I've the keys, but where's the apartment?

When I hear the term, "naked marriage" (luohun), I always get the wrong picture in my head.

In China, a "naked marriage" refers to one without all the expensive trappings - a car, a diamond ring and an apartment.

Luckily, when Ellen and I married, she didn't ask for all those things. To start off, neither of us can drive, so a car really wasn't needed. I had also procured for her a rather lovely diamond ring - but she never wears it.

But I did take out from my hard-earned savings to buy an apartment for our future. The problem is, I still have no idea where it is.

You might think that's rather odd, but let me explain how it came to happen.

During the National Day holidays in 2009, we went for a spin with Ellen's parents to see her relatives. I was sitting in the back of Ellen's dad's car, oblivious to the heated conversation in Mandarin, staring vacantly at the countryside as it rolled past - that is, until the car suddenly pulled up outside a kind of showroom, in the middle of nowhere. Make that a large, glass showroom, almost empty apart from a few sofas and a couple of coffee tables.

Still none the wiser, I was ushered inside, and parked myself with the newspaper at one of these tables, while Ellen and her parents went off with a young man in a suit.

Sitting there, glancing through the stories, I looked up, and saw a pile of paperwork being produced - and the young man eagerly proffering Ellen a pen.

"Strange," I thought, "there's nothing to buy out here. Seems a long way to come just to buy a couple of bits of furniture. Where are we going to put it?"

So, I turned back to the paper and immersed myself in the goings on of the world in print. It's not my fault I dozed off

Ellen woke me up with a start, and thrust a document under my nose.

"See! We bought an apartment! Now we need to go to the bank, and take your money out for the deposit!"

I love Ellen more than anything else, so I didn't say, "What's this 'we' stuff?" but, rather, meekly nodded my head.

After a trip to the "nearest" bank - an hour's round trip - we returned and handed over my life savings to the young man.

He then bundled us all into a waiting minivan, and drove us to what appeared to be a scale model of the Somme battlefield, complete with mud, barbed wire and trenches.

This, I was informed, was the site of our new apartment.

My heart sank like a stone in my chest, and I couldn't help but turn to Ellen and cry: "What? We bought a puddle to live in!"

"No, no they'll build it here. A lot of apartments. Ours will be on the eighth floor - it's lucky!"

Since then, the apartment block has been completed, and we've been given a key. My parents very generously gave us the money to decorate the place as a wedding gift, and Ellen's parents oversaw its completion.

My father-in-law even built and put in the cabinets in the kitchen, using his skills as a joiner.

As of now, we're looking for someone to rent it, as my post at a Tianjin university comes with its own apartment on the campus - so we have no real plans to live there in the immediate future.

That is probably a good thing, because I have absolutely no idea where the apartment really is.