My teaching contract provides us with a Chinese apartment rent free. We are only responsible for electricity, water, gas, and internet. Free housing is a huge perk of the job! We didn’t have much of any say so on where the apartment was or what it was like. But lucky for me, our apartment is an easy 10 minute walk to my school. And aside from some quirky decor, it’s actually pretty nice.
After three months, we’ve finally settled in and more or less made it our own. We even have a magnet on our refrigerator now. (As someone from the Midwest, that’s how you know it’s officially home.) We didn’t know what to expect about apartment life in China, but there were a few things that surprised us.
It is so much bigger than we expected.
Nanjing, where we are based in China, has a population of 8 million people, so we weren’t expecting anything too spacious. Our apartment is in a gated complex with eight buildings. Each building has 18 floors and six apartments per floor, so it’s a pretty large community. Chinese apartments traditionally hold three generations. So even though we have so many neighbors, we ended up with a large two bedroom, one bathroom apartment.
We are quite far from the city center in a development district, so that’s probably how we got so lucky. The ceilings are high, the bedrooms are large, and we have a large dining/living area where we spend a lot of our time. There’s an enclosed balcony that serves as the laundry room and the bathroom is fairly large as well.
The kitchen is the only part of the apartment that actually feels small. The refrigerator is shorter than I am, but it is more than enough for what we need now. That’s the beauty of living within walking distance of grocery stores and fresh markets.
There’s not a lot of storage, but it works.
Although the apartment is bigger than we expected by far, the storage options are pretty slim. There are small wardrobes in each bedroom and two small cabinets by the bathroom sink. That’s the extent of the usable storage. It’s enough for us since we only brought what we could fit in a few suitcases. As someone who’s used to walk-in closets my whole life, it feels strange. The kitchen does have a few cabinets, but they’re old and musty and not really suitable for storing dishes or food. We don’t use them for anything at this point.
There’s no oven.
It turns out, all you need is a rice cooker and a wok. There are bakeries here, but from what we can tell Chinese people don’t bake at home. Traditional Chinese cuisine just doesn’t use ovens. This was one of the hardest adjustments for us to make. We’re learning that things cooked in an oven can usually be cooked in a rice cooker too, with a little trial and error. You can even bake a cake!
The bathroom is divided.
From what we have seen, a typical Chinese apartment will have a split bathroom. The toilet and shower are in a separate room from the sink and mirror. This design has its pros and cons. On one hand, you can easily clean the floor and toilet with the shower head. On the other hand, the whole area gets wet every time you shower. It’s unavoidable so we find it’s best to leave your clothes in the bedroom and run back and forth wrapped up in a towel. It was a little awkward the one night we had a roommate and thought he was already asleep for the night!
You have to open the window after you shower to help the room dry out, no matter how hot or cold it is outside. It can be a bit inconvenient at times, but it’s all a part of adjusting to life in China.
Everything is really hard.
The “mattresses” in our apartment are nothing like the ones back home. It’s only thin pads laid on a wooden frame that make up our bed. It definitely took some time to get used to it, and to be honest, we still wake up very stiff most mornings! There was only one pillow when we arrived on our first night in China, but we were too tired to even care. A second pillow was one of our first major purchases, though. The futon couch in the living room is the same way, just a thin layer of padding over a firm wooden frame. As soon as the first pay day arrived we bought our fruit slice cushions, which help.
Life without a dryer is fine…on sunny days.
We have a washing machine in our apartment, but the “dryer” is a drying rack on a pulley system. Our balcony area gets a lot of sunlight, so we don’t have any problem getting our clothes dried quickly on clear days. On the dreary, rainy days it can take well over 24 hours to dry one load! We had to learn to check the weather and plan accordingly for washing our loads. Especially when it comes to bed sheets!
The views are amazing from the 15th floor.
And even better from the roof. The view is one of our absolute favorite things about our Chinese apartment. It has a great bird’s eye view for people watching by day and seeing the fireworks by night.
Pretty much all Chinese apartment buildings have rooftop access. People will often take their blankets to the roof to dry in the sun. It’s a liability in the US, but here it’s necessary. Like I said, life without a dryer can be a little bit of a challenge! It makes for some pretty good views of our district though.
Utilities in China are super cheap.
Depending on how much we run our wall units, our utilities have run us somewhere between $5.75 to $22 USD per month. Our internet only cost us $86…for the entire year here. That’s what it cost us back home for one MONTH of internet.
Really everything is so much cheaper here. You can eat dinner in a restaurant for about $4 for two people. And groceries for the week will usually run us about $12 to $14. A bus ticket costs 29 cents and a 45 minute taxi ride only costs us $14 or less. It’s fantastic for us because we can save a lot of my salary, but it’s sad for the locals. Foreign teacher salaries are generally a lot more than what a local person might earn. It would be so much harder for them to save up money and travel like we did. It’s a reminder to be grateful for just how privileged we really are to be able to do the things we’re doing.
Not owning a car is actually pretty great.
I’ve had my own car since I was 16, but I haven’t driven in months. And it’s actually really nice! First off, walking has been so much healthier for us. And public transportation here is pretty easy to navigate. In a city with this many people, I wouldn’t even want to try to drive here. Or have to try to park.
Sounds travel in odd ways here.
The buildings here are all made of concrete. The thick walls muffle most of the sounds from our neighbors. They don’t help much when they are doing building maintenance. Which they’ve been doing for about a month now in one of the upstairs apartments. We hear jackhammers and all sorts of other construction noises most days. Other than that, and the dog that barks incessantly, it’s pretty quiet. It’s actually easier to hear sounds from the street than it is from other floors in the building, especially if any of the windows are open.
Nothing stays clean in a Chinese Apartment.
When we arrived at our apartment, the school contacts had bought us what they call sleepers. It’s a pair of sandals or house shoes that you wear only in your apartment. Anytime someone would see us without them, they would ask us why we weren’t wearing our sleepers. We didn’t see the big deal and we were used to wearing socks or walking barefoot at home. But it didn’t take us long to figure it out. No matter how hard you try, things will always be at least a little dirty.
Seriously, it’s a lost cause. I think it’s because there’s so much pollution here, that it just keeps everything coated in a layer of dirt. Just when you think you’ve got it all taken care of, you’ll turn around and find more dust to sweep or footprints to wipe up. Housework here is a daily task if you want to even try to stay ahead of it, but it isn’t too bad. It just took us a little while to get used to it here. And we always change into our sleepers as soon as we walk in the door!
Life in a Chinese apartment is different than the experiences we had back home. Going back to apartment life, after four years of living in houses, hasn’t been as bad as I thought it would be at all. It took a little while, but we are settling in quite nicely. It may not feel like a forever home, but our apartment is certainly starting to feel like home for now.
This was a lot of fun to read! I’ve never seen or heard about the inside of any home in modern-day China, so I found the construction and lifestyle differences fascinating. (No oven! I’d never have thought of that!)
Thanks, Leslie! Glad you enjoyed it. It’s always interesting to see the differences between different cultures!