Why don't you take photos of the managment notices and post on here so that your fellow Geoexpatters can translate for you?
@klan, just calm down. Learn to ignore stuff, the gate being open, who cares. Let them complain. No reason to get worked up.
About the incense, well it is the Chinese religion to burn those and usually seasonal, sometimes all year long. Those incense were there when you moved in and will be there when you leave HK. That Chinese family probably lived there for 30 years. You have been there what 6 months at best?
This is why people pay more rent and no matter what you are paying now, adding a few thousand a month would solve 80% of your problems. I know agents try to warn expats about these things but the "expat knows better" always wins and then here you are.
Learn to handle the situation. Will help you adjust more to HK. And jobs are easy to find, don't be afraid!
Perhaps all Geoexpaters can help post images for you to print to give to the management and security. Unfortunately I don't have any of power outages, I never had a power outage here in HK.
Think for the incense one, you can draw a red circle and cross through it and tape it to your neighbors door.
Ours I think just says don't do it, but our management company is nice. I pay my management fee late sometimes and they send a letter saying oh maybe you forgot to pay because you are busy. Haha. No fees or any hell. Just a letter that says we know you are busy.
I'd be fine if they complained to me on my way in or out of the building - I wouldn't be able to understand them - or left written notices or the like, but the fact that management knocks incessantly on my door each Saturday until I open it, then proceeds to make a scene of shutting the gate in front of me is the frustrating part. It's a real invasion of privacy and quiet enjoyment of the property.
I guess I could just close the gate... but it's pretty rickety and I don't trust it not to come off the rails (as has happened several times already) and be an issue in an emergency exit situation. I've also considered just removing it, but I don't have anywhere to store it.
Paying more isn't an option, I've already stretched my budget to find the best property I could. As I said, the others I looked at looked genuinely unsafe.
Anyway, to bring it back to the original point of this thread, I was hoping that with English being an official language here there would be a requirement to post official notices about maintenance works, especially power etc (imagine if I was on dialysis or ventilator etc) in dual language, but it appears not.
Going to keep annoying colleagues for translations until they outright refuse
I don't imagine the route you are going down will fly here (unsafe, fire hazard, unable to exit the flat in an emergency situation).
Playing sarcastic here isn't really a quality of the western world that is appreciated by the Chinese. Playing dumb is probably a more acceptable way.
Why did you pour bleach on the incense. You say that a fire started and you put it out and saved the building. Thank everyone for your heroic action to save the day. No one can challenge if there was a fire or not, so in essence you saved the day. Who can challenge you on that?
Different way of thinking.
Ha next time someone lights up a big garbage tin in the fire stair I might just put it out.
So let me get this right.. your neighbours are unhappy about YOUR gate being open because it means YOUR apartment might be broken into? Struggling to figure out why this is such a problem!!!!