Commodity Apartment

In 1994, the State Council issued a transition policy on real estate. Employees were able to purchase state owned housing at regulated price. It is a transiton policy from state provisioned housing to commodified housing market.

In 1999, my parents bought an apartment from the school they worked at for 28,000 RMB. The next year they relocated to another school, they tried to rent it out and it was problematic. Within the enclosed area were school students, teachers, staff and their families. The tenant complained that he couldn't park his truck into the compound after 10 in the night.

In 2001 my parents sold the apartment at market price, around 130,000 RMB, and used it as down payment for the market apartment they bought.

Their experience finding the later apartment and eventually buying it in was quite personal. One evening, they left a note without specifying why they'd left, I went to the school's post room to call their mobile phone. They said that they've gone to Guangzhou, the provincial capital an hour away.

During the time I spent in the post room, I saw lots of letters scattered on the desk, many of which are sent from Der Club Bertelsmann to subscribing readers. Seventeen year old readers in year 2000 is thirty seven or eight now. My parents confiscate romantic novels their students were reading during class and brought few of them home. I am at complete disinterest to those books, nor do I have any appetite for those book covers.

Almost until ten they came back, with two bags full of junk, as a gift from the seller. A bag and a half is full of clothes the family was discarding; What were interesting was a can of imported American salted almonds, and an English wool jacket the owner's daughter had outgrown.

Soon after their visit to the seller's family, they bought the apartment with mortgage. They were in their mid 30s, it was the time to place this life decision. In fact, my parents' housing timeline collapsed with many changes with national housing policies.

Unlike peaceful moments roaming around in the public housing compound, life after we move in to the private house was a nose down. "We are carrying 200k debt" was a constant, pressuring remark. Later I learned why they made visit to the seller's house: the apartment was a form of bribe from local official to the seller, who was in higher position in provincial capital; she was involved in our city's urban planning, thus was able to present to my parents, how our apartment will situate on the central axis. In ten years time the vision was realized. From our balcony, we witnessed former farmlands developed to new, expensive compounds, that came along with larger economic inequality.