Taipei Apartment Hunt

by Brian Hioe

After six years in my current apartment, I’m finally moving. I’ll still be in the neighborhood—my life is so connected to Bangka that it would be hard to leave. But I decided it’s time. 

Perhaps it was the relentless smell of fried chicken from the stall in the ground floor of the building. Over time, admittedly, I stopped being able to smell it as much, though I did become paranoid that I myself might unknowingly smell of fried chicken. 

Or it could be the water and electricity outages. Sometimes, with no warning at all, the building would just suddenly have no water or electricity. And let me tell you, it’s quite hard getting soap off of your body when the water stops with no warning. Even last week, as I was moving out, the hot water for the apartment suddenly stopped working. And then there was the time that leaking pipes soaked everyone’s mail. At the time, I wrongly suspected Wang Wang, the local dog I was friendly with, of urinating on the mail, but it turned out to be the pipes. 

Though I enjoyed the chance meetings with the many odd strangers that lived in the building, they could also be tiresome. I once encountered an elderly woman in the lobby who wanted to see about an empty apartment a few floors up, complaining that the landlord wasn’t picking up when she called.