Our apartment building just got a shiny new silver gate. Gates were the bane of our existence while we lived on campus - if memory serves me correctly, there were at least eighteen that had to be hopped, several eyeless, soulless ferrymen who had to be paid off with special silver coins emblazoned with the insignia of hell, a bloodthirsty hound that could only be avoided by throwing a cloth sack filled with the intestines of a virgin pig before its feet, and all of this usually had to be accomplished while being riproaringly drunk. So we were more than wary when the gate first appeared, but after a few days of seeing it always unlocked, we stopped worrying about it.
Today is Friday, and we’ve got a three-day weekend due to Mid-Autumn Festival. Chris and I finished classes at about three-thirty, and BOLTED from the school, determined to escape work for a glorious seventy-two hours as quickly as possible. We’d been at home for about thirty minutes, during which time we’d mostly jumped around screaming about how great it was to have such a slight taste of freedom, when the doorbell rang. I think we were irrationally afraid that it was going to be something involving school, and so we didn’t answer it (stupid).
Later, Chris went out to buy water (we haven’t set up a water delivery service yet, and so we have to run around the corner every day or two to buy some), and found out that the gate was locked. Chris can jump it - a combination of being tall to begin with and having spent the last several months working out like some kind of sustained but none-the-less-intense-for-the-duration Rocky montage - so it’s not so much a problem for him. I, however, am now for all practical purposes under house arrest. The doorbell had been the building manager trying to give us a key. Chris found some friendly people who told him where to get a key - the trouble was that it was too late in the evening, and the building manager had already gone home for the day. Chris’s conversational Chinese is pretty damn good, and he understood that the friendly neighbor was telling him to try again “ming tian”, which means “tomorrow” or “bei tian.” Chris didn’t know “bei tian”, so we looked it up on the internet, figuring it was some other word for one day of the week or other.
All the internet knew about the phrase “bei tian” was the Chinese idiom “bei tian min ren,” which translates to “bemoan the state of the universe and pity the fate of mankind,” which I hope is exactly what our friendly neighbor was advising Chris to do.
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