February 2011
Our landlady, a mother of two who had daughters studying overseas as well, had been kind enough to rent us The Mansion for five months rather than the minimum one year that was typical of housing contracts. What she had failed to mention, however, was that the dryer located in our sliver of a backyard had not worked since her last tenant.
We lived out of our suitcases for the first few days, encumbered with more pressing issues than doing the laundry, until none of us could ignore the fact that our stash of clean clothes was rapidly depleting. Wayne and Edwin decided, despite the lack of dryer, to use the washing machine and then air dry their clothes with a fan. The rest of us waited, perhaps not very hopefully, to see the result of their experiment.
It was to be futile, the cold winter air rendering their clothes perpetually damp. It was a pitiful state to be in. Large sacks of warm but dusty bedding lay around the house, taunting us with their presence. It was, perhaps, a combination of desperation and frustration that drove me, one afternoon, to go on a search for a laundry shop and declare that I would not be home until I had found one.
It sounds ludicrous now that I might feel lost on Guangfu Road, the main street that lay before our Mansion, but we had been in Taiwan for less than a week and I was still unaccustomed to speaking in Mandarin, let alone wandering around in chaotic Taiwanese traffic my own. Still, it was that or live with dirty clothes forever, so off I went in search of a laundry shop.
I probably wandered up and down Guangfu Road a few times that day, asking for directions in halting Mandarin every few shops until eventually the road swung into an alley. I would turn back, I told myself, if the alley did not reveal the the promised laundromat.
But the laundry gods had smiled upon me that day, and at the end of that small alley, beyond a Family Mart and an electronics store, lay a small laundromat run by two women who wondered at my excitement and abysmal Mandarin before I grabbed a name card and bounded back to the Mansion in excitement.
That evening, Yinghui, Aristocrats Kenny and Wilson, and I bundled all the bedding and laundry we could carry and heaved it to the laundromat, then huddled on small wooden stools as we tucked into steaming soup, which we declared our reward for finding a means to clean clothes.
Two hours later when we returned to the smell of clean clothes and the sight of the two ladies folding our laundry into neat piles, it was a very emotional moment. I am not even kidding. All the way home, we inhaled the fresh scent of laundry softener emanating from the piles of clothes, luxuriating in their residual warmth.
Laundry would thus become a weekly affair, an event we would sometimes plan our schedules around and rush home from school to attend to, so much did we love those two ladies and collecting a fresh load of clothes each time. But at that time, unbeknownst to us, the Laundry Sorting Game was in the pipeline and ready to emerge..
