Whispers of a typhoon reached our village hideaway late afternoon while we were deep into a majiang marathon. Ruby was the first to see a message about a lot of wind and heavy rain. Hours later, videos were sent showing dorm doors blown to smithereens alongside the requisite recorded feats of idiocy - opening an umbrella in the tempestuous inferno or attempting to drive a motobike amid the flooded streets. By that evening, Zach had exchanged a couple of texts with Masha, with the final one saying, "You should probably come back as you lost a couple of windows."
Our languid return to Zhanjiang had become a mad dash.
Travel seems most glorious, but most of the time it is hours spent in a nasty bus stop filled with belching buses and smokers, both attributing to the horrific air quality. Within the course of five hours, our travel plans changed four times. Buses were not showing up and by a stroke of providence, we ended up on the night bus bound directly to our campus gate. An eight hour journey became seventeen.
We began sighting typhoon carnage two hours before reaching campus. The exit tollbooth was in shambles. Billboards had been upended and flung like javelins. There was not one standing road sign between the tollbooth and our campus gate. Disembarking from the bus, I stood beside the
yang character from our dismantled sign.
A mere 24 hours post-typhoon and our campus was in shambles. Standing at the gate, Zach and I stood, stunned. Our lush, tropical paradise had been stripped bare. Its beauty reduced to bare twigs, tree stumps, and bowed palms. There was not a single flower. We could see every building clearly.
In one day, our campus had been transformed into a scene resembling late fall.
The shock of the situation was palpable. The few who meandered around campus snapped photos. People whispered. It was eerily quiet.
What tipped us off that this was not going to be a normal typhoon cleanup was the lack of cleanup. The usual routine is that hundreds of villagers and trucks descend on the campus as soon as the last big gust of wind blows. We saw one backhoe by the front gate with two men. I saw another person move a branch in order to get their motobike past.
While the landscape damage was staggering, the building wreckage was moreso and our hutong was among the carnage. We had a clear view of our back balcony broken windows thanks to bowled over palm trees. As for the front view, it was not pretty.
It was even uglier from the inside.
Opening the front door, the flooding was evident. We walked in, turned to face the hall.
I said, "Oh shit."
Zach said, "That is not a couple of windows."
Before us laid mass destruction comprised of shattered glass, the missing leaves from the trees, twigs, and floodwater.
Every towel we owned was soaked with water and shards of glass. The bread maker looked as though it had been in a cat fight and lost. Our entire stock of toilet paper had been reduced to spit wad material. That was just the hallway.
The kitchen bore resemblance to the inside of a tornado. My recipe books had been become moldy clumps. The waffle maker held an entire bowl of water. Leaves were in the oven. Yet, by some mysterious force of bizarreness, not one dish or glass was broken.
Plaster, leaves and shards of glass covered everything except what was contained in the office. Leaves and sand had even made its way into the bedroom. Thankfully, our dear Russian friends had rescued our computers from the carnage and moved furniture before our arrival.
We stood in our destroyed sanctuary.
First, we took showers. Word had reached us that water and power were non-existent, so when we turned on the faucet and had water, we seized the moment to get rid of travel filth, collect our thoughts, and form a plan of action.
We filled anything that could hold water.
Five minutes later, no water.
Clean up efforts are quite futile with no towels and no water. What towels were not soaked, were strewn behind our apartment building since we had left them on the balcony to dry while we were gone. Zach was the one to follow the bread crumb-ish trail and returned with not only towels but hangers and socks.
Nonetheless, most of our immediate efforts the first day was spent glass hunting. Afterwards, it became leaf and twig hunting. As the sun set on day one, we located our candles and head lamp, ate a romantic dinner of frozen leftover dumplings, and fell into bed, exhausted.
Day two, I stood in the living room and cried.
I was overwhelmed. Not only was the physical state of the hutong horrible, but mold had exploded throughout. We were having to battle on two fronts and the rate of mold growth was terrifying me.
Zach hugged me and said, "We are in this together. Let's choose one room and get it together."
We tackled the balcony.
We had a nice chunk of time with water, so we hooked up the hose I use for my swimming pool and flooded the hutong. China wins the award for brilliant floor drain locations, as it makes mopping and cleaning easy and enjoyable. In this time of abundant water, we also used the washing machine to handwash towels. Zach gallantly aimed to shake out every shard of glass without injuring himself or getting one in the eye, while I swished and smooshed in the suds.
Day three, power sporadically flickered which allowed for real washing even if we had to keep turning the washing machine on.
Ultimately, it took four days for our hutong to even resemble normalcy, with our daily mantra as "it could be worse." We had even become trained to duck anytime we headed for the toilet or kitchen to avoid the window frame shamble, which we had dubbed our Typhoon Modern Art.
The silver lining to the whole debacle is that I can now check clean-up-after-a-natural-disaster off my what-I-do-not-want-to-do-bucketlist.
