Roommate Wanted, Foreigners Need Not Apply

XINING, China - Rebecca's leaving today, catching a late train to Lanzhou and then flying back to her teaching job in Changsha. My vacation is going to linger on for a little longer, as a student isn't under the same stress as a teacher to make it back for the first class. I wanted to stay in my two-bed guestroom room with a view over the city's Tibetan market, and that was looking likely until a knock on my door around 8 p.m. this evening.

"Hello, do you know where your friends are?"

It was the guesthouse's laoban, the manager who figured place people in rooms, collected money and dealt with problems. My "friends" were a Danish English teacher from Xi'an and his Italian girlfriend, on vacation from development work in Cambodia. We met on the bus from Tongren and they spoke little Chinese, so they decided to come along with us on the hotel hunt. We lived in side-by-side rooms, but generally kept apart during the day.

The laoban, a trim Chinese-Muslim with a large mole on his chin, wanted to know if the next room had a free bed. He was a little mixed up - my room had the free bed. Who was leaving and who was staying didn't seem to be his main concern. Standing in the hallway were a haggard looking group of Tibetans, having just arrived from some far-flung corner of Qinghai Province. Clearly the man needed to find spaces for these pilgrims, who despite behind devout Buddhists looked rather annoyed.

"Can you move to a single room?" he said, making it sound as if the question mark was unintentional.

I didn't want to. Single rooms cost an additional 8 RMB a night, which isn't much but I'm on a budget. The last thing I want to spend money on was moving from a room that earlier in the day I was told was mine.

"But it isn't safe. If you stay in the room, someone might take your stuff," the laoban said. "For your own safety, you should move to a single room."

I relented. The real problem with keeping me in the double room is that it would mean placing with me a Chinese roommate. What wasn't safe was the possibility that something might happen to me, and the laoban would be serious trouble with the local government. It's reverse discrimination, keeping the foreign guest out of the normal rooms, afraid what might happen if he was allowed to mix in with the local population. Well, I've got news: the last nine days, I've rode on smelly buses, eaten dodgy food and used innumerable grotty toilets. A Chinese roommate? Bring it on.