I Love China

I have frequent discussions with various people about what’s good about living in China and what I miss. Well, one thing I do miss is the peace and quiet of England compared to the constant noise pollution of a city like Shanghai.

There’s the everyday usual stuff like people literally shouting in to their mobile phones while in a confined space, like an elevator, shops playing awful house music at full blast through speakers placed outside on the street in an attempt to attract shoppers’ attention and so on. But there are also more unusual examples that come up from time to time.

The other night, as I lay in bed reading a few of my favourite chapters from the bible as I often do before sleeping, I started to hear what I thought was my neighbour watching TV at a loud volume. It was distracting me from my reading so I decided to just go to sleep. After about 20 minutes I realised I was not going to be able to sleep with that sound coming through the walls and reluctantly got dressed and prepared for my first neighourly confrontation.

Oddly, when I got to my neighbour’s front door, I could hear nothing at all. Perhaps it was the downstairs flat. I walked down one floor and put my ear against the front door. Nothing. Not a sound. So perhaps it was my upstairs neighbour. I walked up and checked. Again, no sounds coming from any apartment.

So, I’m one floor above my apartment and about to walk back down to my own place, but I could hear the noise was coming from higher up. I walked up to the 7th floor (I live on the 5th floor) and the noise got louder, but I could tell it was coming from even higher up. So up I went to the 8th and BINGO! The noise was so loud there was no mistake. It was apartment 802. There was no need to press my ear against that door, I could here everything clearly just by standing by the elevators. It wasn’t a TV, it was some sort of audio book with a man’s voice in fairly neutral English. And it seemed to be on a loop. To be honest, it was a little bit creepy like some kind of cult hypnosis thing. Nevertheless, I banged on the door as hard as I could, but nobody came to the door.

I went back down to my apartment and called the management office. They said they had already got 2 complaints and had already been to the apartment but there was no answer. I told them I was going to call the police if they don’t do anything about it and they seemed very pleased and encouraged me to make the call, so I did.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t think the police would bother with a grumpy old man complaining of a loud neighbour, but to their credit, within minutes there was not one but two police squad cars parked by my building. I ran up to the 8th floor to see what was happening and there was the building security guy and some police officers. They tried banging on the door but nobody answered. It was spooky.

I didn’t understand what was being said but it seemed like the police were giving up and suggesting that security call the landlord / owner in the morning.

The police left, I went back to my place to prepare for a sleepless night. It was about 4am anyway, so I wasn’t going to get much sleep. But then suddenly, for reasons I will never know, the noise stopped.