“What if my landlord is coming to change the locks,” The landlord asked me to settle the rest of the rent, but I did it with my eggshells”, tenants shared their situation and countermeasures in the Eggshells Apartment Rights Protection Group. However, solutions are hard to come by, and in the end, they can only reassure themselves, “Let’s live and hope the landlord won’t come to us again.
The butterfly effect caused by the suspected capital chain breakage of Eggshells Apartments is still ongoing. The tenants who have signed contracts with Eggshells, such as Zuru and My Love Home, are in a difficult situation. Most of them signed one-year rental contracts and took out rental loans with third-party financial institutions. Now, when the landlord wants to repossess the apartment, the tenants will not only have to repay the monthly loan, but also face the dilemma of having no apartment to live in once they are evicted.
The year 2020 is already difficult, and the lack of a place to live adds to the fatigue. They are like plastic bags in the wind, waiting and drifting in their rented homes before the event is settled.
And this is only the tip of the story that happened in the rental house. In the hidden corners of the rental, there are traces of growth and sorrows of adults. If renting an apartment is the first beating a young person encounters when entering society, then it is only on the first day of living in a rented apartment that one realizes that the beating is far from over.
In this issue of Bistro, seven young people tell us about their lives in rental housing. Some of them had to move 15 times in three years and were in a car accident on the way; some were sick and had to lie alone in the rental for three days and could only drink a few sips of cold water when they were hungry; some were continuously harassed by their roommates and had to move out temporarily; some were kicked in by their landlords, robbed of their keys and had their rental contracts torn up as soon as they moved in; some wanted to change their monotonous rental life and were almost cheated into a pyramid scheme; some wanted to wait until they settled down and stocked up on food for themselves; some wanted to get rid of their money and buy a house; and some wanted to get rid of their money and buy a house. A complete set of Agatha, but the high cost of housing has brought her back to reality; others have all their belongings in a suitcase, ready to leave Beijing at any moment ……
If you want to know how a young person grows up, you can’t miss their story of what happens in a rented apartment.
Continuous Harassment by Roommates, Reported to Police Before Moving Out
Eventide is a 27 year old Internet professional
As soon as I graduated, I started renting and working away from home, and in the past five years I’ve moved between two cities and four or five places. The cost of rent went up steadily, and the roommates I met were more than a little strange, but only when I returned home for New Year’s did I feel like I was really home.
I never believed in the chicken soup of “renting a house, living on your own, and having your own home when you close the door”, but as long as you share a room, everything reminds you that your life is rented and not under your control.
I once experienced continuous harassment in a rental house. The agent showed me a few rooms and was not satisfied with any of them, but finally he told me that there were two rooms available in my own place, so I would like to show you. I felt that the room was large with a balcony, so I stayed. In the end, within a week of moving in, the living room was partitioned off and a couple moved in. The living room had a balcony that was connected to my other door, and I strongly requested a partition, but the agent kept dragging his feet, saying that the owners did not agree, and I had to put a chair behind the door every night in order to sleep comfortably.
The couple usually seemed fine, but the owner kept coming up to me from time to time, and I didn’t care. I didn’t pay any attention to them until one time when they had a big fight and things fell all over the floor, and when it sounded like the woman was leaving with her suitcase, the man started knocking on my door. When the agent didn’t come back, I was so scared that I called my friend. The good news is that they moved out shortly afterwards.
It wasn’t long before a single man moved in, and that was the beginning of the nightmare. This man had a temper that would explode. He would yell at anyone who left the bathroom light on, and he would walk around in his underwear, as long as he wasn’t embarrassed, and the only people who were embarrassed were me and the agent. What’s worse, after adding my WeChat to the tenant group, he began to verbally harass me.
The harassment was countless. I usually work late at night, and one time I went to take a shower and came back, and as soon as I closed the door to my room, I received a message: “Miss, you’re still up so late, are you lonely? I was so scared that I immediately locked the door. I was fixing my hat in front of the mirror in the living room before I left the house, and he just looked at me with the door open and said, “Do you want to go out and seduce someone by dressing up like that?
One day at 4:00 a.m., I received a voice call from him, and after hanging up three or four times, he sent me a message saying that he was drunk and didn’t have his keys and needed me to go downstairs to pick him up. I chose to turn my phone off, and the next day at first light I chose to return the lease.
When I returned the rental, I showed the information to the agent, hoping to return the deposit, after all, it was due to force majeure factors to return the rental, but the agent said, this is a private matter between the two of you, he is still your WeChat friend, who knows what relationship you two are. I couldn’t stand it any longer and reported the partition directly when I moved out, and took screenshots of all the chats to the police.
I have moved 15 times in 3 years of renting, and one time I was hit by a dump truck!
The newest member of the team is a 27 year old girl who is in the middle of her career.
After graduation, I have worked in Shenzhen, Chongqing, Chengdu, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, and have moved at least 16 times and 15 times since I started renting in November 2017. I’ve lived in the worst slums, and I’ve also lived in a friend’s senior bachelor apartment with a monthly rent of 5,000 yuan, and I’ve been moving and on the road all the time.
At first, I chose to share a room with a friend because it was expensive and lonely, and I had no one to take care of me. I had just arrived in Chengdu and was temporarily living with my elementary school friend, Lao Zhang, who was a big fat guy. He was a big fat guy, and we shared a bed. After a month of living there, he suddenly told me one night that his girlfriend was coming. I moved out on my own.
Then I shared the master bedroom with my friend Ah Jun from home, and Ah Jun had to go back to his hometown to work when Dianping and Meituan merged, and my department at Dianping was disbanded. Not only did I have no place to stay, but I also lost my job. My junior high school classmate Ah Jiang knew my situation and gave me the balcony of his rental house. I thanked him very much, but after a few months of living there, he suddenly didn’t invite me to join him at the New Year’s Eve dinner at the end of the year. His sister came that day, and there was no room for me, so I had to move out again. Finally, my best friend, Lao Huang, invited me to rent a room in his neighborhood.
This was the first time I rented a room by myself, and on moving day, Lao Huang picked me up in his car. It was raining heavily in Chengdu, and the navigation took us the wrong way to a development zone. It was a long line of large dirt trucks all around us, and we had a small car in the middle of it, walking in step with them.
At a traffic light, a dirt truck didn’t see us next to it, turned green, and started at the same time as us. All I could see was a big black wheel approaching the driver’s seat, and then I heard the sound of the door being squeezed and clanged, and the window glass being ground out with a violent click and clack. My friend and I didn’t have time to react, let alone unbuckle our seat belts and jump out of the car. Fortunately, the driver of the truck hit the brake just in time, and we were able to save our lives.
I got out of the car and took three deep breaths, paused for three seconds, and rushed in front of the dirt truck and wanted to open my mouth to curse. We wanted to call the police, but they wouldn’t let us, because the trucks were not allowed on the road during the day, and the entire fleet would be impounded and fined.
We immediately called the police, the police car has not yet arrived, they are gone. I’m still shaking when I talk about this experience. After arriving at our new home that day, it was already two o’clock in the evening when we finished cleaning up. I didn’t think much of it, but I slept well until dawn.
I went to Shanghai and now I’m in Guangzhou, living in a place provided by my company. Sometimes I miss Old Zhang’s braised pork, Ah Jun’s snow beans and braised pork, Ah Jie’s minced fish head, Old Huang’s boiled rabbit, and the Diao brothers’ bacon in Chongqing.
Looking back on the experience of renting an apartment, I see a microcosm of my own growth, and there is no shame in sharing it. People who work hard in life deserve to be respected, and I just want to say, it’s good to be alive.
It’s a dilemma whether to live in the company conference room or the big house at home.
The first time I saw this, I thought it was a good idea.
After graduating from university, I found a job in a bank in Guangzhou. It was ten years ago, and I didn’t have much money right after graduation, so I just rented a single room for a few hundred dollars a month. The room was very simple and small, so small that the bed was right next to the door, and the door could only be opened fully. It rained a lot in Guangzhou, always humid, and sometimes it rained so much that it would come into the house.
At that time, my heart was so big that I didn’t know what loneliness meant, and I thought the house was just a place to sleep. It wasn’t until I fell ill with a high fever and lay alone in the house for three days, almost unable to recover, that I realized that it was too dangerous to live alone. At that time, I had no relatives in Guangzhou, didn’t know many people, and didn’t have any friends to visit me when I got sick. I didn’t dare to call home for fear of worrying them. At that time, there was no take-out, so I couldn’t go downstairs by myself, and there was no one to cook for me, so I just laid down by myself and drank a few sips of cold water every day. I remember waking up hungry one day, staring at the ceiling, and feeling like I was going to die. After I recovered, I chose to leave Guangzhou and came to Beijing with my classmate.
My classmate started his own business and asked me to help him. In the early days, the company was not profitable, the expenses were high, and we did not pay ourselves salaries. Since I was from out of town and had no place to stay, in order to save money, the company bought a folding bed and put it in the conference room. During the day, it was put away as a table for debris, and at night it was spread out as a bed, and I slept there.
The company’s conference room became my rental house, and I didn’t have to pay rent, which was quite good, at least better than being alone in Guangzhou. In the evening, I played cards with my colleagues, and occasionally went out to a restaurant, and the rent I saved became my daily food expenses.
But there are still many inconveniences, such as no place to take a shower, no place to dry clothes, and no place to put daily necessities. So I tried to simplify things as much as possible and omitted everything I could, leaving only the most necessary daily necessities such as toothbrushes, basins, blankets, etc., which I put away in a big bag during the day.
At first it was quite convenient, but after a long time, I felt that I really did not have my own life. If you don’t have your own independent living space, how can you talk about life?
Every day is work, from morning to night. Sometimes when I talk to my friends, they ask me where I live, and I say I live in the office.
When your living space is extremely compressed, tool people feel it most strongly, as if you are a machine, a screw that can’t stop. It was impossible to cook, because there was no kitchen, no utensils, and you had to eat take-out or go downstairs for fast food.
Later, when the company didn’t make it, everyone went their own way, so I went back to my hometown. I went back to my hometown, where I lived in a two-hundred-square-foot house with endless living space, but without the kind of entrepreneurial atmosphere I had in Beijing. So, it was a dilemma, a trade-off.
After signing the contract, the real landlord came to me and said I had been cheated!
Yantai Eileen Zhang 丨25歲互联网作业
When I first graduated, I couldn’t find a suitable job for various reasons. When the job didn’t settle down, I didn’t look for a place to live, and I stayed at a classmate’s house for the time being. During that time, I was extremely anxious, with no job and no place to stay. Sometimes, I would get angry on the phone with my family, and often questioned my life, wondering why I was floating around.
After I settled on a job, I decided to look for an apartment. At first, I had little social experience and had no idea what to look for. I’ve always heard people say that intermediaries are unreliable, so I started by looking for direct rental houses on Douban and 58 Tongcheng. I didn’t expect to find one, but the landlord told me to sign it quickly, and I didn’t think much of it, so I just rented it after looking at the blue real estate license.
However, what I didn’t expect was that one day an old man and his wife, who was many years younger than him, knocked on my door and told me that I had been cheated, that he was the real landlord, and that he had another red real estate license in his hand. I was confused. The landlord met with me, read the deed, signed the contract, and then told me I had been scammed?
The man next door came over to me and I realized that this was a historical issue involving public housing. Anyway, the house I rented had three rooms, and the ownership of each of the three rooms belonged to three people.
The one I live in is also the subject of a family dispute involving the extended family. The house originally belonged to an old woman, but when she passed away, the property went to the old woman’s daughter, who was taken care of by her niece-in-law and nephew, and finally the property went to the niece-in-law. The niece-in-law gave me the rent.
The old man who came to my door was the son of the deceased old woman. He found out that the real estate book was missing, made a replacement, and came to me to get the house back.
All in all, the family’s messy business came to me. In the morning, the eldest son and his daughter-in-law made trouble, in the afternoon the original landlord came to make trouble, and in the evening the uncle next door even came to analyze the situation with me. It was a very divisive time.
One day, the contradictions between the parties reached an extreme point, the oldest man directly led people to break my locks, change the new locks, but also ready to install a security door. This changed the locks, how can I live. I was also anxious, the two sides quarreled, a breath of trouble to the police station.
It was the first time in my life that I went to the police station, and in the end, under the mediation of the police, the landlord gave me my money back, and I moved my things out, forcing me to find a new apartment and move within one day. It was a strange experience in my life as a northern floater.
The landlord broke down the door, snatched the keys, and tore up the contract, and I still have the video of it!
The new media industry is a new and exciting business.
It was the winter of 2014 when I first came to Beijing for an internship. I rented a bed in a place that had countless people living there, and then a friend of mine was coming to Beijing, so I thought I would move to another place. At that time, all kinds of rental apps were not yet popular, and the main way to find an apartment was through 58同城.
I saw someone subletting a master bedroom near the Sun Palace on 58同城, and I thought it was pretty good, so I contacted the person who was subletting it. They told me that they didn’t have more than a few months left on their lease, and that they had already spoken to the landlord, so I would give them the rent and they would just give me the contract and deposit slip. I didn’t ask any questions, paid the money and moved in.
The day after I moved in, someone suddenly kicked in the door in the middle of the night, saying he was the landlord and asked me to open the door. He was much taller than me, a 1.8-meter northeastern uncle, and I couldn’t grab him, so I was very confused and didn’t know what happened. The first thing he said was that he had read on the Internet that the house had been sublet, which was against the rules, and he wanted me to move out right away.
I took the contract out of my pocket and was about to explain to him. I was even more confused when he snatched it up and tore it up in less than 3 seconds. I said, “I’m already living here, what’s not to discuss? He kept arguing with me and I had no choice but to prepare to call the police.
As soon as I picked up the phone, he left right away. I had no key and couldn’t go out. Fortunately, I bought a lot of food that afternoon and didn’t leave the house for three days. During that time, my landlord would come every evening from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., frantically kicking and banging on the door and shouting. Once he came, I called the police, and when the police came, he ran away.
I told the couple I sublet to about the situation, and they refunded my rent, but not the $2,000 deposit, saying they would continue to negotiate with the landlord. I didn’t want to take the trouble, so I stayed until the fourth day and left, and when I tried to get my deposit back, the couple couldn’t be reached.
It was a travesty, but I thought it was pretty funny, and I made a video of it. As soon as the landlord rapped on the door, I took a picture of the door and recorded the shaking door and our conversation, and I still have it.
I’ve been renting for five years, during which time I’ve moved around Beijing, Guangzhou, and Taipei, and have met all kinds of landlords.
Last year, I was studying in Taipei, because the area around the school was crowded and the housing supply was small, so I didn’t worry about renting. One time, I went into the house for a tour, and the landlord didn’t allow me to see it for more than three minutes. A friend who has been living there for a long time said that this means that the landlord didn’t like me.
I’m not thinking about buying a house at the moment, except when I look at my pile of books when I move and the thought of buying a house slips my mind. I think the biggest attraction to buying a house for me is the peace of mind that I can hoard a full set of Agatha.
Loneliness made me want to make a friend, and I got suckered into a pyramid scheme.
The first time I saw this, I thought it would be a good idea for me to do it.
This is my fourth year of drifting north. The epidemic has brought out the best in me, but I feel lonely from time to time, especially with a bunch of weird roommates.
There were the Taobao customer service agents who crackled on their mechanical keyboards during the day and hacked on online games at night, and the night owls who went out drinking every night and came back at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. in high heels and had to order takeout again. The scariest time was when the debt collectors came to her door and kept breaking down the door from 4:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Finally, she went out to deal with them and called the police to solve the problem.
My circle of life is too narrow and I am slow and introverted, so I decided to start on my 29th birthday to try to change things.
So I downloaded social networking apps, supplemented my profile, and started screening “people watching”. I was mainly looking at girls and wanted to make friends.
The day I met M was my birthday, and we chatted briefly, but she said she wasn’t very good at it and asked me for WeChat. I was not prepared, she is considered half of my peers, in the spirit of learning attitude, she asked me to meet and I agreed.
The first two times we met at a coffee shop, the first time we talked about horoscopes, she helped me read the astrolabe, the second time the project was handmade. After that, M asked me out two or three times a week, but I refused. But she continued to talk to me every day, which made me feel bad. But I always looked for the reason from myself first: was I too slow and socially inexperienced to realize that modern people could get along so quickly?
The third time I met her, it was because she had been grinding away at me for a long time. She said there was a recent real estate event in Texas (soon to be Jinan) that had a lot of good in-circle resources, and she needed my help for a few days. For the purpose of expanding the circle, I agreed.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have my doubts about the trip, because every time I asked her about the details of the event, she gave me plausible answers, and even when I asked about travel and accommodation, she said I would arrange it.
In the end, even though I didn’t want to go, I had a sudden urge to find out what she was up to. There was a fantasy of networking and circle breaking, but also a natural trust in people. I told my best friend about my travel plans before I left, and she told me to be careful along the way.
In the end, it was a bit silly. Curiosity killed the cat, and I was lured into a pyramid scheme.
In the past, when I knew about pyramid schemes, I read about them on the Internet and TV, and thought they were a kind of gathering of uneducated people who were brainwashed all day long in the hope of making money.
But this time it’s different: the young people after 85-95, mostly college graduates, some even studied abroad, tell you in the name of their friends that this is the best way to expand their network and gain wealth. There are no restrictions on your personal freedom or even taking you out to eat, drink or play board games with them, the atmosphere is friendly and of course they keep an eye on you.
By the next night, I didn’t want to listen to any more brainwashing, pretended to have an emotional outburst, fled the apartment under the guise of a fight with M, and took a taxi to the station. I deleted M’s tweets, phone calls, and canceled my social networking apps, hoping that she would no longer interfere with my life.
I saw a lot of scenarios that were 90% similar: the same operating model, number-crunching, promotion patterns, and dating routines, renting lots (near the police station, giving you a false sense of security); never getting a room in a hotel, always looking for messy B&Bs/apartments; not looking for locals, staying for about 4 days each time under the guise of a project visit, and being trapped through rounds and rounds of brainwashing, so that you don’t have the time or ability to think on your feet to react.
This MLM scheme also has a nice name: Project 1024 – finally earn 10.24 million on the road to success and get out.
I thought that a new world was about to open up on my birthday, but reality slapped me in the face again. It’s not a good place to be friendly. It’s the same as a rented apartment, not many people are serious about talking to you.
It’s the weekend again, and I can legitimately stay in the rental house in the name of “protection”.
All my belongings are in a suitcase, ready to leave Beijing at any moment!
Gasoline-based 25 year old Internet professional
The first house I came to Beijing to live in was in an urban village, and the biggest bugbear was the lack of a bathroom. My landlord had a bathroom, but he wouldn’t let anyone else use it, so I mostly used the bathroom at work or in the subway. Once I felt sick, I searched for a toilet for a long time, but it turned out to be one of those rural dry toilets, and I was particularly shocked.
Then I saw a shared bed house on Douban, over 800 yuan a month, with three bedrooms, two quadruple rooms and one six-bedroom, where a group of girls lived together. Some of them were in big Internet companies, and some were small netizens. I could see some very pretty pictures of their friends, but they actually lived in such a house. I moved out later because I was worried about disturbing my roommates when I came home late at night.
The new house is in Shunyi and costs 1600 RMB a month. The problem this time was that it was too far to go to work. I often left work very late, and my commute took at least an hour, and I had to walk more than a kilometer after getting off the subway. During that time, I was dizzy when I walked, and I could hit the wall when walking in the corridor. After living there for two or three months, I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I changed again.
In the first two years after I came to Beijing, I changed my apartment seven times. I haven’t changed for three years, and I recently moved to a comfortable apartment. He is a real estate agent who sits on a plastic box in the kitchen every day, smoking and playing video games, making a lot of noise. The house was in a perpetual state of smoke and the sounds of lighters and games were constant.
Every night he would start playing games after midnight, smoking a cigarette for 10 minutes and closing the door loudly. I often woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of the game, choked on the smoke, and woke up to the sound of the door slamming. After communicating with him, he would still continue, it really does not work he said, “you go to the platform to complain, I do not care”.
I’m not willing to pay the penalty for changing the rent. In the past two days, I was really devastated, and it affected my work. Because of some mistakes, the management talked to me, and sometimes I really wanted to leave Beijing and go back to my hometown.
The frequent change of apartments has made me develop a habit of buying things, and my first reaction is to ask if I will take it with me when I move, and if it is convenient to send it back home. My degree certificate, valuables, and small items that I really liked were all in one suitcase, and I often thought that if something happened to me, I would just take the suitcase and leave without caring about anything else.
I once bought a beautiful piece of cloth during a trip to Yunnan Province to use as a tablecloth. It’s been five years now, and I’ve never taken it out. Subconsciously I feel that these houses are not my home, and I want to use them in a very comfortable, pleasant, and enjoyable space.
Renting always reminds me that everything is temporary, and the high housing prices in Beijing make it difficult for me to put down roots, so I often oscillate between staying and going back to my hometown. I think it’s a very unhealthy state for young people of my generation to have all their lives tied up in a house, and it’s sad for the times, but we are helpless to change it.
At the request of the interviewee, the names in the article are pseudonyms: Shi Di, Ji Fei, Ji Zi, Eileen Zhang, Lao Yao, Su Su, and Doudou.
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