What Went Wrong in a Chinese-Run House in Chad

From the airplane window, the land appeared almost uniformly yellow, stretched flat and uninterrupted beneath the wing. It was not the yellow of sunlight, but of dust and sand pressed into a vast plain, where roads were barely distinguishable from the earth around them. As the plane descended, the color did not change—it only grew closer. When the cabin door finally opened, heat rushed in immediately, dense and unapologetic, wrapping itself around the body before there was time to adjust. Outside, people moved through the glare wearing long sleeves, as if skin here had learned its own rules. Motorcycles dominated the roads, fast and loosely choreographed, riders weaving through traffic without helmets, without hesitation. Cars sped past on sand-colored streets, engines loud, windows open. I was driven through the city in a modest vehicle by a local professor—someone widely respected, I was later told—yet the ride itself felt precarious, carried forward by momentum more than by control. Only later did I begin to name the place where all of this was unfolding: N’Djamena, Chad.

I had come here knowing that I would stay for two years. I was an early-career, female, Chinese researcher preparing for long-term fieldwork, and I arrived carrying not only academic plans but a quiet accumulation of unease. Before Chad, I had been based in North America, trying—often unsuccessfully—to prepare from afar. Emails to local academics were slow or unanswered. Online information was scarce and fragmented. What I knew instead came mostly through warnings: unstable electricity, unreliable internet, extreme heat, limited medical resources, and social norms that did not always favor women living alone. None of this was abstract to me. It translated quickly into practical anxieties—how to work, how to rest, how to remain functional without constantly negotiating risk. In that context, housing became the most urgent concern almost immediately. Before interviews, before archives, before learning how to move through the city with confidence, I needed a place where my body could settle, where nights were predictable, and where daily life did not consume all the energy meant for research.

In those first days, I made decisions less out of principle than out of necessity. I did not have the time—or the emotional capacity—to search extensively through unfamiliar networks, negotiate in a language I was still struggling to command, or assess safety across neighborhoods I could not yet read. The city was new, the social codes opaque, and my days already crowded with administrative tasks and introductions. When a Chinese contact offered help, it felt like a practical solution rather than a cultural statement. I assumed, perhaps too easily, that sharing a language and a background would reduce uncertainty. On my fourth day in Chad, I moved into a house rented by a Chinese businessman, Hang. The house was spacious, secure, and unusually well equipped by local standards. That night, I slept deeply for the first time since arriving. What the house offered was not luxury, but relief—a sense that daily life could run without constant vigilance. At that moment, convenience felt indistinguishable from safety, and safety was the foundation I needed to begin everything else.

Hang was a fellow Chinese around my age who had come here to build a life from scratch. In those first days, I read him as a compatriot trying to make it in a place where he was also exposed—linguistically, institutionally, and socially. I assumed that if he wanted to earn money here, he would also have to take my well-being seriously, because a long-term tenant only stays when life is stable. And in many ways, he did. Before a cook was even in place, he took me out almost every day for Chinese meals—expensive but consistently good—and that warmth mattered more than I expected. When I mentioned practical needs—hot water, a washing machine, taps that needed fixing, a trash bin—he tried to solve them, quickly and without hesitation. He stocked the house with drinks, fruit, and meat, and he had brought from China the rice noodles and grains I liked—things I could not easily find in local supermarkets. When he left for China, he even gave me emergency cash and handed me small items he thought I might need, like his hair dryer. 

Surprisingly, however, what sustained me in those early weeks was a quiet coordination that formed by the local workers inside the house. The guard learned my routines without needing explanations—when I left, when I returned, when to check in with a phone call. The cook learned my body before my words: when I woke up, what I preferred, and that unfinished food was not waste but something I would return to later, between meals, when hunger or heat crept back in. He noticed that I liked watermelon and began cutting it in advance, storing it quietly in the fridge. Around the same time, local friends started bringing watermelons as gifts, and I would naturally share them with the cook and the guard. It felt ordinary, almost automatic—food circulated, care circulated, nothing needed to be explained. This was a Chinese household in form, but not in spirit: a space mediated through a Chinese intermediary, yet held together by local rhythms, mutual observation, and a kind of everyday trust that did not announce itself.

It was precisely this ordinariness that made the first rupture so jarring. When Hang noticed the watermelons being shared, he warned me sharply to keep my distance from local workers. The comment landed strangely—not as advice, but as a boundary suddenly drawn across something that had never felt negotiable. In that moment, trivial as it seemed, I sensed the house was no longer a single space but a divided one, governed by different moral logics that had so far coexisted without confrontation.

Looking back, there were early signs—small frictions that I noticed but chose not to read too much into. They appeared first not in conflict, but in stories told sideways, through other people. I learned that the interpreter, who had been helping him navigate contracts and negotiations, was paid a modest salary by local standards. When Hang returned to China for a month, he cut that salary in half, reasoning that work would slow down in his absence. For the interpreter, who supported an extended family, this was not a temporary inconvenience but an existential rupture. He eventually left. There were also moments when he would pass through the house without greeting anyone, days when instructions were delivered abruptly, stripped of explanation. None of this felt dramatic enough to name as a problem. I was inclined to rationalize it: Hang worked relentlessly; he seemed constantly pressed by logistics, money, and responsibility, operating in a country where he felt linguistically and institutionally exposed. I told myself that different pressures produced different calculations, and that it was not my place to judge. Compared to the stability I experienced inside the house—the quiet reliability of the cook, the attentiveness of the guard—these moments felt peripheral, easy to excuse. I did not yet understand that what I was witnessing were not isolated decisions, but early expressions of a deeper logic: one in which efficiency trumped relationship, and money quietly replaced trust as the primary language of order.

During the month Hang was away, my life settled into a stability that surprised me by how complete it felt. What held it together was not comfort in the abstract, but a working system built on trust, routine, and mutual understanding. I trusted the cook enough to give him my keys. He would arrive early, let himself in, do his work quietly, and lock the door carefully when he left, always making sure I knew the house was secure. I trusted him with money as well, and that trust quickly became practical. Without a car, and without Hang’s preference for expensive supermarkets, the cook began sourcing food through local markets, taking motorcycle taxis to buy fresher ingredients at a fraction of the price. Every expense was written down. We kept a small notebook recording purchases, amounts, and dates—simple, precise, and transparent. When I gave him cash to shop, he returned the change without being asked. When he was short of money, he told me directly how much he needed to borrow, and when his salary was later paid, he repaid every franc exactly as promised.

This honesty was paired with attentiveness. I wrote French instructions line by line; he read them carefully and adjusted his work according to my preferences. He treated his job with seriousness shaped by long experience—over a decade working as a cook for a large Chinese company, trained in hygiene, discipline, and kitchen safety. He kept shared spaces orderly not out of obligation but conviction, once telling me that a clean environment was necessary for a calm mind. At forty-five, he spoke often about dignity in work and responsibility, especially as a father of five children living far away in Moundou. He worried about school fees, missed his family openly, and still showed up every day with patience and consistency. When I came back exhausted from fieldwork—anxious, overloaded, stretched thin—a bowl of porridge, a pot of soup, or Chinese noodles and dumplings could make the house feel like home again.

The guard became part of this quiet structure of care. He took on small errands when asked—errands I sometimes created deliberately, so he could earn a little extra, knowing how thin his salary was and how easily a delayed payment could mean going hungry. 

None of this felt dramatic, and yet during that month I slept deeply, worked efficiently, and felt an unfamiliar ease. Even in the heat, even in one of “the world’s poorest countries”, life felt unexpectedly coherent. Happiness, I realized then, arrived not through abundance, but through a fragile, well-balanced system that made daily life feel safe, predictable, and quietly human.

Hang did not tell me the day he was coming back. For weeks, the three of us had spoken about his return in the abstract—the boss will be back soon—with a mixture of nervousness and anticipation. Then the expected day came and went. On the evening of the following day, without warning, headlights swept across my window. I was in the middle of dinner. A Chadian friend had come from far away just to bring me a few things, knowing how difficult daily logistics could be for a foreigner here. It was already late, and sending him away without food felt wrong, so I invited him to stay for dinner. That was when Hang arrived. He did not greet my friend. Instead, he told me bluntly that I should not bring other people to eat in the house—that outsiders were not allowed inside. I explained that this was a colleague from work, but the explanation did little to soften the moment. His discomfort with local people was already visible, and from that evening on, the atmosphere in the house cooled abruptly, as if a switch had been flipped.

The next day, the questioning began. Hang demanded to know why the eggs were gone—why a full tray had become only three or four. He asked why a large bag of peanuts had turned into a small one, how I could possibly have eaten so many peanuts in a single month. I knew the answers immediately. I train regularly and eat eggs almost every day; eggs disappearing quickly was not strange at all. As for the peanuts, the cook explained calmly that the heat had caused part of the batch to mold, so he had thrown some away. Hang, however, insisted the cook must have taken them. 

Around that time, several other Chinese businessmen happened to be visiting, and their comments only reinforced his suspicions. They spoke with certainty: local people steal whenever they can; it is only a question of how much. When I said I had never seen either the cook or the guard steal anything, they laughed it off: “You haven’t seen it because they still want to stay. If you ever really saw them stealing, it would mean they were ready to leave.” Others went further, suggesting that the cook’s salary was already too high and could easily be reduced. Hang, worried that he was being played in a country where he had no local footing, began saying openly that he would fire the cook within days.

At the same time, Hang began assigning the cook additional work. Despite being forty-five and hired specifically to cook, he was told to clean rooms and take on domestic chores. Hang explained that since fewer people were living in the house now, there was no need to hire a cleaner, so the cook could simply do more. This stood in stark contrast to the month before. When Hang was away, I had repeatedly told the cook to rest, to focus only on cooking, to stop cleaning shared spaces if he felt tired. The shift was immediate and unmistakable. What had once been a balanced arrangement built on mutual respect was now being redefined through suspicion, control, and a steady narrowing of trust.

That same night, the electricity was cut. Power outages were not rare in N’Djamena, but this one felt pointed. I lay awake in the heat, unsure whether it was coincidence, infrastructure failure, or something deliberate. By morning, it was clear that it was deliberate.

At noon, I found myself sitting in the middle of the first formal mediation between Hang and the Chadian landlord. I had not planned to be there. I had not volunteered. My French was still clumsy, full of pauses and approximations. Yet I became the interpreter by default—by proximity, by the simple fact that I was the only one present who could move between the two worlds, however imperfectly. What unfolded over the next hour felt surreal. I was translating sentences I barely understood myself, trying to soften tones, filling gaps with intuition, all while the temperature rose and tempers followed.

The landlord—an older Chadian man in his sixties, addressed as Papa—was calm but visibly angry. His English was good, far better than my French, and his authority was unmistakable. He spoke not in accusations but in principles. Respect, he said, again and again. Respect for agreements. Respect for boundaries. Respect for people. Yet he was also the one who had cut the electricity. That contradiction forced a question I could not avoid: what makes a man with status decide to cut power to a house? The answer, I learned, was not “electricity” as such. Hang had been in the house for four months and had not paid the electricity bill. But the bill itself was only the spark. Beneath it sat older disputes that had never been settled openly—two months of difficult contract negotiations, repeated arguments, mismatched expectations, and a growing sense of humiliation on the landlord’s side.

If anything, I sensed a Chinese man carrying his own grievances: new to the country, constantly negotiating with a landlord he did not fully trust, and trying to protect himself from being taken advantage of—sometimes in ways that later hardened into suspicion. He expected the landlord to solve problems that he, as a foreign businessman, could not solve easily. At the same time, he had taken on repairs that he believed were the landlord’s responsibility—patching ceilings to prevent leaks, installing appliances, adding a water pump—then felt cheated for having paid both rent and renovation costs. The landlord, in Hang’s telling, kept expanding his own rights during negotiations and “always tried to win,” which fed Hang’s assumption that locals were trying to trap or exploit him. Hang also complained that the landlord had not cleared storage space as promised and had not complied with the agreement. 

The landlord’s account was different. He said Hang did not greet him, spoke to him in a way that felt commanding, and treated him as an obstacle rather than a person. He described Hang as agité—easily agitated—and warned that people avoid working with someone who is emotionally volatile and fundamentally distrustful. He wanted earlier conflicts addressed first. Hang dismissed that logic as backward. For Hang, the past was the past; the only thing worth discussing was moving the electricity meter into his own name and minimizing contact.

As Hang spoke, his vocabulary returned again and again to money and efficiency. The landlord’s vocabulary returned again and again to dignity and relationship. As I translated back and forth, I felt the limits of translation in my body. They were not arguing about electricity. They were arguing about hierarchy, legitimacy, and whose rules mattered more. By the end of the mediation, the electricity issue was postponed, not settled. Grievances were aired, not addressed. I walked away with a sinking realization: the explosion between Hang and the cook was not an isolated incident. It was part of a larger pattern unfolding simultaneously on multiple fronts. The same logic—suspicion, control, and a refusal to treat relationships as anything other than transactions—was consuming the household.

The next day, the conflict escalated. What unsettled me most was not that nothing had been resolved in the first mediation, but that the landlord cut the electricity unilaterally and Hang responded unilaterally. Without informing the landlord, Hang asked another Chinese businessman—someone familiar with local procedures—to go to the electricity company and transfer the electricity account into a different name. It was done quickly and efficiently, entirely without the landlord’s knowledge. By noon, the power was back. Fans started spinning again; the house breathed. But the relief did not last. The landlord noticed almost immediately. He came over, realized what had been done, and this time his anger was unmistakable. He cut the electricity again, deliberately, and stayed in the courtyard.

What followed was a scene I had never witnessed before. The electricity was off, the heat suffocating, mosquitoes swarming. The landlord, usually composed, raised his voice and refused to leave. Quietly, the guard—barely twenty—dragged a chair from inside and placed it next to the landlord. The landlord noticed and pointed at the chair: “You see? This young man knows what respect is.” He was not speaking about money, contracts, or power. He was speaking about being seen as a human being. 

In the middle of that confrontation, the cook tried to slow everything down. He suggested something practical: since nothing could be solved that evening, we should all go together to the electricity company the next morning—showing up together, acknowledging each other, keeping the conflict within a shared process.

That night, power remained off. I lay awake again, listening to the city and my own thoughts spiraling. One side moved through shortcuts and replacements, assuming problems could be fixed by changing names on paper. The other insisted on acknowledgement and process, even at the cost of escalating tension. In the middle stood a cook whose job title carried little authority, yet who held more moral weight in that moment than anyone else. The house was no longer just a place I lived in. It had become a site where different worlds collided—loudly, painfully, and without a shared moral grammar.

After those rounds of mediation, the cook remained what he had always been: steady, composed, and unexpectedly generous in the emotional labor he carried. He tried to soften the atmosphere, telling the landlord that living with Chinese employers required patience, that cultural differences often produced misunderstandings, and that not every conflict meant one side was purely right and the other purely wrong. He spoke gently, not as someone defending a position, but as someone trying to keep a fragile space from collapsing. The electricity was then restored.

None of this changed how Hang saw him. The accusations returned, now directed at the cook more openly. Hang began saying the cook was “complaining” to me—coming to me whenever he felt wronged, asking me to witness incidents, presenting himself as a victim. In Hang’s eyes, the cook was no longer simply an employee; he had become a problem.

One incident became a turning point. Hang hosted guests in an evening. He bought excessive amounts of food, cooked heavily, drank freely, and then ordered leftovers to be thrown away—including a pot that still contained meat. The cook followed the instruction and disposed of everything together. The next day—or perhaps the day after—Hang no longer remembered what he had said. He demanded to know where the meat had gone. The accusation came quickly: the meat must have been stolen. Cornered and humiliated, the cook went through the trash, retrieved the discarded food, and showed it as proof. The value of the meat was not the point. His integrity was.

What made these moments unbearable was not a single incident, but their repetition. Instructions changed, accusations resurfaced, and trust was questioned again and again. At the same time, Hang delayed the cook’s salary for nearly a month. With a family to support and no certainty about when he would be paid, the cook continued borrowing small amounts of money from me—openly, honestly, always keeping track. I could see how deeply this arrangement pained him. Needing help was one thing; being repeatedly suspected of dishonesty was another.

Eventually the accumulation became too much. Arguments escalated. Voices rose. Demands for wages turned urgent. The decision to leave came abruptly. From Hang’s side, there was outrage: why would the cook resign without speaking to him first? Why come to me instead? From my side, there was only helplessness. I was not the employer. The contract was not with me. There was nothing I could resolve.

I remember the moment he packed his belongings—the careful way he folded his clothes, the controlled tone of his goodbye. Then, after leaving, he did something none of us expected: he went to the police, asking for overtime pay and compensation for transport back to Moundou. Those claims came late, almost awkwardly. When he received his first salary, he did not ask for overtime at all. At that point, he still believed the situation might be endured, repaired, or at least explained. By the time he went to the police, the issue was no longer unpaid hours. It was the accumulation of suspicion and humiliation—the constant need to prove innocence, sometimes by digging through trash, and the repeated denial that anything wrong had been done to him. What he was really demanding was acknowledgement: that he was not invisible, and that integrity mattered even when the amount of money at stake was small.

One morning, officers came to the house with a summons. They were calm and procedural; to them, this was a labour dispute. Hang’s immediate reaction was to insist the police take the cook away. Not to listen. Not to explain. Not to appear in person. He relied on others to negotiate and deflect. The cook, who had turned to the police as a last resort rather than a threat, was suddenly reframed as the problem.

After the cook left, I cried uncontrollably. The intensity surprised me, because the house itself remained intact. Electricity could be restored; groceries could be replaced; routines could be rebuilt. But what had collapsed was the fragile triangle that had made daily life coherent: the cook, the guard, and me. With one corner gone, the structure folded inward. I felt exposed in ways I could not fully explain.

People around me noticed before I spoke. The guard asked more often if I was okay. Neighbors and friends, upon hearing the cook had left, responded not with curiosity but with concern: “That must make things much harder for you.” Their kindness was real, and yet it could not replace what I had lost. The pressure moved into my body. Headaches became frequent. Fatigue settled into my limbs. Concentration became harder. I recognised the pattern: stress that had nowhere to go, turning inward.

A new cook arrived almost immediately. Meals resumed. The kitchen was occupied again. From the outside, the household looked functional. But the texture of daily life had changed, and my body registered it before my mind could rationalise it. The food was heavier, oilier, often overly spicy, and the kitchen became a space of instruction rather than shared rhythm. The new cook was obedient and caused no conflict. He followed Hang’s directions precisely and spoke little. Yet the warmth was gone—no curiosity, no pride, no mutual adjustment. The kitchen no longer held the quiet, unspoken care that had once made eating effortless and grounding. I found myself negotiating daily, repeating the same requests, and still ending up tired. Nothing dramatic happened, but the environment began to feel subtly hostile—not because of crime or overt threat, but because trust had been replaced by vigilance. The house still functioned, but it no longer held me. Once that realization arrived—not as an opinion, but as a bodily certainty—I knew I had to leave.

I found a new place through a friend who connected me to a local agent. The process moved fast. The agent identified a house where other foreigners were already living, which mattered to me because it signaled a baseline of stability and shared norms. The property was rented out by a doctor, and a local intermediary handled practical arrangements. The house was dusty and unfinished; it was not a polished, ready-to-move-in option. But by then, I was no longer chasing perfection. After what I had lived through, my standards became simpler and stricter: I needed privacy, predictability, and a landlord-side arrangement that would not swing with suspicion or impulse. If those conditions were met, I could tolerate inconvenience and gradual improvement.

When I listed what had to be fixed—an air conditioner in the bedroom, basic utilities and appliances, essentials like a trash bin and a rug, a functioning stove and gas supply, a better refrigerator—the response was calm and practical. They agreed item by item, without drama, without performance, without psychological pressure. The message was straightforward: they wanted a long-term tenant who would live quietly and steadily. That was the priority.

This is the point I keep returning to, because it is the real lesson behind the entire housing story. Renting a house was never just about a house. It was never about “Chadian culture” versus “Chinese culture,” as if culture were a slogan that could explain everything. Of course money matters, and no one here is naïve about that. But money does not replace a more basic principle: people have to be treated as people. Respect and trust are not decorative virtues. They begin with a cognitive choice—whether one recognizes the other as fully human, rather than as something to manage, a risk to control, or a stereotype formed in advance.

For now, I am still a newcomer here. My life in Chad remains unfinished and uncertain. I have not yet fully settled into the new house, and yet I already feel an unexpected attachment to the old one—not to its facilities, but to the everyday human encounters that formed around it. I do not have a car, so I walk everywhere. And walking here takes time, not because the roads are long, but because people stop to greet me. Neighbors pause to ask how I am, to practice French with me, to offer help. Many of them do not live in these houses—this is considered a wealthy neighborhood—but work here as guards or caretakers. They ask sincerely whether I am settling in well and sometimes joke that one day they will name their children after me. They are often surprised that I speak French at all. I am not fluent, but I speak willingly, and that seems to matter.

If I walk a little further, past the houses under construction, I reach a stretch of road where dust rises endlessly. Poorer families sit there breaking stones, selling gravel. The same women and children are always there. Each time I pass, they teach me a few words of Arabic, call out greetings, invite me to play with their children. When my research exhausts me, when my body feels heavy and my mind overwhelmed, a short walk along that road can steady me again. No one asks me for money. Perhaps they know I am not one of the wealthy foreigners with cars and drivers. Perhaps they simply recognize something else.

The landscape has not changed. The ground is still yellow, dry, and dusty. Even in a wealthy neighborhood, the road outside is sand, and each passing car sends clouds of dust into the air, blurring vision for seconds at a time. But within this dust are people—watching, greeting, remembering. Their attention is warm, steady, unmistakably human. It does not depend on contracts, salaries, or nationality. And after everything that happened inside that house—after mistrust hardened into routine, after responsibility was displaced, after the simplest acts of care were reframed as threats—I find myself returning to a single theme: in places where institutions are fragile and life is already hard, what holds a person together is not comfort, and not money, but the everyday decision to recognize another human being as fully human.

(All photographs shown in this article were taken by the author. Names and some identifying details in the text have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.)

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*This piece has been awarded Second Prize in the category of non-fiction in the Second Global China-Africa Writing Competition (2026) held by CASIN (China-Africa Shanghai International Network). The competition is managed by Dr. Flair Donglai Shi (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), under the directorship of Dr. Jodie Yuzhou Sun (Fudan University). The judging panel of 2026 consisted of Dr. Lifang Zhang (Tsinghua University), Dr. Kaiyang Xu (China Foreign Affairs University), and Mr. Eric Mupona (Zhejiang University). The piece was originally written in English. The Elephant has permission from both CASIN and the author to publish it first. For more details about the competition and CASIN, contact us at casinwriting@gmail.com.

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