Hostages

What follows is an account of our brief stay in the small city of Suihua, in north eastern China. We went there as English teachers, we being my wife, myself and my wife's teenage daughter.

We are sitting in our apartment in Suihua, it was late evening. We had arrived at about 6.30 the previous night. Our arrival outside the apartment was met by a group of women arguing with Stephen (our Chinese boss) about something. We didn't know at the time what the problem was, it turned out they wanted to rent the apartment to somebody else, even though the rent was already paid by BKL (the company employing us).

The landlady and two other women had arrived at the door a short while ago and they then started arguing with Erick (our Chinese guide). We were sitting there in what we thought was to be our apartment not knowing what was going on. Why had these women invited themselves in and why were they now arguing with Erick. In between the sometimes heated exchanges of Chinese (of which we know none), Erick has informed us that they want another 6 months rent in advance, and at a greatly increased cost. Until that is settled we are unable to enter or leave the apartment. Erick is trying to contact Stephen back in Harbin, but it is close to 10 at night and this problem doesn't look like it will be settled quickly. It turned out that when we had been at the school earlier in the day some problem had occurred over our accommodation. The school had wanted us to be put into a hotel while alternative accommodation could be found. During the afternoon Erick had told us to repack all our belongings. We were now effectively being held hostage in our own home and definitely against our will.

It was clear the woman (or her two heavies) weren't leaving. She kept asking us to stop being so loud whenever we raised our voices at her. We were disturbing other people within the block; our reply was that she was disturbing us more. If she left there would be no problem. Why were we in the middle of this?

It was nothing to do with us.

Finally her two friends left, we moved all our belongings into the two rooms we would be sleeping in, we definitely didn't trust these people with any of our stuff. Finally after midnight and some more heated words we tried to get some sleep. It took me several hours to fall asleep, and at 5am I was awake as Erick's alarm went off. I fell asleep again only to be woken an hour later by the doorbell. It was the headmaster from the school we had visited the previous day. It turned out he was related to the landlady, (she was his older sister). He and Erick were having another serious conversation in Chinese. The crazy woman of the night before was nowhere to be seen. The headmaster was the latest negotiator in this saga. Lisa and I had a cup of coffee. Erick was off to the school with the latest unwanted visitor to cross into our home. As he was leaving Erick informed us that we should be ready to leave at a moments notice. We finished what little packing we had left to do. We were accused of trying to steal one of our own pans by the headmaster. Lisa pointed out that there is nothing worth stealing from this s***hole, as it was all worthless.

Erick arrived back, said he had two taxis outside and we were to leave now. By 8 am we were on board a bus and headed out of town.

On the bus Erick said to me that he was supposed to stay with the headmaster, a way to stop us from leaving. When the headmaster went into a meeting Erick decided it was a good time to leave, we explained to him the term "doing a runner".

This event did not put us off working in China, it took almost a year and many other events to do that.