EPTDisclaimer: This is a true story. I did not make anything up. And it's long, but hopefully worth it!
I’m a Finnish game development student doing my internship in Shanghai, China (wohoo, WCS World Finals!!) for about 7 months. I arrived in China at the end of May and a Chinese friend of mine helped me find an apartment. After checking several places we finally found a suitable place not too far from the metro or my work.
The rent is 4000 RMB (a bit under 500 euros) per month plus electricity and water, which was fine since we would be 4 people living together and sharing the costs. The building is one of many apartment buildings in a walled area with guard(s) at the side and main gates. All or at least most of the apartment building areas are like this in Shanghai and I assume elsewhere in China too. The guards don’t really do much apart from smoking and talking shit with each other and then smoking some more. Basically anyone can come and go to the area as they please.
The apartment is located the first floor, but not ground level - you have to go up maybe 10 steps of stairs to get to the door. There are 2 real bedrooms, an office-like room that we turned into a third smaller bedroom, the kitchen, the balcony and the bathroom. I have the biggest room, one friend of mine has the small office-bedroom and my two other friends have the second bedroom. My roommates are all Chinese (they can speak English) and we are friends and hang out together, but lately I have felt more distant from the couple living in the other room.
When we rented the place, the householder only gave me 3 keys total: one for the door to the building, one for the door to the apartment, and one for a lock that locks the steel bars that all houses around here have for protecting the windows and basically attempting to prevent anyone unwanted from entering the apartment too easily. The apartment has two doors: a real front door and then a wooden inside front door. The wooden door can also be locked but usually we don’t even close the wooden door, just the real front door. We only close and lock the wooden door at night because the householder didn’t give us a key to it and it didn’t feel necessary to have one either.
We had to make copies of the door keys to my roommates later but thankfully it was cheap. Actually ridiculously cheap, I think I paid 8 RMB per key (1 euro). Compare that to Finland where I probably would’ve had to pay at least 5 to 10 times at much.
So, last Thursday I got off work a bit past 18.00. I took the metro and arrived home at around 18.25. None of my roommates were home. I’m guessing they had gone out for dinner and I knew one of them was still working.
My roommate had gotten off work and called me at about 18.39 and asked me to meet her at the side gate in 20 minutes to go for dinner. So I set the alarm on my phone to go off at 19.00. I browsed TL and did random stuff until 19.00, then grabbed my wallet, phone and keys and went out.
On the way to the side gate I decided to take a shortcut that goes behind one of the buildings in the area. Taking the normal route means you have to go around the whole building which takes maybe an extra minute or so. The shortcut is between the building and the fence to the area. This area has very poor lighting and here it’s already dark at 19.00.
Stepping to the short “corridor” between the building and the fence, I was slightly startled by two guys who were walking my way. I didn’t really look at their faces as it was dark and I didn’t really care. But I noticed that they were pretty young, one was maybe 20-25 and the other one was slightly older, around 25-35. As such that’s not really young of course, but the vast majority of people living in the area are 40+ and most are retired, apart from a few younger children. Both of them were smoking and I’m pretty sure the younger one had a grey or dark green shirt and the other one had maybe a white shirt. I didn’t pay too much attention as I was wondering what delicious Chinese dish I wanted to have for dinner!
So I arrived at the side gate and my friend was already waiting for me. We went to dinner and ordered a big stew-like dish with beef, potato, onion, garlic and some other stuff (Don’t ask me what it was called, I have no idea since my Chinese is terrible). We also ordered a side of noodles, making the total price 55 RMB (6,75ish euros) for two people. Dirt cheap again, and extremely delicious! It took quite a while before our food was done. After we actually finished eating it must’ve been around 20:00. After that we headed back to our apartment.
We got to our apartment between 20:10 and 20:15 – not entirely sure as I didn’t check what time it was. I opened the door to the building, we walked up the stairs and I opened the front door to the apartment. For some reason, the inside wooden door was closed. Usually I don’t close it when I leave, but I do remember closing it a few times in the past. Naturally I try to open it, but it’s locked. At that point I think that my other two roommates have come home and locked the wooden door for some reason or by accident.
We try to knock for a while but either they aren’t there or they are sleeping. I’m trying to remember if I closed the door on my way out and I’m 80 % sure I didn’t. We try to call our roommates but they are not answering their phones. We go outside to the door of the building on the ground level. I clap my hands to switch on the light (In Finland I’ve never seen this kind of funny technology :D), then I ring the doorbell repeatedly. I look at the balcony trying to see or hear anything inside. No lights are on inside so it’s very dark, plus I’m maybe 2-2.5 meters below the balcony, so I can’t see anything really. There’s nothing.
I stay there, looking at the balcony and listening for maybe 5 seconds. Then, despite noise from never-ending Shanghai traffic, I thought I heard something, and for a brief moment I got a strong feeling that someone was inside. The same kind of feeling you sometimes get in the dark when you are alone, you think you hear something and “sense” that someone is there, only to turn on the light and see that you are just by yourself. Silly imagination.
The funny feeling quickly passed as I thought that why would my roommates be inside and not open the door for us, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s not like them to do pranks or anything like that. Also, the doorbell is very loud and would’ve surely woken my roommates up if they were inside, but no one came to open the door. After this I came to the conclusion that I had closed the wooden door on my way out, and earlier during the day I or someone else had accidentally switched the lock on so it locked when I closed it.
My roommate was kind of pissed at me at this point, because she still had some stuff to do that night. And I wanted to do some ladder! She was a bit worried about our two other roommates, why would they not answer their phones? I told her they probably went out for dinner or to the supermarket and just left their phones home (although we didn’t hear the phones ringing when we called them from outside the apartment), or they have their phones but can’t hear them ring because of traffic or other noise. Then we tried to call the householder to ask for the key to the wooden door, but he also didn’t answer the phone. Great, we are stuck outside our own apartment with no key and no idea where our roommates are.
We decided to just go for a walk and hang out somewhere, as obviously sitting there waiting wouldn’t help. We left the vicinity of the apartment at around 20:25. We walked around and I went with my friend to a shoe store (What is it with women and their need for approximately 135915 pairs of shoes? Last time I checked, people only have two feet!).
Afterwards we ended up going to a hair salon to get a haircut. I had asked her earlier if she could accompany me as I wanted to make sure they didn’t do any funny stuff to my hair because again, wo de Hanyu bu hen hao (=My Chinese not so good), and my hair was starting to get way too long as my last haircut was back in Finland. We had planned to go there the next day but as we didn’t have anything to do besides walking around, we decided to go now.
We kept trying to call our roommates but they never answered. The hair salon treatment was weird, but in a good way. They put this strange stuff on my hair, kind of like shampoo but without any water, and the girl gave some kind of a head, shoulder and neck massage while shampooing my hair. I sit at the computer for most of the day, at work as a game developer and then at home as gamer so my neck and shoulders are normally pretty stiff. Boy, it was so good!
After 30 or so minutes of this, I was apparently ready for what I came to the salon for, the haircut! The whole fun cost 30 RMB (like 3.70 euros). In Finland I would have to pay like 20 euros just for a haircut if it weren’t for my awesome sister who used to work as a hairdresser and cuts my hair for free. Dirt cheap, again!
By the time they were done with my hair the salon had already closed (22:00) and the workers were leaving. So then we walked back home and met our two roommates at the main gate at around 22:15. They had been waiting there for an hour. I was relieved to see them as I had also started to get a bit worried because they hadn’t answered their phones. But that hardly helped us unlock the wooden door. I told them I was sorry I accidentally locked the door and they said I shouldn’t worry about it, that it’s ok.
Shortly after we arrived at the main gate, two police cars came gate and one of the police officers asked something from the guard before they drove further into the area. The guard told us that a burglar had been in one of the apartments. Shit! If my laptop (pretty much the only valuable thing I have inside) is stolen I’m screwed. I remembered how I thought back in Finland that paying for insurance for my stuff would be a waste of money and decided I would just keep good care of the laptop and skipped the insurance. How stupid. My roommates were also scared for a split second but the guard said the burglar went to building 30 and we live in 38. Thank god, I can still play SC2! That is, after we figure out how to unlock the door.
We talked for quite a while wondering what we should do. The guard at the gate gave us phone numbers of some repairmen/locksmiths who could come and open the door for us. We called some of them and it would’ve been 80-100 RMB (10-12 euros) depending on the repairman to do it even though it’s not even the real and sturdy front door. We also tried to call the householder again to ask for the key but he didn’t answer.
We didn’t really want to pay 100 RMB to open the door to get in our own apartment. Then, I told my roommates, half-joking, that I could probably break down the wooden door as it didn’t feel too sturdy before (made in China), but it would probably cost more than 100 RMB to fix it. Then I suggested that we could just ask the police to help us break down the door. My friends said they probably wouldn’t do it, at least not for free, which sounded totally weird to me but then again China is nothing like Finland.
We decided to go and ask the police anyway and started walking back to our apartment. One of the police cars was just leaving and we stopped the car to ask the police officer if he could help us, and he agreed. He got suspicious of the burglar also breaking into our apartment, so we helped him check if the steel bars on our windows were ok. The darkness made it a bit difficult to see, but everything was fine and seemed exactly like before.
Then the policeman was ready to help us break down the door. The officer and I both tried our best to break it, but it turns out, breaking even a Chinese wooden door is surprisingly difficult. We couldn’t break it. After this, the officer went to talk to the other policemen. I assumed he was going to ask for help but he came back with a flashlight and wanted to check the steel bars again. Everything still seemed fine until we noticed a small hole in the steel bars on my roommates’ bedroom window. The hole was just big enough for someone small (not me) to fit through.
Immediately, I thought back to that moment, that feeling, of someone being inside the apartment when I was staring up at the balcony about two and a half hours earlier.
Fuck.
FUCK.
Someone actually was there.
We lifted my roommate up and he managed to fit through the hole and go into the apartment. That’s when I thought back to all the stuff I had inside, all the stuff all of us had inside. Not a great feeling. My Chinese roommates especially don’t have too much money right now, having recently graduated and still looking for a job. They are actually developing games for iOS so if their laptops are gone they are seriously fucked. (if you want, you can check out the games on iTunes: the Night of Aphids and KungFu Bug).
We quickly went to the front door and waited for my roommate to open it for us. For some reason, it took quite a while. That’s because the extremely heavy kitchen table had been put on the other side of the door to bar it. The door was never locked to begin with.
Right away we saw all the cabinets open and stuff being all over the place. We were about to get inside when the police officer stopped us. We have to wait for the investigator to come and check it out first. If we go in, we contaminate the crime scene.
My roommate said their laptops and stuff were still in their room. He hadn’t gone to my room so I couldn’t know if my laptop was stolen or not. We waited like 10 minutes for the investigator to come and I was getting more and more anxious to know what was missing.
Finally the investigator comes and the funny thing is he actually had CSI written on his jacket. He asks us to show him our shoes and takes a good look at them for like 10 seconds before deciding that: OK, maybe we didn’t break into our own apartment, lock ourselves out and then ask the police to help us break down the door.
He takes stuff out from his kit and goes in to take fingerprints and photos. After doing his job he allows us to go in and I see that my laptop and, at first glance, most of our other stuff seems to still be there. What the fuck?
We do a quick check of everything and notice that the thief had washed his hands in the bathroom. He had put on the switch to block the water from draining and the sink was full of dirty-as-fuck water. Again, what the fuck?
We concluded that the thief got his hands dirty when opening the dusty window from the outside, and decided to wash them before going through all our stuff. How nice.
After a more thorough search we actually find that nothing is missing. The investigator told us that there was a necklace or something like that stolen from the other apartment. I suppose the thief was only looking for money, jewelry or anything small enough to fit in a pocket. My two roommates had like 100 RMB or so stashed in their room, but it was still there. Apart from that we had no money or other small stuff to take. The thief had removed the protective cover of my roommate’s 8GB iPod Touch but didn’t take that either. Weird.
Funny detail, we have a common stash on the kitchen table were we all put some money to buy things we all need, like toilet paper, rice, cooking oil, etc. Luckily enough, the stash had only a few coins left when the thief was here. Haha, sucker! Previously we had up to 400 RMB in there.
Interesting points to think about:
1. We didn’t have the key to the wooden door so we thought nothing out of the ordinary was going on, the door was just accidentally locked by me when I went out.
2. The thief was inside. He has no idea that we don’t have the key to the door and we don’t know something is wrong. He is probably thinking “Oh fuck, I will get caught, they will call the police and I’m going to prison”
3. According to a quick Baidu (Chinese version of Google) search by my roommate, the punishment for burglary is 3 years in prison.
4. Then we just went away so at this point he was probably very confused.
5. He might have actually taken all the laptops and stuff and walked out the front door if we had never come home during the burglary.
6. On the table where the iPod was, a cup of water had been knocked down. It’s possible the thief got scared when he realized whoever lives in the apartment is back home, and he left the iPod there and didn’t have time to check my roommates stash in the same room where they had a bit over 100 RMB.
7. If I had had the key to the wooden door, I would’ve known immediately that someone had barred the door and that something was off. We would’ve called the police and the thief would’ve most likely gotten caught.
8. It may have been possible to open the door by pushing heavily and causing the table to slowly slide out of the way, instead of kicking or tackling (which I and the police officer tried, thinking it was locked).
9. Who knows what the thief would’ve done if I saw him face to face. I’m about 188 cm and 81 kg and could not have fit through the hole in the steel bars so he was most likely much smaller. But in case he had a knife (even one from our kitchen) or a gun (very unlikely), things might not have been pretty.
10. The two guys I met at the shortcut on my way to the side gate could have well been the burglars. I have never seen them before, but given the amount of people living in the area, I probably haven’t seen half of them. It would be extremely difficult if not impossible to get up to the steel bars and window without someone lifting you up or using some form of a ladder.
11. The burglar(s) are pretty good considering they went to two apartments without getting caught. But I guess it actually makes sense that they would not just go into a single apartment if they plan to do something.
Also:
_______________________
Dear Thief
Please let your thieving friends know that our apartment is full of poor people and it’s not worth breaking into again.
Thanks.
_______________________
So, do you think I was lucky in not encountering the thief and getting stabbed or whatever, or stupid in not realizing what was happening, trusting my gut and calling the police right away? I guess the thief was really the lucky one, considering we just happened to not have the key to the wooden door and didn’t realize something was wrong, which most likely would’ve ended up in him/them getting caught.
PS. Obviously I can’t be completely sure the burglar was inside when we came back from dinner. My friend also said afterwards that she thought she heard something from inside. I guess I’ll never know.
In order not to make it a pure wall of text, here's a bad pic of my WCS Asial Finals tickets that arrived today (100 RMB per, about 12 euros):
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/HQcbk.jpg)
Yes, I'm going despite the lack of terrans.
