A few months ago I briefly looked at apartments in Beijing before ultimately bargaining my rent down and staying put. After that experience, I wrote a post (rant, really) that summed up my feelings about apartment hunting in China. My major complaint was that Chinese landlords are unchallenged in their ability to select the worst, tackiest, ugliest possible furniture for any given apartment.

So I was understandably staggered when just a bit over a week ago I walked into a rental apartment in Shanghai that had some of the nicest furniture I had ever seen. The apartment was gorgeous, with a tasteful paint job, reasonable lighting (another rarity in a country obsessed with colored fluorescent tubes and baroque chandeliers), simple moldings and truly elegant and comfortable furniture. It was on Julu Rd., a ten minute walk from my office, and near a wet market and several pleasant restaurants and cafes. It was quiet and had a big balcony. To top it off, the rent was reasonable. Its only drawback was a microscopic, Hong Kong-style kitchen. But Mrs. Imagethief and I figured we could live with it if we kept our elbows in.

There was, naturally, a complication. I have cats. I had warned the agent beforehand that I have cats. “I have cats,” I said, to minimize confusion. “I don’t want to waste time. Make sure any apartment we look at doesn’t mind cats.” This instruction, along with several others of lower importance, like my budget range, was ignored.

As we looked at the apartment I asked the agent, “How does the owner feel about cats?”

“There are some concerns,” he said.

Undaunted, I said that I was interested. He said he would look further into the cat issue and let me know.

The next day I was requested to appear at the apartment along with my cats so the landlady could evaluate them. I explained that the cats were still in Beijing and an introduction would be somewhat impractical. A compromise was struck. Could I bring photographs instead?

I had Mrs. Imagethief send me the most cuddly, harmless, nauseatingly cute, aw-shucks photograph of the cats that she could locate (see below) and I printed it out in color. What I didn’t point out is that the reason the cats are so serene is this photo is that they are in shock from being transported from Singapore to Beijing and spending 48 hours in Chinese animal impound. In a spectacular piece of extra-credit work, Mrs. Imagethief also shot a digital video that convincingly shows that the cats will energetically scratch a scratching post but cannot be enticed to sink their claws into the sofa. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get that video into a portable format in time to take with me.

I arrived at the apartment at the designated time and waited along with the agent. When the landlady swished in I knew I was in trouble. She was immaculate. From the perfect hairstyle down to the tiny pair of sparkly, silver shoes, she was a picture of high-fashion perfection. She also radiated a brittle arrogance that I associated immediately with one or two of my particularly fabulous ex-colleagues, a trademark of those Chinese women that have painstakingly and fastidiously elevated themselves above the long-underwear dowdiness that still pervades so much of the country.

She did not, in short, appear to be the kind of person well-disposed to a dusting of cat hair on every surface.

She was also not the landlady. She was the landlady’s good friend. The landlady herself was pregnant in Hong Kong, and this woman had been entrusted with the task of vetting potential tenants. It was a responsibility she took seriously. Where did I work? How long had I been in China? Was I single? Did I absolutely have to keep the cats? Wouldn’t stuffed cats do just as well?

Still, she was supportive in her own way. “I can see that you have good taste,” she said with the deadpan sincerity with which you might compliment an extremely simple third-grader, “because you like this apartment.”

You see, she explained, the concern is that the furniture is all imported. The bed alone, I was warned, was worth some RMB 20,000. And it was nothing against animals in general. She had a dog, after all. (I could picture it — something microscopic and high strung. A colicky cotton ball with a diamond collar, protruding eyes and an angry snarl.) Dogs stay on the floor. But cats, well, they like to jump on top of things. And her friend, I had to understand, was her colleague from Vogue, and she was very serious about the condition of her apartment.

Vogue.

I had watched “The Devil Wears Prada” a week or two before and had laughed off the attitude as Hollywood hyperbole. And yet here it was in front of me, big as life. They really are that self-consciously fabulous. I am the product of a bookishly unstylish bloodline and I have no experience dealing with this sort of person. It was like being in the presence of an extremely fashionable space alien. I mean, what common ground do you really have?

Well, she had heard of my company. I guess that was something.

She said she would go back and discuss it with her friend. She also suggested that they would put a list of all the furniture and its values into the contract (actually a sensible idea). Then she turned to the agent and in Mandarin laid down the bottom line on rent. It was incrementally higher than I wanted to pay, and I was slightly annoyed that she didn’t say it directly to me. But it didn’t matter. I had already written off the apartment.

Even if her absent friend had agreed to my tenancy I had mentally abandoned it about the time I was indirectly complemented on my taste. The world is full of imperfect and obsessive landlords, but the thought of having a phalanx of neurotic fashionistas riding shotgun on my tenancy was more than I could tolerate. It wasn’t just the cats. I’m big, klutzy and drop things. I sit on the couch after sweaty workouts. Mrs. Imagethief and I cook smokey, spicy things that stink up the house, and then eat off the coffee table while we watch TV. I drop my underwear on the bedroom floor. Mrs. Imagethief and I would have made noisy, spring-rattling whoopee on that expensive, imported bed. There is a reason why leases have “normal wear and tear” clauses, and that reason is me.

And I have enough stress in my life without having it transmitted at me by a landlady who’s going to worry if I sit on the couch in riveted Levis, let alone do any of the things above.

The next day, even before we heard back from the landlady’s friend, I called the agent and told him to forget it. That was probably exactly what the owner was hoping for, but it spared us all the uncomfortable last dance.

I defaulted to my second choice. It’s in an uglier building and it’s a tattier apartment. The couch looks like it was lifted from a frat house yard sale and the dining room table is so hopeless I told the agent to get rid of it. But the place is big, nicely painted, and has an enormous kitchen and an unobstructed view of the entire eastern half of the city. It’s a five minute walk from the office.

And the landlord doesn’t care about cats. For that kind of serenity, I’ll go downmarket.

Would you trust them on your couch?

The first symptom was the complete evaporation of his appetite. To know Tiny is to know how alarming this was. He’s not so much a cat as a fuzzy, ironically named jet engine that ingests all loose objects in his path, and, perforce, emits a noxious stream of pollutants and gas from the rear. This cat can hear the workmen at Goldfields open their tins of luncheon meat seventeen floors below us. He never met a meal he didn’t like.

Appetite loss turned into vomiting. Finally, we awoke one morning just before the Spring holiday to find cat puke meticulously arranged on every fabric surface in the house (couch, living room rug and hallway runner), and thought it might, perhaps, be time to go to the vet.

We hoisted Tiny off to the Beijing KPK Veterinary World Hospital, in the vet and pet shop ghetto on Gongtibeilu, west of the Worker’s Gymnasium. It didn’t take long for Dr. Xiang to make a diagnosis: liver failure.

My cat has liver failure? From what? His late night Maotai benders?

Brought on by obesity, you see. She pointed to a simple silhouette chart on her office wall, apparently designed for dullards like me, which showed a thin cat shape, normal cat shape, and obese cat shape. “He is like this,” she said, pointing at “obese cat”. A highly scientific assessment of his prognosis followed. “Maybe he’ll live, maybe he’ll die in the next week.” All hope lay in an aggressive program of intravenous medication to be administered every day until he recovered or expired.

Well, that’s settled then. We’ll just leave him here. Phone us up when he’s better or dead.

Not so fast. The Beijing KPK Veterinary World Hospital does not board animals. We would have to bring him in every day. My fantasies of a well deserved, indolent Spring Festival crumbled. I don’t want to seem callous, but it kills your vacation to go to the vet every day. It’s the immovable scheduling object that everything else must be scheduled around. Shall we go to Longqingxia to look at the ice sculptures? Sure, after the vet. Shall we have a long, indulgent breakfast at Steak and Eggs? You bet, but remember, we have to go the vet. Shall we go to Chaoyang Park and have a snowball fight? Absolutely. Right after we go to the goddamned vet!

We began a daily schlep of dragging Tiny out from under the couch, cramming him into his cat carrier, wrapping it in a jacket to insulate him from the wintry, Siberian blast ripping through Beijing, and taxiing up to the vet for his fix.

Under the People’s Olympic Beautification Plan, line item 857, Beijing is upgrading its fleet of disintegrating, rattletrap Xiali taxis to swish, new Hyundai Sonatas. This has three consequences. First, it is increasing the bottom-end taxi-fare from 1.2 yuan (14 cents) a kilometer to 1.6 yuan (19 cents) a kilometer. A scandalous outrage.

Second, it is killing off a singular Beijing experience. Xialis (and many of the equally dire Citroens) are grungy and cramped beyond compare. Your average adult American has to break his own legs to sit behind the driver’s cage of a Xiali. During the sweaty summer, when I was going for job interviews, Xiali seatbelts often left broad, diagonal black stripes on my white business shirts. I learned to forgo the belts even though there are few experiences as nakedly terrifying as bombing through Beijing traffic at high speed in a car with the build and ride of a Radio Flyer wagon.

The third consequence of the upgrade is that it has made taxi drivers choosy about what they will carry in their elegant, new cars. A Xiali driver will take your camel, if you can find a way to squeeze it in. (Hint: break its legs.) But Hyundais? No cats, please. One Hyundai taxi driver, after refusing to take us, kindly warned the driver of the next taxi in line (also a Hyundai) not to take us, as we were carrying a cat. Another Hyundai driver thoughtfully offered to put Tiny in the boot (trunk, Bob).

I think this is all part of the great, Beijing double standard. As I have noted before, this is a dog town. My apartment building is infested with little dogs, and at least two large enough to be officially illegal inside the fourth ring road. Every evening the courtyard is a riot of minuscule dogs in precious winter outfits: checked coats, little dog sweaters, and such. I bet dogs get to ride in the swish taxis. But cat people are viewed with suspicion:

What? You don’t have a dog? Didn’t you get the memo?

(Of course, they also eat dog in Beijing, but there is clearly a mental separation between eatin’ dogs and huggin’ dogs. However, a few days ago we had lunch in one of our favorite cheap and cheerful jia chang cai joints, just across from the vet, and we noticed both a dog-meat special on the menu and an assortment of conspicuously doggy noises drifting out of the kitchen. Maybe the chef was feeding scraps to his pet…)

Through cajolery, charm and luck we managed to taxi to the vet every day. And every day we would go through the same routine. We would take Tiny into the examination room and decant him from his box. Dr. Xiang would ask us if he was eating (yeah, some). She would gravely inspect the color of his skin and eyes (still yellow). Her eyes would narrow; did he poop? Then she would tsk a bit, write a daily prescription and send us to the treatment room. There we would pay 100 yuan, the nurses would greet Tiny with the usual exclamations of “Aiyohhh, so fat!” and he would be wired up for his cocktail of meds.

The IV drip is Beijing’s catchall approach to veterinary medication. Whatever your pet, whatever its problem, the Beijing KPK Veterinary World Hospital has an IV for it. Cat, dog, parakeet, hamster, goldfish, whatever, they’ll needle it up for you. And every animal gets the same thing: a straw-colored concoction that looks like piss.

From the crowd in the treatment room, winter was scything through the little pets of Beijing. Large, bullet-headed Chinese men, who would have owned ridgebacks or rottweilers in any other city, fussed over comically tiny, bug-eyed puppies wheezing and hacking their way through various ailments. One man tried to control three diarrhea-ridden husky puppies. Another miserable, palm-sized pup vomited onto its owner’s lap with mechanical regularity. Every animal was getting a drip. There was a sense of solidarity at the Beijing KPK Veterinary World, all of us spending the biggest holiday of the year cradling our pets, surrounded by the bunting of the IV lines.

After a few days, Tiny began to recover. The vet commented on his rude glow. We started having to wrap him in a towel to restrain him during his drip. The bottle runs slowly when your re-invigorated cat is struggling to escape. Over three weeks we graduated from IVs to daily shots, to home treatment, to the ol’ jet engine. Tiny has had his second narrow escape in Beijing. I am out another 1500 kuai, grudging taxi rides included. And I am reminded, once again, of the folly of carrying cats to Beijing.

Now, I can hear you thinking, cats is cats. No doubt they can be had a buck a bushel on any Beijing street corner. And you’d be right, although, to split things finely, the Beijingoise are more partial to little, yappy dogs than to cats.

Furthermore, you will be thinking, Chinese chefs are notorious for being able to conjure delicacies from the carcass of almost any animal. After all, kitchen-bound civit cats (not actually cats) were widely blamed for SARS and a stroll through any Chinese wet market will reveal that, with creativity, almost any creature can be stir-fried, braised or pickled in its own gastric juices. As the (possibly apocryphal) saying goes, if it walks with its back to the sun, the Chinese will eat it.

However, I believe that refers to the southern Chinese, who seem to be more gastronomically adventurous than the northerners who populate Beijing. Although dog is an expensive delicacy in Beijing, most local restaurants offer little more exotic than mutton and eel. Considering I’ve had fruit bat and squirrel in Singapore, that is hardly anything to get worked up about.

So I wasn’t really worried about my cats ending up in the stewpot. I was much more worried about animal import bureaucracy. After all, along with gunpowder, moveable type, paper money, neurosurgery, arbitrage, lip balm and the weather vane, the Chinese invented bureaucracy, and they’ve had four millennia to perfect it. When you consider that the national symbol of China, the Great Wall, is the world’s first government boondoggle, and it was an active project for 2000 years, it’s clear that bureaucracy here is world-class.

My company had thoughtfully recommended a local real-estate outfit to help me find an apartment. I asked them if they could provide information on pet importation into China. “Not recommended” was their official advice. I had the receptionist at our office do a little more research, and her results were more encouraging. With the appropriate documentation and inoculations, and a small fee for veterinary examinations, it should be possible to import the cats.

Meanwhile, my wife, Olivia, was busy researching the problem on her end. Singapore, it seems, has created a cottage industry to help expatriates get their fuzzy friends into and out of the country. After soliciting bids from a few such companies, she selected an outfit called Mitchville that claimed to be able to handle preparation of all necessary paperwork and inoculations and arrangement of shipping.  Mitchville also assured us that, with appropriate documentation, it would not be necessary to quarantine the cats in Beijing, but that they would have to be restricted to our apartment for thirty days.

That was important to us. The idea of our cats in Chinese institutional care for a month was too horrible to contemplate. With our confidence thus bolstered, we decided to ship the cats to China to live with us.

Naturally, it did not go well.

First, Tiny sensed something was up and ran away the night Olivia left for China, forcing her to search the neighborhood to find him.

Then, after an uneventful flight, the real trouble began. As I waited in the international arrival area with our driver, I got a call from a distraught Olivia. The Chinese authorities were going to impound the cats for thirty days. Mitchville had been wrong. According to the customs official that Olivia was speaking to, the regulations had changed just two months previously, and thirty days quarantine was now mandatory.

While I waited helplessly outside, Olivia had it out with the customs authorities in Mandarin for an hour. She pleaded, cajoled, bargained, and made oblique references to “working things out” on the spot. It was all to no effect, and a morose and tearful Olivia emerged into the waiting area while an equally miserable Tiny and Xiong were packed off to Chinese kitty hoosegow.

Well, what do you do in this situation? Call the embassy?

“Consular services, how may I help you?”

“Uh, yeah, the Chinese authorities are detaining, well, um, my cats.”

“I see, sir. The ambassador has the gravest concern for your situation, and he will be in touch with the Chinese authorities immediately.”

“Really?”

“No, moron. Buy a  freakin’ clue.” Click!

“Hello?”

Maybe not. In fact, you do what we did, and call Mitchfield and read them the riot act and tell them to get their Chinese contact burning up the phone lines to find out what alternatives exist. We were pretty sure that thirty days in the Chinese hole would leave our cats dead or irreparably damaged, and Xiong, having been hit by a taxi in his younger days, was neurotic and spooky enough already.

After twenty-four hours, Mitchfield came back with the goods. As always in China, everything was, in the end, negotiable. The cats could be returned to us immediately. There was just one obstacle: six hundred US bucks in cash, if you please.

Once again, I can hear what you’re thinking. Six hundred bucks? Dude, it’s cats! They are practically free. Heck, ours are Singapore drain cats. They were free! That is, if you don’t count the thousands of dollars worth of lifetime vet bills, inoculations and the recent air-freight charges. But, then, why throw good money after bad?

Because, ultimately, they were our cats. And, god help me, I love the obnoxious, smelly, little beasts. And I was moving my wife to Beijing and she was going to be studying full time in the house, and I knew the cats could make the difference between her feeling like she was at home, and her feeling lonely and isolated.

So I barged my way into the Bank of China after closing time and wrestled the US dollars out of my account (no mean feat at the best of times). The next day Olivia handed it to a representative of the local moving company working with Mitchfield, and later that day two dirty, stressed-out but otherwise unharmed cats were delivered to our apartment. Net total detention: two days.

Ultimately, I’m glad we brought the cats to China. Although we were rewarded for our efforts and expense with month of ungrateful complaints (we can’t go outside; there are no lizards to kill; this place smells funny; I hate you; etc.), they do make our apartment feel like home. And my clothes wouldn’t be my clothes if they weren’t perpetually dusted with cat hair.

But if you are considering moving to China, and you ask my advice on bringing your pets, I have two words:

Not recommended.