The Ayi from Hell

Folks, I am not a rich man, but I am sufficiently slovenly to invite the assistance of an ayi, that’s a maid to you non-Chinese speakers. True, I live in a one-bedroom apartment that does not require much housekeeping; I could do it myself. But for less than $100 a month, having someone come in twice a week to make the bed, do laundry, iron my shirts and dust a layer of Gobi Desert off my floor is a cheap luxury. That is, until something goes horribly wrong, and you wake up one day to find Satan with dish gloves and a mop has moved into your residence.

I am not talking about my current ayi; she’s a wonderful woman who barely does a mediocre job and gets paid handsomely for it. Thankfully, she makes my life just a little easier. No, I am talking about the ayi that held my friend and I psychologically hostage in our own apartments with her lunatic behavior. This was a woman who made me live in fear.

In the late 1990s I lived in Huajiadi, which was the local ghetto for foreign trash in Beijing: English teachers, translators, interns, students, and other laowai twenty somethings with their fist jobs out of college. To this day, I still have a set of good friends who were my neighbors at this poor Chinese version of Melrose Place.

Huajiadi was our own little bohemian village of concrete blockhouse apartments. The compound I lived in was decidedly rustic, a family of chickens was raised in the courtyard; so was a small crop of hemp plants. Our apartments were cheap and functional; but even back then my friends and I had ayis.

I will not name the guy who introduced me to her, although he should be drawn and quartered. The woman had worked for him for a year; he very well knew she was a psycho and should have warned me. Instead he mentioned she was a little ‘off’, but a fantastic ayi; he suspected cleaning was some kind of catharsis for her. If that’s true, the woman probably murdered children, bathed in their blood, donned a suit of her victims' decomposing flesh and danced in the moonlight if she didn’t get her hands on a mop and feather duster at least once a day. She had some serious demons to exorcise.

I also share some of the blame. When I interviewed her I could tell right away she wasn’t right in the head. You see, like Gollum in the Lord of he Rings movies, she referred to herself in the third person. Our first meeting went something like this:

Author: “Can you come on Tuesdays and Fridays?”
Ayi: “Yes, ayi can come then, ayi cleans very well! She’s a good ayi…”
Author: “Uhhhh, ummm… ok. Can you start next week?”
Ayi: “Yes, ayi will start on Tuesday.”

I shook it off at the time, but I should have realized then and there I was in danger of having one of my digits chomped off by the crazed woman and might very well get pushed into a pit of lava for my trouble.

Anyway, I hired her, and before things got really bad, I recommended her to a very good friend of mine, we’ll call him Jose. In spite of this, Jose and I still remain friends to this day.

At this point dear readers, you are all probably asking yourself “how bad could she be?” Sorry to keep you in suspense, for starters the ayi’s cleaning uniform was an old-fashion set of full-length red woolen underwear and white sneakers. She looked a little like a matriarchal version of Thing One & Thing Two from The Cat in the Hat. By the way, a handful of the half dozen teeth she still possessed were gold. This is the stuff nightmares are made of.

Here are a few examples of her work before I describe the worst offenses. On a couple memorable occasions I returned home from a hard day’s work to find:

• Most of my dishes taken from the cupboards and stowed in the refrigerator; the ayi figured since I never had any food she might as well put the dishes there because it was the cleanest space in the kitchen.
• My precious few good suits were taken off their hangers in the closet, neatly folded and placed in drawers.
• My pants ironed with broadside creases so when I put them I on it looked like I had two khaki chimneys jutting from my crotch; it wasn’t a flattering look for me.

OK, none of this is that bad, right? The worst was when I came home a little early one day after the ayi had been working for me for over a year and I saw her cleaning the toilet… with my back brush! Pause a moment and think about it. It was an honest mistake on her part; she saw a brush in the crummy little bathroom and drew a conclusion. But, God!

So obviously she wasn’t the world’s greatest ayi, why didn’t I fire her? Because I was afraid what would happen if I did. She knew where I lived and I was fairly sure she was unstable; events unfolded later that further heightened that suspicion. Also, by this time I was only a few months away from leaving China and going back to the US, I figured I could just stick it out.

Jose had his own problems with her. First, there was the cat. Jose was cat sitting for a month or so while a friend went home during the summer. The ayi took one step into the apartment and gave the animal a disapproving look and immediately asked how long the offensive pussy would be on the premises. The ayi, it appears, was afraid of the cat; so much so she might have very well tried to frame the cat in a bit of domestic dooty terrorism.

One day Jose came home to find an enormous turd on the windowsill inside his bedroom. At first glance he assumed it was the cat’s, he was pretty sure it wasn’t his. But after careful inspection, he concluded it could have been the ayi’s. There was no evidence; a team of crime scene investigators didn’t take a DNA sample. But the simple fact was the turd was roughly half the size in length and diameter as the cat, and it would have been a miracle for something so small to poo something so big.

At this point, we started suspecting the ayi was capable of anything. I was grateful I was leaving the country. This leads me to my last ayi story. A couple of weeks before I was to leave China for the second time I took a vacation to hang out with some monks in a Tibetan lamasery and practice my chanting; really. While I was away, the ayi came to my apartment, saw a lot of my stuff boxed up and assumed I’d skipped town without paying her for the last month. She then called Jose at the office and demanded to know my whereabouts. Being the helpful friend he was, he said I left town. Jose’s Chinese was functional, but not great. I think a little might have been lost in translation.

The ayi whirled herself into a fury! She wanted her money; no American slacker was going to cheat her out of her hard earned wages. She demanded the money from Jose, who is a genuinely good guy, so he quickly caved in and agreed to pay. Great, she was on her way to the office to collect. Two hours later, the ayi shows up at a place of business after ridding roughly 10 kilometers on her tiny flatbed tricycle on a hot day. The ayi was dressed in her woolen red underwear and sweat rolled off her face in streams as she berated Jose and cursed me. Jose paid her quickly and got her the hell out of the office.

Within a few weeks I out was out of the country and safely away from the Ayi from Hell. Jose dealt with her in his own way. He moved to the other side of Beijing and told her he didn’t need an ayi anymore.

To this day, I have never bought another back brush.