Cat in a scary Chinese elevator

     Several months ago, I decided it was time to get a cat.  I was turning 40, I’m single, I didn’t have a cat, it only seemed logical.  And for the most part, I have enjoyed having a fuzzy little friend around the house.  We are still working on a few things such as not treating the furniture as scratching posts and learning appropriate places to take a little kitty tinkle (i.e. not in my bed, especially not in my bed while I am sleeping in it).  Overall, it’s been mostly a success and I have not made good on my threat to turn her into a cat-skin rug, even when she probably deserved it. 

     So, I ‘ve gotten used to having Dublin (because she’s a girl and I couldn’t name her Larry Mullen Jr. after the drummer in U2) around.  Even though she often attacks my toes for no reason and wakes me up before 7:00 a.m. on weekends, I’ve grown accustomed to having her around.  So, you can imagine my horror last week when Dublin decided, against her better judgment, to go for an unsupervised ride in the elevator. 

     I live in a 29-story apartment building on the 29^th floor.  I had gone grocery shopping and my hands were full.   So, as cats do, Dublin darted into the hallway when I opened the door.  I dropped my bags on the kitchen table and went out to fetch her.  Mysteriously, I heard meowing, but saw no cat.  And then the meowing grew fainter and fainter.  Down she went, in the elevator, into the vast recesses of my huge apartment building.

     Panic set in.  I speak a bit of Mandarin, but my cat only speaks meow.  She also doesn’t read numbers (that I know of) so if she did manage to meow in Mandarin or Cantonese, she wouldn’t have known which numbers to meow.  Plus, I’ve heard that some people in this region of China think cats are tasty snacks.  I don’t know if any of those people live in my building, but I didn’t want either us to find out the hard way. 

     I saw that the elevator had descended to the 26^th floor.  I got there as quickly as I could, but she was nowhere to be found.  There is a large open area on the 4^th floor of the building where people go walk around and vigorously slap themselves (a Chinese method of improving circulation and health) so I thought I would check there.  No cat.  By this point, not knowing what else to try, I went outside to the guardhouse, hoping that someone had picked her up and taken her to the guard.  I am sure the guard didn’t know what to do with a flustered foreigner speaking in rapid and broken Mandarin trying to relate what had happened to my cat.  It went something like this (with frantic hand motions implied):

Me:  “My cat went electric thing (I could only remember half of the word for elevator at this point). I’m looking for my cat.  Have you seen my cat?”

The guard looked confused but he started calling people on his radio.  I walked him back over to the building and he asked me to wait.  At this point, I was sure someone had the wok fired up and the filet knife out, so I wasn’t about to wait.  I told him as much and started climbing up the stairs.  On every floor I checked for a lost cat, but none was to be found.  Finally, after a bit of climbing, I found her crouched in the stairwell on the 9^th floor.  How she got there and what she had been up to she didn’t say, but I was very relieved to see her.  We had a serious talk about riding the elevator alone, about learning her address and phone number in Mandarin (and Cantonese) and strategies for looking less delicious.  Hopefully she’s learned her lesson, but I’m a bit wary as she keeps wistfully eyeing the door.  You know what they say about curiosity and cats.  And elevators.