The rat stared at me, I stared back, and then we both screeched: "Aiya!" This is the Year of the Rat, but whenever I've ever stumbled across these little critters, I've always been such a chicken.

I was recently staying at a very charming, colonial-style Wuhan hotel on the banks of the Yangtze River. As I was watching TV, a little fury fellow paid me a frightening visit.

It was about midnight and I was glued to the hugely popular CCTV series A Soldier's Story. It's a Chinese version of Forrest Gump about a farm boy who makes it good in the army. The show's actually quite addictive, once you get into it, and the Chinese language level is basic.

Suddenly, the rude rodent running up my hotel room wall had my full attention. This was a 300-yuan-a-night hotel, and in Wuhan, that amount of money pays for posh lodgings. For that price, I'm not sharing my room, especially with this little blighter who ruined my late-night TV session.

Before storming down to the hotel lobby and demanding a change of rooms, I grabbed my very handy talking Chinese dictionary, typed in rat and pressed the speaker button. "Lao shu," it said.

The hotel receptionists all looked up as I marched towards them saying: "Wo you lao shu!" (I have a mouse!) They started giggling. "Why is this foreigner telling us about his pet at this late hour?" they wondered.

I rephrased my Chinese sentence. "Lao shu zai fangzi!" Then they laughed louder. What I was saying could have been interpreted as "there's a mouse in the house".

So I used my machine and kept pressing the talk button. "Lao shu! Lao shu! Lao shu!"

They understood I wanted to change rooms but had the audacity to charge me more. That was not going to happen. A group of Chinese hotel guests were entering the lobby. I pressed the button.

"Lao shu! Lao shu! Lao shu!" The mechanical voice's perfectly pronounced putonghua echoed across the foyer. The hotel guests looked at me, then at the hotel staff. I pressed the button again. My crafty scheme worked and I didn't pay one yuan extra. Cunning as a rat, they say.

The rat in question was actually a nice looking animal. It wasn't one of these mean, ornery looking, dark-brown gutter rats. It was more of a stylishly gray color and looked in good condition. Of course it was looking fine. The little bugger was living in a flashy 4-star hotel for goodness sake.

When I shared my experience back in Beijing, some folks laughed like the hotel receptionists. "Maybe it was the Rat King (like the Monkey King) and he was visiting you wishing you well in his year," said one pal with a cheeky grin on his face. Who knows? Maybe it was. It was actually a very auspicious time - the night before the Lantern Festival.

If it was the Rat King, he was more scared than me. I can just imagine him telling his buddies about his fright night with a giant. His rat crew would rib him: "What are you a man or a mouse?"

"Well actually "

(China Daily March 24, 2008)