of Zhongguancun, opposite the Haidian Theater and Haidian Hospital, at the intersection of the two soon-to-be-completed subway lines, right next to Carrefour and Zhongguancun Shopping Plaza, and within a twenty-minute bike ride north to Peking University and Tsinghua, and south to Renmin University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Minzu University, the National Library…
Compared with the 11,000 and 13,000 yuan apartments we had seen before, this one was only a little over 10,000, and at a location where I simply could not imagine where anything better could possibly be. What was there to consider?
Of course, being cheap did not mean getting it for free. The reason the price was so low was that the living cost of this apartment was too high. Because this is a Grade-A office building with mixed commercial and residential use, the property management fee is shockingly high (6.5 yuan), and added to that are the even more shocking charges for central air conditioning. The fixed monthly outlay for this apartment already exceeded what I had originally spent on rent. But since there was no mortgage, and since it was bought for self-occupation, this apartment was still quite cost-effective—think about it: if we add up more than ten years’ worth of property management and air-conditioning fees into the purchase price, it is still cheaper than those apartments in those messy locations. According to one neighboring household, their family looked at more than eighty apartments in Beijing, and after comparing them back and forth, this one was still the best, whereas we only looked at two or three before finding it, so it can be counted as fate. Later, when the deal was struck, we actually had the chance to shake off the agency (after all, the seller had not originally entrusted them), but we still paid them several ten-thousand yuan in commission, because after all, it was they who made this fate happen.
Only my name is written on the property certificate, and only my name appears on it, so it can truly and properly be counted as my private residence. Of course, there is basically no chance that I will fall out with my parents, so this gift is mainly just a formality. In any case, I will have full authority to choose the use of this apartment, for example renting it out, registering a company, giving it away, and so on.
This address can be used to register a company (probably it can also enjoy Zhongguancun’s preferential policies, though I’m not sure). Addresses with “Tower” in the name are basically not places for “people” to “live,” but places for companies to do office work. The entire A Block of Zhichun Tower is a business building; the first floor is “Zhichun Electronics City.” Although it no longer has much fame in today’s Zhongguancun, it is still an old-timer from the same era as Hailong, Silicon Valley, Pacific, and other established electronics markets, and it is still a genuine “electronics city” to this day—mainly selling electronic components, rather than computers and digital products… Block B is behind Block A and is still mainly for business offices, with a few residences scattered among them.
The 6.5 yuan property fee is not for nothing. Security guards are on duty at the entrance of the building 24 hours a day, water and electricity repairs are available on call within 10 minutes, and there is dedicated hourly cleaning and tidying service (8 yuan per hour, though I haven’t used it yet). Bicycles can be parked in the underground garage (5 yuan per month).
The public area of the building is enormous, so that after the common area is deducted from the nearly 94 square meters of building area, the usable area is actually less than 70. Add to that the fact that both the kitchen/bathroom and the balcony are quite large, and the two rooms end up looking far less than what one would expect from “94 square meters.”
Although it is a second-hand apartment, we renovated almost every part of it except the flooring.
When moving in, we discovered a major defect: that is, there is often a persistent and intolerable low-frequency noise in the house (buzzzzz~~), suspected to be caused by resonance between the central air-conditioning pipes or something else and the walls. This was not because the original owner had deliberately concealed it when selling the apartment, but because she had simply never noticed it. Perhaps I am especially sensitive to low-frequency noise. And this noise often doesn’t start until after 12 or 1 at night, so it mainly has a significant impact on someone like me whose schedule is set to the Western Hemisphere… In short, this problem urgently needed to be solved. So we found a company specializing in soundproof renovation (“Shengxuan (Acoustics) Decoration Co., Ltd.”) to carry out the modification—this company was utterly disgusting. Not only did they endlessly delay the schedule and have workers whose professional competence was extremely poor, but the boss’s attitude was also extremely bad. Right up to the end, when we urged the boss to come quickly and settle the bill, that busy man broke his word again and again: in the morning he said he would come in the afternoon, in the afternoon he said he would come tomorrow, as if everyone else had nothing to do but wait for him every day. In the end I really couldn’t stand it anymore and snapped at him a bit, and then he started acting like a hooligan, bragging about how much influence he had in Beijing and saying things like, “If you want to stiff me, I’ll get people to come to your house and keep you company and make trouble.” I thought to myself, I’m the one hoping to settle the bill with you as soon as possible—how did I end up being the deadbeat? In the final reconciliation we accidentally miscalculated an item and ended up paying a full 2,000 yuan too much. A few days later when we contacted him, he admitted the calculation was wrong, but getting it back from him was a long shot: today the accountant isn’t in, tomorrow the company has an issue, and in the end, of course, he just plays dumb and reneges…
The soundproofing method was to nail light-gauge steel keels onto the walls of the entire bedroom, then lay down a layer of soundproof mat and a layer of acoustic cotton over them, then stick another layer of gypsum board on the outside, and finally paint the gypsum board. As for the floor, it was pried up, laid with soundproof felt and acoustic cotton, then sealed back up with cement, and the floor was relaid. This is roughly equivalent to building another room inside the original room, a room several centimeters narrower than the original, and it should be able to block the wall-resonance noise. The actual effect is not perfect; the resonance sound can still occasionally be heard, and in quiet moments one can even hear the elevator running, but of course it is not completely ineffective either. At least the resonance noise no longer interferes with normal reading and sleep. As for the soundproof door that had originally been promised as a gift, it had absolutely no soundproofing effect at all (at most it was about the same as an ordinary wooden door), and its material was even worse than the worst wooden door I had seen in the furniture market…
Sigh, better talk about something happier: the biggest highlight of the whole renovation was unquestionably that set of “bookshelves” (http://node0.foto.ycstatic.com/200805/23/e/26433246.jpg). This is still my mother’s doing. For by my experience, even if I came face to face with this thing in a furniture market, I would never have thought it could be used as a bookshelf. But my mother had once worked in her company’s archive room, so she knew what it was. And I don’t know how she managed to spot it in some corner of a furniture store by winding and twisting around so many turns (when I later went there specially, I spent quite a while looking for it).
This “bookshelf” is formally called a “dense filing cabinet,” and is generally used as an archive cabinet. Six sets of shelves roll on casters, and each time they can create one aisle. Each set of shelves is 2.2 meters high and 2.4 meters wide (my memory may be off), and books can be placed on both the front and back sides. Each shelf has seven tiers top to bottom, and altogether it can hold at least 6,000 volumes, and it can be locked shut as a whole. In short, splendid, excellent, mighty!
In this bookshelf system there are already about less than four thousand volumes, most of them purchased during my undergraduate years. Classification is a headache. Let me give a brief introduction. The six cabinets are counted from right to left, front and back. The two outermost shelves have cabinet doors, and there are no books in them for the moment; they mainly contain some materials and odds and ends. The two sides of the first aisle are what one might call the display shelves—these hold all the good series and sets. On the right are things like The Chinese Translated Masterpieces, Century Humanities, the black-leather series from Shanghai Translation Publishing House, and the Humanities series from Yilin Press, and so on, though of course only a small part of each. On the left are mainly philosophy of technology and popular science series, including the Peking University philosophy of technology series, the Cambridge Studies in the History of Science, Philosopher’s Stone, First Push, New Vision, Golden Fleece, Green Humanities, San Si Science, Fire Thief, and so on. It can be said that I have most of the philosophy of technology and popular science translation series worth reading on the market, though not very complete either (the best books in them should all be there). After all, I’m not really buying books in order to collect books. The two sides of the second aisle are books on philosophy of technology, history of science, and popular science, of course excluding those set-series mentioned above. On the right are mainly more academic philosophy of technology and the like; an entire row of books on environmental ethics is also placed at the bottom. On the left are popular science books: the large top compartment holds some oversized books, the first row below is miscellaneous general introductions, the second row mathematics and computational science, the third row physics, the fourth row biology and chemistry, and so on; the fifth row holds books by domestic science-and-culture writers and various books related to pseudoscience, while the bottom row generally holds some books that are hard to classify or that I don’t care much about. The third aisle is mainly philosophy. On the right, the left side of the middle section is, in order, Plato (and ancient Greece-related books), Kant (and Enlightenment-related books), and Wittgenstein and Heidegger’s primary and secondary works (all Chinese translations). On the right side are a shelf of popular philosophy books, plus miscellaneous works, Anglo-American philosophy, Continental philosophy, and so on. On the left side are, in order, a row of miscellaneous works, a row on modernity and postmodernity, a row on ethics and applied ethics, a row on political philosophy and philosophy of law, and so on. The fourth aisle is religion and the social sciences. On the right are mainly religious studies (including one shelf of science-and-religion-related books), with some old miscellaneous social-science books and books related to intellectuals interspersed among them. On the left are, in order, psychology and education, sociology and anthropology, economics and history, and other miscellaneous categories. The final fifth row is the most miscellaneous of all, including books related to eating, drinking, and entertainment (though basically they are still academic books), an entire section related to sex (of course also academic books), and various “History of XX” titles; the left side holds a very small number of novels (one shelf of which is science fiction and technology-related fiction), as well as a small section for books I bought twice. Visitors who like anything can take a few volumes away.
After introducing the bookshelf, let’s look at this desk as well (it can be seen in that photo above too). I remember that when I bought this desk, it was called an “irregular-shaped Bantai,” but in fact it is just an irregularly shaped “boss’s desk.” Square and proper desks are not to my taste; I always prefer those things that do not follow any rigid pattern. Whether they are beautiful or not is secondary; personality comes first~
However, even with such a proper boss’s desk and boss’s chair, I almost never sit there in daily life. My life is basically spent on the bed.
The inner room has a six-foot-wide bed (that is, 1.8 meters wide and 2 meters long), and instead of a Simmons or other soft mattress, it uses some kind of rattan or something—anyway, a relatively hard pad. Apart from habit, it also ensures that life on the bed can actually unfold…
Unfortunately, my bed does not currently have a woman cohabiting with me; half the bed is occupied by a pile of books and a small platform. Although there is enough room on the bookshelf for books, when sleeping it still feels more reassuring to have books by my side. (But note carefully: it is because there is no woman that the books occupy half the bed; it is not because the books occupy half the bed that there is no woman. That causal relation must not be reversed.)
What is called the platform was originally used, when lying down, to span over my body and place the keyboard on; now, because I use a higher leisure chair, this platform has been turned sideways and is used to hold the lamp, books, and mouse. The so-called leisure chair is, as the name suggests, a leisure chair, similar to a beach chair, and can be sat on, reclined in, and folded up. When sleeping, I fold it up and place it on the other half of the bed; during the day I set it up on the left side.
Opposite the bed is a 47-inch LCD TV, but I rarely spend time watching television; this thing is mainly used as a computer monitor. Recently I bought a desktop computer, and didn’t bother to get a monitor at all—I just connected it directly to the TV. As you can imagine, this monitor is simply bliss, especially when watching animation on it—it is truly splendid!
Both the keyboard and mouse are wireless, and the mouse is placed on the platform to my right hand side. When not in use, the keyboard is just casually put aside; when typing, sometimes I put it on my lap, and sometimes I use another, higher adjustable platform. When eating in bed (often…), I also use that platform, and when writing papers I use that platform to support books, while the keyboard still remains on my lap.
In this way, if I don’t go out, life at home is almost entirely on the bed. Although the current chair is quite comfortable, that is of course not good for physical health. Fortunately, a bicycle exercise machine has been placed by the bed, so when I want to work out I can also do so not far from the bed… Generally speaking, I exercise while watching animation, otherwise it would be too boring.
In the bedroom there is still a patch of empty space, where in the future one could put a small piano, or another bookshelf, or else set up a little bed.
The inner room and the outer room each have an enclosed balcony. The balcony in the outer room is larger; in the middle one can hang clothes, while both sides are for the time being piled with miscellaneous odds and ends. On the inner balcony are two rattan chairs and a rattan hanging basket. The curtains in the inner room are special blackout curtains, said to block out more than 90 percent of the light, and in practice they do indeed work rather well. The curtains in the outer room, meanwhile, were chosen in the style of the wallpaper of “A Zhu Dan,” which felt quite familiar to me (I used to go there often to pull all-nighters writing papers), with the words “A Scholarly Family” printed on them.
In the outer room, the space between the entrance corridor and the bathroom door is just right for a small sofa. This sofa is really not much to look at, but practicality comes first. In daily use it can seat two guests, and it can also be unfolded into a small bed.
The bathroom was completely renovated. At my mother’s strong recommendation, the toilet was bought as a “water-washing for PP” model, although I actually don’t use it much; the bathroom itself is even more upscale—a one-piece design combining a whirlpool bathtub + shower stall + sauna steam. Basically, one could open a private bathhouse oneself. Only recently did I begin trying out the sauna (I’ve always been lazy about trying new technologies…), and it actually does feel pretty good.
The environment outside the window is terrible (in a location like this, one can’t ask for much…), with a row of snack shops downstairs, the clamor of boiler noise and human voices. Fortunately, if the two layers of double-glazed windows are closed, then one can almost hear no sound at all. A little farther back behind the snack shops is an elementary school (the High School Affiliated to Renmin University and the High School Affiliated to Peking University are also nearby), and a pharmacy and convenience store are right next door. Go a few more steps south and there is a vegetable market; because of my schedule, I have never gone to catch the morning market, and my groceries are all bought at Carrefour or Sufa.
After going out, it is less than fifty meters to the subway entrance (Lines 4 and 10). Cross the street a bit farther north and there are Haidian Theater and Haidian Hospital; farther north still are Xinzhongguancun, Carrefour, and Zhongguancun Shopping Plaza, and after that come Dinghao, Hailong, and other computer markets, and then you arrive at Peking University. Going south not far at all brings you to the famous Shuang’an Market and Contemporary Mall, while Renmin University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Minzu University of China, and even the National Library of China are all within biking distance. This location is truly one where one can summon wind and rain at will, with everything one could want, and there is no danger of boasting too much about it—of course this is something worth boasting about, because although it was mainly a matter of chance, this location really was one that I “chose” for myself.
Let this xyt end here then…
September 25, 2008
Latest Comments
- physis
2008-09-25 11:05:30 Anonymous 220.176.147.94
I came in with the mindset of reading gossip… tsk tsk
- smw
2008-09-26 22:31:39 Anonymous 125.46.31.137
Using stock-market money to buy a house—now that trick is truly subarashii ^^
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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