Guiyang is a...thickly peopled city, with approximately thrice the population density of Phoenix, and the skyline reflects the premium on horizontal space. The school I teach in is on the 13th of 26 floors, and my apartment is on the 7th floor of my residential unit.
Elevators are are often slow, unreliable, packed to capacity, or strangely absent (sometimes you can see a hole in the wall where one used to be, though!) so I spend a lot of time on stairs. In what I'm assuming is a cost-saving measure, no stairwells that I'm aware of in Guiyang are always lit, or even lit throughout nighttime hours. Instead, stairwell lights are generally linked to sensors. Back home, motion sensors seemed to be the usual go-to sensor for security and what-not, but not here. These sensors are dependent on sound.
But it's China, and many of the sensors are improperly or inconsistently calibrated (or just plain broken,) meaning most of my trips up or down stairs requires some combination of the sound of my footsteps, the sound of me whistling, the sound of me shouting, or the sound of me clapping. Not every sensor responds to the same sounds, and not every sensor responds every time.
Today I got tired of waiting for the notoriously slow elevators at school, so I decided to fly down the steps. Around the 5th floor, I picked up a tail; a 5 or 6 year old girl from the school on that floor. Chinese children seem to be insanely reckless, and even though I was descending at a nice clip, this little girl thought she had something to prove by stomping down right on my heels.
I guess I had something to prove too, because instead of letting the little girl pass me, I thought it would be more fun to let her chase me. At the 5th floor, the stairwell is no longer on an exterior wall, but entirely dependent on the stairwell lights for illumination. It can get a little terrifying. But me and the little girl were racing, and a little darkness wasn't a big deal, until partway down the third floor when it was clear no more lights were going to be turning on. I clapped. She shouted. Nothing; just blackness below.
Well, I'll tell you- I hesitated for a moment, and I think the girl did too. But then I went for it. I pounded down 2 and half floors in almost total darkness, hoping that nothing unexpected had found its way onto the stairs.
I made it to the lobby unharmed. I went and had KFC for lunch. The server tried to speak to me in English, but I confidently maneuvered the conversation with my limited Chinese. I drank a big Pepsi and I thought about how fun it is to live in China.
It wasn't until much later that I wondered if the little girl on the stairs safely made it out of the building or was swallowed up by the darkness.
