Battling cold in new house adds 'frost on snow'

For many people around the world, this is a particularly cold winter due to the financial crisis that "adds frost on snow", as a Chinese idiom puts it. Our family is also enduring an unprecedentedly icy winter, but I find the situation inspiring.

We have to wrap ourselves in cotton pajamas, layers of sweaters and gulp down hot water to keep ourselves from turning into icicles. The temperature in Beijing dived below zero last month. Our problem is that our apartment's walls lack insulation, meaning precious heat keeps on leaking outside no matter how we flap our elbows, stamp our feet or sing at the top of our lungs.

A year ago, when we bought the new home, we installed a fashionable electric heating system beneath the floor with the hope of enjoying "green energy".

However, we've found out that we are consuming about 50 yuan ($7.15) of electricity a day. And the average room temperature is around 15 C, or 10 C lower than we were used to in our previous home, which was part of the public heating system.

It's no use lamenting our bad choice, or attempting to bang the head of the heating system's salesman into that of the real estate developer who "forgot" about insulation.

God helps those who help themselves.

My husband has turned himself into an insulation material and technology expert. We dived into the decoration markets to find the best insulation foam boards at the lowest price; we negotiated with the real estate developer, who lives in the same cold community, to share the expense of installing the insulation.

However, before the temperature rises above 5 C, it is not technically possible to stick the foam boards onto the wall - the glue will simply freeze and the boards will fall.

Both my husband and I grew up in southern China, where winter temperatures seldom dropped below 10 C, thus leaving a fatal hole in our common sense about heating. We have decided to learn from scratch and local residents are our role models.

After considering many choices, such as a kang, a brick bed heated inside, and a stove that uses honeycomb briquettes, we believe our salvation will be mian bu mian men lian - door curtains filled with cotton.

We have five doors and three windows to cover. If our concrete walls are dormant guards who fail to keep the freeze out, then glass is a treacherous doorman that ushers in cold air.

At a local vegetable market, we were thrilled to find stalls selling cloth and cotton. Hearing our request, a woman in her 20s pulled out a roll of curtain covered in military green cloth. It even has a square hole stitched with plastic to allow one to look through.

When we finally decided on a flowery cloth and showed them the sizes, the woman's husband uttered a cry: "My, we will never make enough money to live in such a big home." My husband chuckled bitterly: "You should come and enjoy our big, cold house."

While waiting for the curtains, we found a convenient way to avoid catching a cold: wearing a cap in bed. Winnie the Pooh wears a cute cap and I believe it's a time-honored Western tradition that Chinese have yet to adopt. Maybe we should start a business selling nap caps.

Two weeks passed, the cotton curtains finally arrived. It took us a whole night to put them up. The temperature has remained much the same, but it takes less time to make it warmer by another degree.

One afternoon, as I fetched my 4-year-old son from the kindergarten, he asked: "Why did we move? Our new home is cold like an icy hole."

"My dear," I replied, "we moved for the quieter environment and more trees. But every coin has two sides - the bad and the good. When we can't get another coin, we just make the best of what we have."