By this point, the map of my trip is starting to look less like a round-the-island, and more like a spiderweb or the splat of an overripe tomato dropped on the floor of your kitchen. With effort, I can squeeze as much as two or three more days of riding out of the upper northeastern corner of rural Wenchang Shi1, but, after that, it will be impossible not to cross a line of road already travelled this holiday, and, besides which, I'm once again getting to the point of "Having Things to Do" in Haikou, so, I'm strongly considering that once I go back to Haikou, if I go back out again, it will ostensibly be a different bike trip.

And then David contacts me.

In the Hainan translation space, David is the closest thing I have to a competitor.

There are other people who do translation. Some of them are even foreigners. However, David is the only one who is both a native speaker of English and a competent writer, proofreader, translator, editor, and wordsmith2. He also actually trained to be a translator (as opposed to falling into it by accident), is business-minded in the sense of actively seeking out clients, and has taken the Chinese Association of Translators and Interpreters test.

Luckily for me, we mostly don't fight with each other.

One of David's government clients gave him a massive load of work a few weeks earlier, and the specific peculiarities of this job mean that he's got no chance of finishing it to what either of us considers a reasonable standard before their admittedly unrealistic deadline.
Am I willing to help take some of the pressure off him?

Initially, I didn't like the idea of doing a bunch of work that would end up with his name on it. However, when it comes to light that I'll be using his glossaries, his notes, and submitting my draft to him for revision, I am gradually talked into it3.

As a result, instead of continuing past urban Wenchang to someplace more my norm or going to the place I usually stay in Wenchang4, I book the next two nights at the Waika Business Hotel. This is a grave mistake. I want to book at the Waika International Hotel5. They're in the same location on the map, they have the same management and housekeeping department, and they both use the big lobby of the main property for their check-in, but they aren't at all the same.

One is a 2005-standard five-star hotel6; the other is the three-star ranked sister property where, in the days when most tourists were on package tours with tour guides and bus drivers who, despite employers that weren't going to shell out for Nice Rooms, were expected to be sleeping nearby.

Both properties are seriously in need of the kind of maintenance work that involves taking an entire floor out of commission for a few weeks of recarpeting, repapering, and replacing of worn-out stuff, but the Business Hotel—which is decorated with outcasts from the 2013 refresh of the International Hotel—is also filthy.
Not dirty.
Filthy.

I get where the front desk worker was coming from in simply not caring enough to warn me, when I got to the front desk, asked how much a room was, and then decided to book online (at less than half the price) that I wasn't so much "taking advantage of better online prices" as I was "booking in at the sister property on the other side of the parking lot." But, even as someone who is perfectly willing to go months without properly cleaning her apartment, I can't understand how none of the people involved in running this place seemed to notice or care that the only thing Housekeeping was doing with the Business Hotel was changing the bedding.

I don't notice all this at first. At first I just notice the dated furniture7 along with some hairs and a toothpaste cap on the bathroom floor. I'm busy changing out of my bike clothing so I can go down the street to Utopia Pizza for a huge-ass meal of carbs and cheese and loveliness.

Chatting with the owner of the pizza restaurant over dinner, he suggests that I have the right to demand a change-of-room when I go back to the hotel. Which, after heading back to the room, and confirming that it's very definitely not been swept or mopped or vacuumed in a very long while, I do.

It feels awkward, though, and, in the process of moving my stuff from Room 1 to Room 2, I decide to take a video of the old room to prove that I'm not actually overreacting. Which somehow results in me accidentally locking myself out of Room 1 before I've finished getting everything.

Walk back to the lobby of the International Hotel to get the card reactivated so I can get my stuff, move everything into the new room, and discover that the new room is also unswept, unmopped, and unvacuumed.
On top of that, there's a dead centipede in the middle of the floor.

Walk back to the lobby of the main property and insist that someone come with me to just open up rooms with a master keycard until I find one that's clean.

They need to open at least two doors (maybe three, don't remember) before I find one that I'm willing to move into. 

As I either get food delivered for most of the next day or eat from my panniers, I won't notice until quite late that the keycard I've got isn't for the room I'm sleeping in and may not be active at all. That results in another walk to the lobby of the main property to talk to the Front Desk. So, by now, you would think someone on staff would have said something to Management about the weirdness going on with the foreigner, but it doesn't look like they did.

Or, at the very least, when Management come by to beg forgiveness on my second morning (as I'm sitting on my laptop grinding my way through the dense content provided by David's client and trying to decide if I want to pack and move somewhere else in Wenchang or pack and take a day biking), it's because of the video I had edited and posted somewhere around noon the previous day.

It doesn't have many views or likes, but it seems as if Corporate in Hong Kong saw it8.

Without asking, I will have my previous two nights refunded to me in full. I will also get taken out to brunch at a fancier than normal laobacha, be given ten room night vouchers (that I mostly never redeem before probably throwing them out by accident) to the main property, and have them pay for a Huolala truck to pick me up and take me and my bicycle back to Haikou in heated, un-rained upon comfort. 

--

1 Many years ago, and despite the fact that it would annoy the Chinese speakers who knew that 市 are not 县, I would have written this as Wenchang County (i.e., the rural area surrounding Wenchang City). However, since meeting Dr. M and discovering that she has similarly strong opinions on the use of the word 市 and why it doesn't mean and shouldn't be translated as "city," I've been getting into the habit of just using the pinyin for the word that defines this geopolitical construct.

2 Among the native English speakers, I'm not sure whether I have a higher degree of disdain for the one who doesn't like to offend her Chinese clients' sense of their English-language ability by making too many changes to the things they are paying her to polish or the multiple illiterate men who get their wives (or DeepSeek) to do the bulk of the work and then 'edit' it to the best of an ability that doesn't involve the capacity to check the source text.  

3 I won't even know until after the book in question is a physical, published product that, despite taking on the clearly more difficult parts with the illustrations, his payment to me as the subcontractor rescuing him from drowning means that I earned more money than he did on it.

4 Located a little under a kilometer from the Coach Station, it was the first nice place you got to when walking from the station towards the city in the 90s. I know I had an overpriced and not very nice coffee there in December 2004, but—if only because I wasn't in the habit of sleeping in downtown Wenchang—my first time staying there was in 2022. As they do a good job with hygeine, I low key loved every outdated and unupdated feature about it and have since come back twice more.

5 Actually, if I'm insisting on upping my budget and going someplace that will be comfortable to work from for two or three very intensive days of solid work, I want to stay at the Vienna Hotel, but I'm remembering the Waika from when they were the first locally 'five star' hotel in Wenchang, and the place used by the Tour of Hainan for the 2006, 2007, and 2008 races. 

6 I will spare you a lengthy description of the Chinese star rating system for hotels and why it corresponds to initially built facilities rather than service standard or overall quality.

7 The flat screen TV has to be over an inch thick

8 A full year later, the Business Hotel still hasn't been relisted on the booking platforms as a property which one can get a room at, so it also seems like the Wenchang Health Department saw it.