As eggshell apartments burst into flames, a video of a female tenant with a knife confronting a landlord who forcibly repossessed her apartment has hit the news. The video was shot in September 2020, and the protagonist, Aya, is not an eggshell tenant, but her experience is almost a preview of the eggshell incident. Landlords and tenants who are isolated by agents form a closed loop of mutual harm.
I. Confrontation
At the end of November last year, I rented an apartment in Hangzhou from Nestle Guest. The landlord was not in Hangzhou and entrusted the house to the agency Nest Guest. I rented it for a year from Nest Guest for 3,300 yuan per month, paying the rent once every six months.
Before signing the contract, I asked the agency how often I would pay the rent to the landlord. If I paid semi-annually as a tenant, but the agency only paid the landlord 1 month’s rent at a time, I would give up renting the apartment. The agent repeatedly assured me that they pay the landlord quarterly. I didn’t think it would be a big problem, so I didn’t look any further.
I didn’t expect the landlord to come to my door when the nesters ran away. The day the video was taken, the landlord came to the house three times.
At 10 a.m., I heard a sharp knock at the door. Open the door and found the landlord with her husband and another man and a woman two relatives. The four people entered the door and immediately dismantled various appliances in the house. Refrigerator, induction cooker, while demolition, the owner said that she bought everything in this house, to take away.
In order to stop the situation, I repeatedly told them: I am still in the lease period, I have the right to use these things, the landlord has no right to take away.
It didn’t work, so I called the police.
The police came, followed by someone from the property. The police asked them to return the items to their original location, leave the house and go to the police station with me to negotiate, and the landlord got louder and louder. At this point, the landlord made sure to keep one of the relatives in the house, saying that he would also stay in the house with me after the negotiation. It felt like he wanted to disgust me and force me to move out on my own when I couldn’t take it anymore. I had no choice, so I asked the police to take them away. Finally, the police forced them and their group to leave the apartment.
When we arrived at the police station, the officers came up and advised the landlord not to bother me, telling them that the landlord had no right to evict the tenant in this situation. Another landlord was there to call the police, and even he advised the landlord: you can’t do that, it’s illegal. As a result, my landlord and he got into a fight.
The landlord and his wife said, “Never mind the law, the house is theirs and they must take it back. Finding it impossible to persuade them, the police could only let them go back first and, at the same time, cautioned them not to continue to go up to the house to make trouble.
The officer’s advice to the owner of the house made me think that I could be quiet for at least one day. In my depression, I let myself cry at home.
Suddenly, I heard someone at the door moving the lock and kept fiddling with it, and I knew it must be the landlord and his men. I asked my friends who were accompanying me to keep quiet, hoping that they would just leave when they thought no one was in the house. When they heard that no one was there, they didn’t stop, but continued to fiddle with the lock.
The fire came up. I ran to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and rushed to the door to threaten them not to come in – at first I grabbed a kitchen knife, but I thought better of it and swapped it for a steak sawing knife and rushed out. The head of the knife is round and can’t cut or stab people. Later, some articles on the Internet rendered me as wanting to cut people with a knife, but in fact I really didn’t want to cut people, just to force them away.
When I came out with a knife, the landlord and his wife rushed in together. The male landlord even rushed up to me and held his chest against the knife, yelling at me, “You stab me! You stab me now! “Maybe he also saw that the knife could not hurt anyone at all. I felt my hand being bent over very hard, and my hand hurt. I remember standing in the corner the whole time, not taking a step forward, while saying something threatening to try to scare them away.
I was desperate. I even thought about dying in the house right in front of them. I saw the news the other day and learned that a tenant had committed suicide by jumping from an eggshell apartment. I can totally understand him. A foreigner who rents an apartment is isolated and helpless. A normal person, no matter how big or small the loss is, will be in a bad mood if he suffers a loss. In addition, he may have negotiated and the landlord has come to make trouble, he also knows that the money will not be returned. On the other hand, that house is really someone else’s, the tenant seems to have no way back.
In the confusion, the landlady began to record video, shouted at me, while I stabbed her husband to death, while I told me to kill myself, and said a lot of nasty things, saying what people like me, can not afford to buy a house for life, and similar to my boyfriend and I later married will also divorce and other disgusting words. After that, she began to yell again, let me stab people, threatening me to post the video to the Internet.
The situation got out of hand and we called the police again. We were taken to the police station again to negotiate, and they still insisted that we move out within three days. To no avail, they came back at night and made another scene.
My rent was due on November 25, and the last time we went to the police station, the landlord still insisted that we move out within 10 days, and called in relatives to help her. Then the police stepped in and offered a grace period until October 31. One of the landlord’s relatives saw that I was hurt and helped the police convince them both to accept the deadline, and the relative ended up replacing the broken locks out of his own pocket.
II. Thunderstorm
Before the confrontation occurred, the landlord had already crossed over to the agent and contacted me to express their concerns.
The earliest was in May this year, when I was not at home, the landlord slipped a note with contact information through the door. After adding WeChat, the landlord told me to contact her with any questions and didn’t talk much more. I checked the internet and found out that there were some problems with some houses in the nesters’ field.
At that time, I was ready to pay the second half of the rent. I advised the landlord that if I was worried about any problems, we would go to the agent’s side together to cancel the contract. She insisted that she didn’t care about this and would come to evict and repossess the house as long as the rent was not received 3 days late. I contacted the agent and was told that I could not unilaterally cancel the lease and was certain that my landlord would not come forward to cancel the lease because the landlord would have one month’s rent deducted if she proposed to cancel the lease.
I am in the e-commerce business, and I have a lot of goods in my house, and it is not convenient to move. After I contacted my landlord, I felt that I could discuss things together and paid the rent for the second six months after the agent urged me to do so. I sent a screenshot of the payment to the landlord, telling her that the money had been handed over to the agent and to keep an eye out for the money. The landlord replied to me: I don’t care about that. If I don’t collect the money in three days, I will take back the house.
I don’t think she is making sense. The agent is the one who signed the contract with her, but when something goes wrong, she is pinching me to solve it. The whole logic is messed up.
This year, I didn’t return to Hangzhou for a month due to the epidemic, so I applied for a month’s rent refund, but was refused. The landlord later told me that the agent started to default on her rent at that time, and told her that the agent was under a lot of pressure because the tenant didn’t pay. But I had clearly paid the rent six months in advance.
At the end of August, I met the owner of the house for the first time. At 7:00 a.m. that morning, the landlady came knocking on the door with her daughter and some male relatives and told me to report the incident right away. The landlords had heard from someone that Nestlé had exploded. I had just woken up and told them to go to the police first, and I would go in the afternoon. The landlord changed her mind and said that she couldn’t get her money back anyway, and that if I didn’t pay her back, she would have to go. I sent her a screenshot of the rent payment, but the landlord still insisted that we pay the full rent at the agent’s rate before she would let us stay on. It was then that I realized that the agent’s rent to the landlord was a full $500 higher than the rent I was paying to the agent.
I had already paid six months’ rent, so how could I possibly pay the landlord at the higher rate again? After I reported the case, I joined some rights groups built by Hangzhou nesters’ tenants. At that time, many landlords in Hangzhou were evicting people. Tenants have no choice but to organize together to learn various laws. Everyone in the group knew one thing: in legal terms, we tenants can’t be evicted, because the lease is bigger than the sale. But all the landlords who evicted people selectively ignored this law.
But my landlord only recognized one – the house was hers, and if she didn’t get paid, she had to evict. When I returned, she sent me a document saying that I was illegally occupying her house and had to move out within three days.
When the nest guest thunderstorm, in our neighborhood, many landlords will exhaust all sorts of ways to force out the tenant: cut off water and electricity, or even to the tenant’s home to remove the door, some properties will even help the landlord cut off water and electricity. There are also landlords with blankets to sleep in front of the tenant, and screamed: “I do not have to work, I will sleep here every day. “To later, the landlords began to take video exposure to defend their rights.
Reasonable words, it is the agent did not pay, then expose the agent, why should expose the tenant, the tenant did not default on rent. Landlords don’t want to get around the agent, they just want to get the tenant in trouble. The scary thing is that these methods really work, and many tenants end up being disgusted away. Landlords send these messages to landlord groups, bragging that they got the tenant out, the house back, and teaching each other what tactics they used to replicate the success of others.
Even more outrageous, after getting the house back, one landlord said he would continue to rent the house to these types of agents because they pay more money and just disgust the tenant away when something goes wrong.
In a panic, I asked my boyfriend to come and live with me for a while.
Third, on the hot search
The video of the confrontation with a knife spread more wildly, it was around November 23rd of this year. I saw that hot search, the title said eggshells, so I did not click in to see – I had already been unlucky because of this kind of thing, do not want to review again.
By chance, I swiped to a public website posting a collection of news for the week, clicked on it and found a screenshot of a video with me in it, and realized that I was the one who was the subject of the hot search.
I approached the landlord and told her that the incident had gone too far and that I would sue her. Instead, the landlord said that the video had caused her distress and that I should just go to the police and delete it myself. Originally, when she posted the video, she wanted to get people on the Internet to scold me, but she didn’t expect that many people were scolding her. From the beginning to the end of the video, she did not show her face, compared to me, she has nothing to be anxious about.
In fact, every time they came to make a scene that day, I took videos, but I never posted them publicly, and some of them were simply deleted. Not because I think they did not do wrong, and then the police came, there are recordings to save the evidence, I can protect themselves from being wronged on it.
The exchange of information between rights tenants, I send in the group and the landlord’s chat log, but also the landlord’s avatar and name cut off. I don’t disclose it because I think everyone is a victim. Although I think the landlord has gone too far, I can understand how the landlord feels when he doesn’t receive the money. One person has a circle, and after I leak in my circle, it will be transferred to other people’s circles and spread infinitely. I don’t want to cause secondary harm to others, and I don’t think that’s right.
Public opinion sympathizes with me. But it still scares me that the video was sent out without any mosaic.
People don’t know what happened before I pulled out the knife. They don’t know that the landlord forced me to go to the agent, they don’t know that I was blocked from the lock, they don’t know that I had to block the strangers who had to enter my room and sleep in my house. They didn’t know that when I pulled out my knife, I was trying to scare off the very things that were driving me mentally toward a breakdown, step by step.
People just see my face and know that I pulled out a knife when the conflict erupted. I was afraid of being identified as a troublemaker because of it. Will I be rejected for that later when I go to rent an apartment or get a job? All of this scares me.
After I knew my video was on the hot seat, I posted a few messages on my private Twitter account. Comments came in, accusing me of staying in my landlord’s house, saying I didn’t go to an agent to fix it, accusing me of bullying the weak. They said that the landlord’s interests were also interests.
I would like to say that I am not the kind of brutal tenant they think, who stays in the house because they want their rent back. I couldn’t get my deposit back, but I knew I should have gone to the agent to get that money back. According to the contract, I could stay until November, but in the end, we each took a step back and I agreed to stay until the end of October and move out. When I left, I cleaned their room and put away all the trash.
Later, I found a new house near my original place. I was also referred through an agent, I have no animosity towards agents, not everyone is bad. I paid the agent’s fee in one lump sum, signed the contract directly with the landlord, and the rent was paid directly to the landlord. I’m extra cautious about anything contractual now. I changed jobs during that time, and when I signed the contract, I offended the HR manager because of that. But I think it’s good to be cautious, rather than not get that job, but also to write clearly.
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