Today, I am officially a creep.
As you may recall, we have this lovely woman who for the past several months has cleaned our house and watched Nico and whatnot three times a week. It’s been lovely, for the most part. That is until last month when she decided should couldn’t clean and watch Nico unless we raised her salary again… as I was handing her said salary (which is how she managed to finagle the first raise she got–I have no spine). We smoothed over the situation by just having her clean while I would haul Nico off on whatever adventures I could conjure up, which these days is a lot more tiring than it sounds like it should be (especially if the adventure must begin with wrestling that dear little monster into a much-hated snowsuit) and often involved spending money (Starbucks often made an appearance when I ran out of other ideas). Meanwhile, Christian also gave me the task of hunting for a new ayi.
The thing is we’ve been paying well above the average going rate from the beginning (thanks to Christian and my inability to bargain outside of the Beijing Silk Market). And that’s if you went by the “foreigner rate” which is generally at least twice as much as what a Chinese person would pay for the same services. So being approached for more and more money every other month was a bit of a hassle. It was also a stupid reason to fire someone. So let’s chalk this whole thing up to a personality conflict, as that’s what’s going to allow me to get any sleep at all tonight.
After almost a month of false leads, Christian and I did manage to track down a new ayi. She’s sweet, the wife of one of our local illegal taxi drivers who I like to call White Car Guy, Nico likes her as much as he likes anyone who isn’t his parents (which is a lot), and she’s willing to do full half time work for the same price we’ve been paying for nine to eleven hours (depending on when the ayi felt like going home) a week.
Mrs. Chen, the old ayi, was in such a good mood when she arrived this afternoon until I had her get on the phone with someone at Christian’s work to break the news of her impending termination (my Chinese is most definitely not good enough to do that deed). It was horrible. Like the entire room deflated. Mrs. Chen’s shoulders sank and her voice got lower and lower as the situation sunk in. It was like watching someone kick a puppy.
What made the situation even more awkward is Nico had no clue that his mom was being a jerk today to someone he likes a lot, so he was constantly reaching out to her and crawling up to her expecting her to play with him and whatnot, so she had to be strong in front of not only the evil woman who was firing her but also said evil woman’s sweet and innocent child.