Slightly racist artist's rendering of my landlord

Just for the record, China Hearsay has officially moved its headquarters (i.e. my painful apartment move is over). I think I’m suffering from some low-level post-traumatic stress over this, so I’ll keep my remarks here brief so I can return to a sweaty embrace of my new toilet bowl as I retch repeatedly, wishing that I could simply excise the memories (a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) of the past few days.

Like the Squirrel Nut Zippers, though, I can put a positive spin on hell, as the experience wasn’t all bad. The results were ultimately satisfactory. Recall that my furniture was being held hostage as we opened the final round of negotiations. I am convinced that my landlord (she prefers to be called the “Dragon Lady”) had some sort of Somali pirate sex fantasy, in which my furniture played a vital role, going on with her boyfriend Saturday night. Anyway, it has all been released into my custody (as opposed to its own recognizance, which would have been bad).

We almost had a breakdown in the furniture discussions when, while filling out the “Exit Card” at the management office, the Dragon Lady insisted on changing all the Arabic numerals printed on the form to Chinese (i.e., ?, ?, ?, instead of 1, 2, 3). She’s a patriot, though, so I chalked it up to nationalism and gave her the go ahead. And, like magic, my crappy IKEA furniture was once again mine to do with as I pleased.

Additionally, the protracted negotiations over the paltry sum that was our security deposit ended quite well, although we were screwed out of a bit of cash over the cleaning fee when the estimate for doing so magically doubled once the cleaning staff showed up at the apartment and figured they could gouge us. We overheard the Dragon Lady’s agent muttering to her that he could get someone to do the job for half the price, but she was happy with the cost overrun since she was able to successfully foist the liability onto us.

It’s almost impossible to describe the bizarre world that is inhabited by the Dragon Lady, so let me just point out that every person I ever met who had dealt with her, including all the folks at the management office, the agents that worked for her, and the maintenance staff, have programmed their mobile phone speed dial numbers with the local mental hospital’s “emergency committal” hotline, just in case.

The woman’s psyche is a curious hodgepodge of batshit crazy, asshole, and prima donna. From a clinical standpoint, it’s sort of fascinating. But then again, I’m not a clinician, so during the move-out summit meeting, instead of jotting down in my notebook possible diagnoses and preferred methods of psychoanalytical treatment, I was scouring the apartment looking for a weapon, the blunter the better.

The low point of the afternoon was when she insisted that all of the original furniture be returned to the exact location it was in when we moved in a year ago. Since no one remembered the layout of the apartment, a protracted conversation that included all twelve of the people in the room (all playing a vital role, I’m sure) ensued. After that the Dragon Lady did what she does best, pretending she is royalty and ordering whoever she sees to perform manual labor, in this case meaning moving sofas and tables hither and yon.

The whole thing lasted 4 1/2 hours, including the 45 minutes it took for the Dragon Lady to transfer the security deposit amount via mobile phone. We offered to accompany her to an ATM downstairs, but she insisted on doing it her way (“I pay the bank for this service, and I’m going to use it.”). The Dragon Lady’s agent told us that he’d seen similar meetings last up to six hours and said that we should consider ourselves lucky.

“Lucky” is not the first word that comes to mind. I’m just glad it’s over, and I didn’t even have to call in The Wolf.