In humid areas of the world, bugs inside of homes are not a sign of uncleanliness. But our apartment was not clean, even before me and my stuff got here. The cockroaches on the floor were already dead. The cabinets looked like they'd been clawed by Rottweilers and there were cigarette burns in the linoleum. Smoke from cigarettes and weed was inlaid amongst layers of grey and beige paint.
I subscribe to Architectural Digest magazine and I think on some carnal level, I hope to create a space as gorgeous as something they'd print. But as I was writing this, I had an explosively funny daydream about a magazine that featured apartments like the one we currently live in. Imagine Drew Barrymore caressing a bumpy beige wall talking about how after a year of watching her neighbors become homeless, she's learned to smile at the smell of weed because it's like the whole neighborhood truly deserves a respite from the shitty jobs they have.
We chose this apartment complex from 2600 miles away because it was cheap and zoned for a public school we were interested in. The plan was to buy a house in the area and kill two birds with one stone by living in a cheap(ish) apartment that could double as a storage unit for our boxes. Within months of our cross-country move, we hadn't found a house to buy, and 1.5 years later, we still haven't. My feelings about this are laughy-cry-y. I have a strong urge to assure everyone that our delinquency as functioning adults is not our fault, and there's plenty of truth in that. I've spent a lot of time daydreaming about being somewhere other than right where I am. But slowly I've come to identify less as a person with means who will get out of here in time, and more as a person who does actually live here in the same reality of this neighborhood with my neighbors.
These apartments remind me of my childhood homes in China. The entrance to our building here in Durham is similar to the entrances to the ubiquitous five-storied concrete block apartment buildings in China. The ones in China are modeled after Soviet buildings colloquially called Khrushchoba, a mashup of [Nikita] "Khrushchev" and the Russian word for slum. China adopted this post-communal design because the buildings are easy and cheap to mass produce. The sides of the buildings are prefabricated concrete, made to fit together like sides of a paper doll house.
One thing that's always confounded me about those apartments and the one here in Durham too, is that the kitchens are so small. I think the people who design apartments think that two parents and 1.7 children will live there. Ironically, low income families across the world tend to have more children, relatives, and friends living with them, which requires multiple people to be preparing meals almost constantly. While galley kitchens are not my ideal, there is something to be said for being able to reach everything without moving, and being able to order everyone out of the kitchen when I'm cooking because there isn't enough room. No one would believe Drew Barrymore if she said she needed more space in her kitchen.
In China, we lived in homes with mudbrick walls and no plumbing, neighborhoods swamped with open sewage, bars on the windows, and unstable electricity grids that caused lightbulbs to explode like little glass grenades. The confusing thing was that our homes were luxurious compared to many of our local neighbors, and hovels compared to some other missionaries. It was often embarrassing that we had so much or so little, depending on who our guests were. I find myself in much the same situation as an adult on a different continent. My parents were conscientious of their living choices in mixed cultural contexts, and did a wonderful job with that juggle. Still, they chose to live far below their means. I'm not convinced that my similar situation is as autonomous.
I'm right on time for my appointment with mysticism as a Millennial exvangelical white woman, but lack of answers, resolution, and control is not tranquil. I'm probably the only moron who thought it would be. Living in the unideal present has given me a more realistic and depressing understanding of the castes of existence in the United States and all the rules that actively keep people from transcending the misery of poverty. I'm against the idea of "bad" neighborhoods, but the darkness and tension that permeates poor neighborhoods often feels bad.
Exhibit A: Apt 315. I don't know how many people were living in 315, but one consistent character in that household was an older teenage boy. I had nothing against him, except that one of his buddies was trouble. The buddies came by in their car every now and then, and then they all stood down by the edge of the forest (which is mere paces from our building), and fired their gun into the trees.
I was making dinner when I noticed flashing red and blue lights on the ceiling. I reached over to the window and parted the blinds to see three squad cars lined up in the street. An officer was talking to the teenage boy who looked like he was desperately trying to reach someone on the phone. An ambulance was already outside, but must have done its work (if someone went in to the ambulance, I never saw) and left soon afterward. The squad cars stayed and stayed, for hours.
When I looked out again I saw a white crossover with lettering on the side. It wasn't the typical black and white paint job, it was rather inconspicuous. The letters said Crime Scene Investigation. Of course I recognize that someone somewhere must have the job of taking careful photos at crime scenes and samples and stuff, but it's one of those jobs that I've only seen on TV and therefore only existed in my mind as part of the world of TV. A man with rubber gloves on was rummaging around in the trunk of the car putting together an accordion folder of I'm-not-sure-what. It looked like drop clothes, but I couldn't wrangle a picture of their use into my image of the interior of Apt 315. Then he slung a nice camera around his neck and began taking pictures in a 360 degree radius of the surroundings of the building entrance. I wondered if my prying little eyes were captured between the blinds the way a cat's eyes look robotic in a flash of light.
Then the CSI photographer walked into the building entrance and that's all the more I saw. Well, I did see that the teenager didn't seem to be in trouble. He was going in and out of the apartment, eventually with two overnight bags packed, and then he drove away. I didn't see the family's car for a few days, but when they were back, they had a U-Haul and were moving out. What happened in there?
As I'd been watching through the blinds and putting together that something probably terrible had happened, I thought about going out there and asking if anyone needed food or something else we could offer during a crisis. In a previous chapter of my life, that was my job - stepping in to neighborhood crises with food or jackets or kind words or childcare at the ready. This time I just stood still.
I thought to myself that if I went out there to satisfy my curiosity and offer assistance, perhaps I would discover what had happened and perhaps that would help me piece together the other clues I'd gathered about this family. Then I would be crushed by the weight of all that I could not do to help. All the help they'd needed leading up to this point that I could not give because I did not know them, and I didn't want to know them very much because then I might have something to offer, which means I couldn't not try and help, which means I would be sharing in their suffering on top of all the troubles I'm already facing.
Exhibit B: Apt 312. Inside my imagination live the lives of other people, painted in the color scheme that belongs to me. For a year, I knew the neighbors in Apt 312 only by sound (I never saw them), and the room in which they produce this sound lives in my imagination. The sounds I hear come from who I think is a child. The child is not like most other children of similar voice maturity because they do not speak but only shriek. They sound like a whale, their voice dipping up and down in a curvaceous and continuous line, or like a grade-school recorder flute as it distorts. Are they happy? Are they communicating an idea to someone else in the room? In the room as I imagine it, there is no furniture except a small table, and on the small table there is a television that keeps the child happy, or at least entertained, most of the time. Maybe they whoop when they see something on the screen that they like. The rest of the room, which is small but clean, is carpeted and there are high-pile blankets making hillocks of fuzzy rainbow flowers in every direction. I know this image is also transmuted from Tajik homes in China. The child's family is doting and inhumanly patient. They treat their child like the incarnation of a Hindu god. What saints they are, for I would only want to stop the blubbering of a whale.
My perception of my neighbors is unsaintly. But part of writing, both fiction and nonfiction, is getting to tell stories about unlikable and imperfect characters, in this case me. I wrote the paragraph above last year, and have since learned that my shrieking neighbor is an adolescent boy with autism. In my limited interactions with him and his mom, they are both considerably more patient and loving people than I am. Just this week I heard them singing happy birthday, followed by a lot of excited shrieking.
Exhibit C: Apt 306. The one family I had started to get to know had three or four kids of their own, and cared for several additional children. We met them last summer at the pool where one of Ishmael and Ira's agemates in their family hugged them in the pool, and the dad would catapult my kids out of the water along with his own kids, just like my dad did in the pool when I was little. We'd wave and chat briefly whenever we passed each other in the neighborhood. Their kids often played outside in the grass between our buildings, and I began inviting them to play games, draw with chalk, and eat graham crackers on our patio. The kids waved at me when I'd drive by.
One day I waved at them and the little girl I talked with the most gave me a much less enthusiastic response than usual. She looked worried, I realized later. The next day as I walked home from the mailboxes, I noticed an orange piece of paper in one of the windows of this family's apartment. I got closer and saw that it was an eviction notice. All their belongings had been locked inside and if they came back to get them without talking to the management or the sheriff, it would be considered breaking and entering. I never saw them again.
I still feel miserably sad about that family. Where did they go? There is nowhere in this city with cheaper rent that I know of. The kids didn't get to say goodbyes and probably didn't get to take any of their things when they had to leave. I imagined their pillows still in their bunkbeds and how they'd probably be destroyed when maintence went in to clear out the apartment. Somewhere out there, my little neighbor was missing that familiar pillow. It hurts me to think of how joyful that family was in spite of the struggles they were up against. The dad had a job, but they must have been unable to pay the rent for a long time to have gotten to the eviction point. Even if we'd known their situation better, we could not have helped out with that level of cash.
Once I'd discovered the orange notice, I spent hours putting together a packet of documents about their tenant rights and other city resources for struggling renters, although the websites offering special COVID assistance had long since used up their emergency funding. I carried around that packet of documents hoping I'd see the family somewhere and could give it to them, but it was already too late. I wonder if the kids got to say goodbye at their school.
Part of my deep distress over that eviction and the left behind pillow was that it feels familiar to my own childhood. We left so many homes to which there is no return, and with that came the same feeling I'd seen in the little girl when she was too worried to wave back at me. The loss of your connections, your friends, and the impermanence of stuff. Adrift in a scary sea of an adult problems that work actively to make life harder. Too young to have any power within that sea. Then we grow up and realize that if we're poor, we're still mostly powerless.
I have one picture of those kids that I'd taken when they were playing on our porch. I printed it so that I can say goodbye to them as many times as I need to.
Exhibit D: Apt 318. When we first moved in, the neighbors in 318 were dealing drugs and jumping over live fireworks. They eventually abandoned their apartment and all the stuff in it. But they were the friendliest and most generous people to live in their building since we've moved here. The current neighbors in 318 arrived around a time which makes me thing they're Afghan refugees, but some other aspects make me wonder if they're Pakistani by way of Afghanistan. They aren't friendly, but I think it's because they're scared, and I don't blame them. I worry about them when I hear the old woman's deep cough or when bombs burst in air during the 4th of July.
The young woman of the family sits near the mailboxes for hours in a jacket in Southern summer heat, talking to friends or relatives in other countries through the earbuds attached to her phone. Most of their belongings are probably donations from churches or relief funds. Someone gave them a 1970s rainbow sheet set that is coveted by vintage sellers, and I always think about that when I see it drying on their fence. Recently a young boy in the neighborhood was throwing large rocks and otherwise trashing the patio of the refugee family. So Jonas and I sit on our patio and wait for the kids to come by and then chase them away. It makes me delight in being an adult that my stare is enough to put fear into beastly children.
Exhibit E: Apt 319. These neighbors are chaotic. Once I had the distinct and amusing pleasure of overhearing someone in that household come out on to their balcony while on the phone, trying to convince a girl to continue their relationship. The caller made an impassioned case for why this girl should come back to him instead of be with some other guy, and the reasoning was mostly a list of the sexual pleasures he'd provided in the past, and how he could perform these things better than the other guy. She hung up on him.
Someone else who lives in that apartment must be a student in beauty school, because sometimes there's a disembodied mannequin head floating on their porch, or a drying wig flung over the rail.
Plastic play food ends up in the grass below their porch, but they never come pick it up. The kids are young and cute, but often the recipients of a great deal of shouting, along with the weepy eyed little dog. When the kids cry, I want to go far away so I can forget the hurt playing out in someone else's doorway. As a child in China, I remember hearing a woman being beaten through an open window and when I told an adult (not my parents) what I was hearing, they said there was nothing we could do and it wasn't our business. I never know how involved I should get when I overhear yelling or hitting. I think of times when my own sons have screamed or sobbed, not because they were hit or yelled at, and thankfully no one took it as a sign to call the cops on us.
Exhibit F: Everything, Everywhere, Forever. As far as I know, Drew Barrymore is actually a lovely person. She probably smokes pot, even though her house probably doesn't smell like it. I don't like the smell of cigarettes because I smelled SO MUCH of it growing up in China, and I don't like the smell of weed probably because I never smelled it growing up. I still don't like the smell, but I appreciate it a lot more than I did before I moved here. It's a smell that's becoming part of my sense of home and community.
I've learned that the history of weed in Black culture is often a salve for sorrows. It feels as if the long history of criminalization was really just a way for the powerful to say, "we want you to stay poor, and hate it." No opiates for the masses allowed. When I see my neighbors in a cloud of smoke, I respect that moment. I want them, and me, to have those moments where troubles fade into the background for a minute and we remember the treasured things in our lives in spite of all the circumstances that could and sometimes do lead us to hate being poor.
Almost all our neighbors have bleak backstories, at least from my vantage point. Maybe I do too when the neighbors are observing us through the blinds. I wonder if they wonder why I'm always carrying small plastic groceries bags of clothes in and out of our apartment. The pains of these families are evident through the walls and closed doors, but each of us is too beaten down to take on more pain that isn't our own. The gap between the way things should be and the way things are is ever present. It requires a herculean effort to believe that anyone cares, because that's not the evidence before us.
The apartment management can be low-key despotic with their arcane rules coupled with wild incompetence and ridiculous fees. The pool is this entire microcosm of American disgraces, in which the powerful control the overtaxed. It's like the management waits for dark-skinned children to punish for breaking arbitrary rules while praising light skinned children in the same breath. I clench and unclench my fists. My nails have grown long and strong, fortified by the sunshine and hair dye, painted to match the water. I silently pretend I'm the guardian of children who obviously aren't mine so that they can stay in the pool. I worry silence isn't enough. The management seems despondent at being on the premises, and superior when they leave in the afternoon to homes in other neighborhoods.
Not everything is depressing, sad, tense, or exploitative. In what some people call bad neighborhoods, there is also joy and resilience. Families barbeque outside together. Tweenagers do TikTok dances in the pool, admiring their own fresh bodies. Men zip around helmutless on their scooters, sometimes giving kids a ride. Our kids trade Pokemon cards with other kids. The cicadas look prehistoric and their cries to mate haven't lost their magic.
The summers here are everything summer should be. When Ira fell asleep next to me, his breath went in and out with a noise that sounded like a shriek followed by a sigh, "freeee-domm, freee-domm, freee-domm." Our tans deepened to the point where our body hair gleamed in contrast like a metallic weft. Cockroaches lay lifeless and papery on the patio, resembling an overturned container of medjool dates.
Nearby, snakes entangle themselves in a thicket of Bojangles wrappers and exotic vines. It is the kingdom of frog fairies and the occasional cat, sleek as a sheik. I stand a safe distance away on the steaming asphalt, like molten lava recently congealed. Above our heads, a building has misplaced a vent covering, leaving a hole in the bricks that looks like a giant flared nostril. My memories of summer in the cool concrete shadows of Khrushchobas are similarly some of the most vivid and cherished that I have.
A line from Elif Shafak's "Three Daughters of Eve" struck me. It reads, "Peri would come to understand that nothing swells the ego quite like a cause motivated by the delusion of pure selflessness." I've tried to describe our living situation as something I'm grateful for, something I recognize as subpar for everyone involved, and as an opportunity to learn from and immerse myself in without a savior complex. It's messy.
Choosing to give generously (money, time, emotion) can be challenging. Choosing to suffer systemic greed is delusional. A big moral dilemma since living here has been balancing choosing to help as I'm able with not liking it. What does it mean about me that I care and I help (sometimes), but with a grimace? I have lost the delusion of selflessness. Which is a great thing. Charity costs less than solidarity. And while chosen solidarity is valuable, unchosen solidarity lasts longer and isn't half as suspicious in "bad" neighborhoods as charity is. There is no glory in unchosen or imposed destitution. When we move away some day, I won't miss this apartment or this neighborhood. But I will remember that we learned to call it home.
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Parts of this essay appear in a different format in this anthology.
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